Over
the weekends, I frequently attend an entrepreneurs’ group, basically a mutual
support and education group for people starting or running their own businesses. And lately, I have been thinking about the
many different reasons people do start their own businesses. All entrepreneurs, on one level, start their
businesses, because they like to be their own bosses. But what else motivates them to start or run
their particular businesses, selling their particular products and services
when they do?
Location
can be a particularly good motivating factor.
An entrepreneur can see a certain kind of business in one location and
can sense that it would be a good kind of business to open in another location
that he knows of, a location that is frequently close to his house. On the other hand, sometimes one wants to
open a business close to other similar businesses to get the overflow
effect. Think of all the Chinese restaurants
that cluster together in Chinatowns, the Greek restaurants grouped together in
Greektowns, the Italian restaurants that come together in Little Italys or the
Korean restaurants that are close to each other in Koreatowns. By coming together to create a neighborhood
with ambiance, everybody benefits.
Rather than be competitive and disruptive, in the case of an ethnic
restaurant neighborhood, restaurants can create a collective grounding with one
another. This collective grounding
principle also holds in tourist areas with souvenir shops and stalls and in
farmer’s markets.
Then
there are the businesses that are built on the notion of being marginally
different from the businesses around them.
This is where people try to create a slightly different aesthetic
experience: different designs in clothing, different variations in houseware
designs, different variations in flavors of ice cream or other foods. An entrepreneur creating such a new business
is trying to generate a certain amount of competition with other businesses,
but not necessarily to the point of replacing the other businesses. Such an entrepreneur is certainly interested
in creating a new defined discrete identity with the new aesthetic experience,
but always within the grounding of the larger established economic category.
And
then there are those businesses that are based on new technological
improvements of pre-existing items.
Supposedly, the Japanese are very good at creating such improvements for
the automobiles they build, which is a major reason for why they seem to last
forever. Here the desire to create a
more unique defined discrete entity out of the product or service being built
is more apparent and the desire to stand apart from the grounded economic
category of automobiles is more pronounced.
There has been an attempt by the Japanese to shake up the automobile
market and to a great extent they have succeeded.
Over
the years, there have been businesses whose purposes have been not to shake up
the marketplace, but to simply replace a pre-existing product. Using cars again, when Henry Ford first
brought his car on the market, it was in competition with the horse and buggy,
the latter being a vehicle that the care ultimately replaced. In creating a new kind of vehicle, Henry Ford
created a vehicle that became a source of great profits. Ultimately, for entrepreneurs, the more ways
that they can separate their products and services from those of the past, the
more potentially lucrative they probably will be.
Finally,
there are those businesses that come out with products that have no equivalent
in the past. A good example of this is
the computer. The computer is completely
unlike anything that has existed before it.
It creates a complex world that becomes for many a superior substitute
for the external world.
These
different entrepreneurial strategies represent, on one level, increasingly
strong attempts by entrepreneurs to separate themselves from their peers in the
marketplace and to leave an impact in their societies. As the flowing blendable continual organic grounding
for these entrepreneurs disappears in their communities and in their living
environments, entrepreneurs feel a greater and greater need to leave an impact
with their imprints in order to pull out of the numbness that they feel in
order to feel alive. And this desire to
come out with products and services that shake up, replace and even create
entirely new categories of products and services generates a particular
problem. Products and services are created
with little regard to the long term secondary effects they may have. An extreme case of this, even though the
product was created by a government, was nuclear energy. Furthermore, just like there can be problems
with drug interactions, so there can be problems with technological
interactions. What it does to people to
be surrounded by different kinds of screens all day. As a result, we have all kinds of disruption
from shake-ups, replacements and creations out of nowhere leading to all kinds
of overstimulation, all kinds of tension pockets, all kinds of growing stress
trying to adopt to new forms of technology that are making their appearance at
an accelerating rate. All kinds of
attempts to become like human robots in order to accommodate themselves to
their enveloping technology. Or attempts
to simply withdraw from an external world filled with screens and other kinds
of technology into the psychological quarantine of numbness.
The
life of an entrepreneur can seem very exciting, adventurous and romantic. Which is all fine except when it leads to the
sensory distortion that is hurting so many people’s lives today. One person’s adventure can in today’s world
be another person’s deterioration or even destruction.
(c) 2020 Laurence Mesirow
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