The de-facto entrepreneur

“The problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur” (George W. Bush).
Being French, this quote from the most caricatured president in the US is maybe his most amusing and President Bush could not have been closer to reality if he had simply said: “France has no entrepreneur” (France is still ranking 20 in term of friendliness to entrepreneur far below the US ranking 3rd). What is interesting, however, with the word “entrepreneur” is that, for obscure reasons, it has lost in English its original focus on the action. Entrepreneur in French is a noun derived from the verb “entreprendre” (to undertake) and its correct translation should be “undertaker”.
 
This apparently insignificant lexical change is not without consequence because by using a noun instead of a verb we shift our attention from the action and the context where the action takes place to the individual performing the action. By focusing solely on the entrepreneur, we trigger an interpretative behavior where the only solution to define “good” entrepreneurship resides on the enumeration of personal attributes or on the repetition of behaviors established by other individuals, the role models.
 

How many times have you heard that to be a good entrepreneur you need to be, at the same time, smart, persistent, flexible, with strong nerve, charismatic and of course risk-taker? How many times did you compare others or refer to people like Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, or Jack Welsh? Do you really think that to be an entrepreneur you have to fit in a mold shaped from movies’ superheroes or be some kind of semi-god of entrepreneurship?
 

Focusing on the individual is a seducing approach not only because it derives quick recipes for good entrepreneurship that are easy to name, explain and promote but also because it displaces unfairly the responsibility of the entrepreneurial quality from the practitioner to the entrepreneur. If you are not successful in your enterprise, it is surely because you were not flexible enough, or not persistent enough. Of course! So convenient…
 

Improvements are however visible in some business schools which claim that they are no “natural born entrepreneur” and that entrepreneurship can be taught and, to be fair, which do actually a good job by providing hands-on experiences by exposing their students to real life experience in startup or with VC. Still, executive educations are exclusively focusing on the individual and offer classes to improve technical skills (e.g. entrepreneurial finance); personal attributes (e.g. communication, negotiation) or by exposing the students to successful entrepreneurs to learn their insight, another way to describe the systematic reproduction of norms and behaviors.
 

All these classes are useful to some extend but none of them really focus on the action to “undertake” and fail to prepare the future entrepreneur for the real coming challenges: coping with the humiliation that the business plan was once again put aside by investors; wondering again and again why the people fail to recognize how crucial the idea is; waking up every morning and continuing to push forward despite alarming bank statements, wife’s legitimate worries and the own fear of putting kids’ education at stake.
 

The shortcut of explaining all this cocktail of frustrations, conflicting loyalties and fears by the simplistic statement that (“we told you”) an entrepreneur has to be flexible, persistent and risk taker fails to recognize that entrepreneurship is essentially an iterative and experimental activity where the entrepreneur tries out ideas, fails, learns and start over differently. Learning how to “exercise entrepreneurship” becomes possible by the very same way you learned how to ride a bicycle when child: you fall, stand up and ride again.
 
The challenge thus becomes to understand what should the entrepreneur do (and not be) to stay engaged and to keep other major stakeholders (such as customers or investors) engaged in the business despite growing frustration and repeating failures. For that, the entrepreneur needs to learn how to perceive the system in which he is evolving. Having such understanding, he becomes able to identify what are the factions of stakeholders that share some form of interest with the enterprise, to understand their expectations and commitments and to design a strategy of intervention to navigate the system and bring his idea into reality. With such an approach, each intervention turns failure into positive outcomes, minimizing frustration, and becomes a new source of information that will complement the entrepreneur’s system perception.
 
Luckily, the analysis of complex human systems is not a new field and solutions are already available to help entrepreneurs to make better sense of the world around them.
 
French don’t have a word for leadership (and this time, it is true!)
 
Entrepreneurship is not the only buzzword affected by the same curse, “Leadership” would rank pretty high in the list of the victims of this lexical disease. How many times have you heard that a good leader is a person with a vision, committed to excellence, with a perfect record of integrity and of course armed with the everlasting charisma necessary to sell the vision to the de-facto followers who will drink his/her words like the nectar of the Olympian gods.
 
What about the all too common complaint that there are no good leaders anymore? France is still looking relentlessly for a second de Gaulle to restore its “grandeur” and the US had to wait 41 years before stopping killing off any emerging voices from the African-American community by comparing them to Martin Luther King. Could it be that there was actually never a perfect leader and that it is our society that raises, often post-mortem, figures of authority to a pedestal using them as role models, reinforcing unmanageable expectations on anyone who would want to influence the system.
 
These two dynamics are very similar to the one experienced for entrepreneurship with which they share a similar root cause, the exacerbation of the importance of the individual in comparison to the action and the system where the action is taking place.
 
Building on thousands of year of philosophical heritage and a good dose of common sense, several academics from top-notch universities have already developed frameworks focusing on the exercise of leadership within complex human organization. In his book, the “Fifth Discipline”, Peter Senge, from the MIT Sloan School of Management transposes the same system dynamic theory as the one used in the design of industrial control system into human organizations and explore how the understandings of these dynamics can help the leader to identify how the organization should evolve to improve its capacity to learn and to adapt.
 
In “The Practice of adaptive leadership”, Heifetz, Linsky (from the Harvard University), and Grashow offer an entire framework to help the reader to diagnose the system in which he operates and to strategize interventions. The system’s reactions to these interventions become then input data to the diagnostic process, thus reinforcing the ability of the leader to understand the context is evolving in and improve its next experimentation.
 
These new approaches reach a degree of maturity such, that exercising leadership has been taught in both universities for decades. Each year, scores of students learn these new approaches and transpose them effectively into their jobs and personal life. If a paradigm as complex as exercising leadership can be taught, why could not we transpose these theories developed by leadership practitioners to the “practice of entrepreneurship” and truly rejuvenate our mindset.
 
It is time to redefine the paradigm of entrepreneurship by transforming it back into a verb as it is in its original language and for that, to capture, the low hanging fruits that are already available by transposing existing frameworks and theories derived for the exercise of leadership for the purpose of the only “good” entrepreneur, the de-facto entrepreneur.
 
Olivier Ceberio is Chief of Operations at Resolute Marine Energy, a Boston based startup in marine renewable energy. Previously, Olivier was a "rocket scientist" for 8 years at Starsem S.A. where he directed the satellite launch team and managed the development, production and inaugural launch of a revolutionary new rocket system. Olivier is a dual MBA/MPA graduate of MIT Sloan School of Management and Harvard Kennedy School of Government. and obtained his Master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from Ecole Nationale Supérieure Aéronautique et Espace in 1996.