BIRCH: It's particularly true of the CEO in a smaller company, where his position is more important and his impact more obvious. If the CEO goes stale, the company goes stale.
INC.: But for people in smaller companies, the likelihood that they're going to be able to satisfy that need for personal growth within their organizations is negligible. Small companies don't offer that opportunity. It sounds like those owners and managers need to get outside the organization just when there are a thousand pressures keeping them there.
BIRCH: That's true. But the good ones find a way. One of the things that's really striking about the small-business audiences that I talk to is their extreme intellectual curiosity. They are far more curious about what's going on in the world than most people imagine. The questions that I get asked when I talk to a small-business audience have almost nothing to do with my subject matter. They're after broader issues. What's going on in the world? What are the Japanese doing? I think CEOs need to keep learning, and I think more and more of them know it.
INC.: There are lots of roadblocks though, aren't there? We'd make the argument that for many people, owning their own companies can be an intellectually stultifying experience; you don't have a bunch of peers working with you on a day-to-day basis and challenging you. You may be extraordinarily bright and very curious, but your business can be brutally confining. Yet figuring out a way to routinely transcend that confinement is difficult, because your company probably doesn't have the management depth to let you get away.
BIRCH: I agree it's difficult, but it's got to be done. And I think that, increasingly, it is being done.
INC.: How?
BIRCH: Small-business owners, entrepreneurs, are going back to school, taking courses, becoming involved in seminars. They'll go to a business school or even a nonbusiness school and take a 6-week course or a 14-week course in some subject they're interested in. They listen to cassette tapes, they read books.
And it's not how to fill out a tax form that they want to know, but a broad-based kind of subject matter. I never cease to be amazed at the extent to which audiences I meet want to elevate the discussion rather than narrow and focus it. It's not how to anymore. It's: what's going on out there? What new technology might I use that I hadn't thought about? What's in it for me in Eastern Europe?
INC.: Why would entrepreneurs be getting more concerned about issues not directly relevant to themselves?
BIRCH: Because deep down there is an anxiety that what's going on outside of the confines of your business will affect the ultimate survivability and value of the business. The space between one generation of technology and the next is getting smaller. Markets are changing faster. People are moving and shifting and relocating. All the things that took 5 to 10 years to occur can happen in 18 months. So I think there is a gut sense that you have to keep abreast. It's not pure intellectual curiosity.
INC.: So you think people are more aware of the costs of complacency?
BIRCH: Yes. Part of it is fear driven. If you don't change, something bad will happen to you. There are no safe havens anymore. In any field, anywhere.
INC.: What's the effect of this pressure to be knowledgeable on the caliber of the average business owner?
BIRCH: Positive in the long run. You'll have a much more aware, much more cognizant business owner. The ones that aren't knowledgeable are getting left behind, and the ones that are survive and grow and do well. That's in mundane, not just exotic, businesses. A chain of hair salons comes along and wipes out your barbershop.
INC.: What's the effect on that portion of the U.S. economy that we think of as mom-and-pop ventures? We've had the feeling that there's lots of anecdotal evidence, if not statistical, that that part of the economy is shrinking, that mom-and-pop businesses are becoming extinct. Is there evidence that that's true?
BIRCH: There's still a large number of small firms out there -- with four or fewer employees -- that don't grow or decline over a four-year period and manage to keep going from one year to the next. I would never underestimate the number of those. It's huge. And they're not just grocery stores; they're law firms, design firms, free-lance photographers or consultants, public-relations people.
INC.: Do they have to be savvier just to remain a part of that population?
BIRCH: I think they do, but much of what they do is still mundane enough that changes take place more slowly than in the companies I've been talking about. On the other hand, if I had to say there was a general trend, it's that they are an endangered species. If you think of the creation of technology as one wave of development and that technology's application being the next, then during the wave of technology creation, the mom-and-pop business wasn't very threatened. People were just figuring out how to make computers in the '60s and '70s. It took a while before we figured out what to do with them. But now, during the wave of application, there isn't a business in the United States that isn't threatened. Even in the most mundane businesses, there's somebody out there trying to do it more cleverly and more efficiently and with more pizzazz.
