The New American Start-up
Profile of a new-type entrepreneur and the beginnings of her children's food company.
'This,' says Mary Anne Jackson, referring matter-of-factly to nothing less than the start-up process itself, the experience that terrifies most people, 'is just one big project.'
Mary Anne Jackson is not the sort of entrepreneur we're accustomed to hearing about. When I first visited this large-company veteran in June, I met a person whose deliberate, dispassionate approach to building a company challenged all the conventional wisdom about founders. As part of a wave of displaced Fortune 500 managers, I wonder whether she won't come to represent a new paradigm of the entrepreneur. -- T.R.
Mary Anne Jackson, 35, a CPA, M.B.A., and eight-year veteran of financial and strategic planning at Beatrice Cos. when it was still a huge food conglomerate, is really excited. The product that's going to launch her new company is just now moving onto supermarket shelves, and she can hardly wait to see the results.
Oh, no, she's not curious to learn whether consumers will buy the children's meals that she's developed. "Of course they're going to sell," Jackson answers. "I know that because I did the research." And if she'd had any doubts -- any doubts -- she never would have introduced the product. What she's giddy about instead is the prospect of finally finding out how close the actual performance will come to the projections she drew up using planning models and a wealth of research data. She has more the temperament of midwife than mother to this business birth.
But then My Own Meals Inc. (MOM), Jackson's company, isn't your traditional start-up, and Jackson, with her cool savoir faire, isn't your traditional entrepreneur. Jackson spent 18 months studying her market, conceptualizing and developing her product, and crafting distribution and marketing strategies before the introduction because she, like the corporate culture that bred her, dislikes surprises. There's no "Ready, fire, aim" here. Instead, you'll find study, calculation, and planning. Then come execution and monitoring.
Jackson is the consummate corporate player. In her career at Beatrice and at two Big Eight accounting firms before that, she organized and managed dozens of corporate projects. "And this," she says matter-of-factly, referring to nothing less than the start-up process that sets entrepreneurs apart from ordinary businesspeople, the experience that exhilarates and terrifies these people who make the brave leap, "this is just one big project.'
A project? Like putting together a committee report or overhauling the subsidiary accounting system? Well, she says, think of it as a series of projects with no particular finish date.``But terror? No, because I'm not doing anything that I haven't done before. I'm just doing it for myself this time.'
If Jackson doesn't sound like the sort of entrepreneur you're accustomed to hearing from -- the seat-of-the-pants, shirt-sleeve opportunist -- plan to get used to hearing from a new sort of company founder. Thousands of managers are being tipped out of their boxes as big companies trim their organizational charts (see "Big-Company Exodus," page 5). Some of these button-down managers, too young to retire and too fond of the perks a large company can provide, will find new boxes to occupy in large corporations. But others, like Jackson, will create their own charts -- or try to. And many will succeed. Entrepreneuring, we are about to learn, is not just for entrepreneurs. In fact, it's a job that trained managers, in increasing numbers, are finding they are well equipped to take on.
Peter Drucker, a wizard among American management experts, has insisted for years that the best entrepreneurs are those who approach the job with training and big-business experience. "They get tools," he said in an Inc. interview (Face-to-Face, October 1985). Ascribing entrepreneurial success to some ineffable quality of the entrepreneur's personality is, he holds, romantic foolishness. Lots of people can have ideas; some of them can start something with those ideas. But the more tools you have, he argues, the more likely you are to succeed over the long run. Entrepreneurship, claims Drucker, is a discipline, and, like any discipline, it can be learned. In fact, it had better be learned. Jobs and Wozniak failed at Apple Computer, he judges, not because they weren't brilliant and hardworking, but because they had never learned the simple elements of their job -- which was building and managing a growing organization.
If Drucker is more right than wrong, it means that America's entrepreneurial class is about to undergo change. The thousands of seasoned managers who, like Mary Anne Jackson, are now emerging from big corporations will alter the entrepreneurial image. They'll typically be older, for instance, because they're starting later in life. They'll be different kinds of people, operating with different styles. Whereas the archetypal entrepreneur relied on instinct and reflex, the corporate émigré prefers deliberation and considered judgment. The traditional entrepreneur's confidence sprang from exuberance, but the newcomer's is grounded in experience. Earlier entrepreneurs were visceral; the trained ones are more cerebral. Founders used to talk about their visions for a company. Now, they'll discuss projections. Old-school entrepreneurs practiced an art; this group exploits a science. Mavericks rejected corporations; managers are nurtured by them.
Entrepreneurs used to stand apart from the crowd. Now, increasingly, they are the crowd.
Fired. It happened in April 1986. After a leveraged buyout, Beatrice was going to be dismantled, its separate parts sold off. Jackson was quickly exiled to outplacement, a political casualty.
Never mind. The lady had a career plan, which she reviews annually. The firing didn't destroy the plan, which had never demanded that she remain at Beatrice, anyway. The goal of her plan was to run something. Since that something would not be a Beatrice subsidiary, it might be a division of some other corporation. Or it might be an independent company, one that she could buy or start. But, significantly, it didn't matter which. Ownership wasn't the issue; management control was. For years Jackson had worked in corporate offices, accounting and planning. She wanted, she says, to change, from planning to doing. Where she did it was a secondary consideration.
