Creators of the New Economy

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Out of this happy confluence of motive and opportunity have come millions of independent business owners and the prototype of a new business practitioner--someone different from the corporate manager and the small-business owner. That someone is the professional entrepreneur.

People who flout prevailing cultural norms often take pride in their idiosyncrasy--maybe even brag about it. The traditional entrepreneur was stereotypically a male, usually lacking significant educational credentials, who operated from the gut. He followed no plan and did things his way. He took risks, and what he built, he owned. In his company, he made the rules. Employees could choose: they could do what the boss said, or they could leave. The entrepreneur didn't expect bankers--or anyone else, for that matter--to understand what he did because entrepreneurs were, after all, born, not made. Entrepreneurship was an art, and entrepreneurs were artists.

But we have made a discovery. Little by little, over the past 15 years or so, we have come to realize that entrepreneurship--stereotypes notwithstanding--is not wholly art, any more than, say, medicine is. We'd all like our surgeon to have a knack for his or her trade, but most of us feel a lot better knowing that he or she has also gone to medical school. Likewise, a great deal of what entrepreneurs do can be taught, learned, and practiced. In fact, management sage Peter Drucker argued a dozen years ago that entrepreneurship, as distinct from entrepreneurs, hadn't even been invented until people began to study it. "Look," he said in an interview with Inc. in October 1985, "if you can't replicate something because you don't understand it, then it really hasn't been invented, it's only been done."

The invention of entrepreneurship--in the sense that Drucker means--and of the professional entrepreneur arguably began in 1979, when David Birch, a researcher associated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shocked and upset the disbelieving establishment of academics and policymakers with the news that the Fortune 500 had stopped creating jobs. Birch's research showed that small business--later emended to "growth companies," a minuscule but incredibly fertile subset of small business--had become the principal creator of jobs in the United States. (See " Help Wanted," an interview with Birch.) It took a few years, but from that time on, managers' gray flannel suits ineluctably began to yield to entrepreneurs' khakis and jeans; the manager gave way to the entrepreneur as symbol and icon, respectively, of a new business age.

The jig was up for the old-time entrepreneur who liked to think of himself as a specialist just because he had a knack. People--academics, consultants, journalists, and entrepreneurs themselves--began to figure out what entrepreneurs did, how they did it, how it could be taught, and even how it could be improved.

The academic establishment, also not blind to opportunity, expanded its offerings to would-be entrepreneurs. As Sahlman points out, Harvard Business School, which used to have three or four faculty members who would teach courses relating to small business, now counts 17 full-time members on its entrepreneurial-studies faculty. Bill Wetzel, a University of New Hampshire professor, observes that whereas 10 years ago standard finance textbooks assumed that students would be employed by businesses that were already well under way, they now routinely include chapters on early-stage companies. Entrepreneurial seminars with daylong or weekend sessions on how to start or grow nearly any kind of business are buzzing. The truth is, there aren't a whole lot of secrets left about the techniques, tools, and processes of entrepreneuring. You want to learn them? You can buy a book, read a magazine, take a course, get an M.B.A.

No honest purveyor of entrepreneurial expertise believes or advertises that tools alone make the entrepreneur. As In Search of Excellence coauthor Tom Peters puts it, "The fact that you can download a spreadsheet for free off the Internet does not make you a better business planner than back in the days when you were doing it with a number-two pencil on the back of an envelope. It looks a lot prettier, but the odds are at least as high as they ever were that the information is total B.S."

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