The Hottest Entrepreneur In America

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The children of Organization Man, Leinberger explained, "have grown up in affluence. It's expanded their choices, and they have taken different experiences into their decisions. You can have the father and son, or daughter, standing at the same decision point. The father will say, 'You have nothing to rely on, nothing to fall back on. Where are you going to work if you fail?' And the son says, 'But I won't fail.' Dad says, 'That's unrealistic.' His son says, 'Dad, you just don't recognize opportunity when you see it.'

"This generation has turned optimism into a resource." And, Leinberger added, just as Organization Man was what the country needed after World War II, "this second generation is exactly what we need to revitalize America. They take chances; they have no loyalty to old organizations; they've merged their family and their work lives; and they are comfortable with technology."

Alas, he has no name for them. "The best I can do," he said, "is to say that we're in a transition from the social ethic of Organization Man to an enterprise ethic."

THE HOTTEST ENTREPRENEUR OF the year, I started out to say a few pages back, is Betsy Tabac. Not because her company, Tabac & Associates, is the biggest, fastest-growing, or most sophisticated or because it is unique in any category or contest. Those aren't the criteria by which you'd judge her business, or other postindustrial enterprises, anyway. Tabac is the hottest just because she mebodies so many of the characteristics and motives that typify this next generation of entrepeneurs.

She is, first, a woman. It was assumed that women, who headed off to business schools in unprecedented numbers during the past decade, would make their mark in business through the corporations that sought them out and hired them. But for reasons that authors Sarah Hardesty and Nehama Jacobs begin to explore in their recently published book, Success and Betrayal: The Crisis of Women in Corporate America, women climbing the corporate ladder have bumped into a glass ceiling. "Does corporate culture betray women the closer they get to the top?" the book asks. A University of Michigan survey, noted in The Wall Street Journal recently, found that of the corporate executives promoted to the rank of vice-president and above in 1985, only 2.6% were women, down even from the scant 3.1% reported in 1984. While everyone has been preoccupied with Mary Cunningham's rise and fall, women have moved solidly into business -- but not in the corporate organization. Women now own nearly one-quarter of all small businesses in the country, according to 1982 U.S. Census Bureau data, and women are starting businesses at three times the rate of men. Some of them are beauty salons and day-care centers, but some of them aren't. Women, dare I say it, are leading the new entrepreneurial wave.

Second, Tabac sees the leverage that technology affords her. There are a large number of home-based businesses owned by women, Alvin Toffler wrote in 1983, that have been operated without any technological support. "That's been a little undiscovered island in the economy. . . . Now, suddenly, give it cheap computers, cheap telecommunications, video equipment, and the like, and I believe it will explode." It has. "Without this computer," says Tabac, standing in one of the two bedrooms given over to her business, "this business wouldn't be. For $3,000, it's as if I have two or three more people than I do. . . . Car telephones will allow me to do without middle-management layers. I can be in touch myself any time I need to."

And Tabac, 44, is a liberal who, though a bit old for Woodstock, was nonetheless caught up in the antiwar activism of the '60s and the feminism of the '70s. In 1971, she cofounded a pre-Roe v. Wade abortion-referral service in Cleveland and stayed with the organization, at a politically correct paltry wage, as it moved through the feminist issues of that decade. She left in 1980, got a master's degree in public administration, and went through vocational counseling and a good deal of self-examination. "I guess," she said over dinner, "I got more pragmatic. I also got used to the fact that I have a right to a decent standard of living, that there's no intrinsic good in being poor. I used to think there was, but I was poor then."

Tabac staffs her policy research and writing firm -- "We'll research and write any business communications: manuals, newsletters, speeches" -- with part-time independent contractors. As her Cleveland business grows, she's looking into creating similar firms in Washington, D.C., and in North Carolina's Research Triangle, places where she may want to live and retire, respectively.

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