The question continues: study entrepreneurship, or just jump in? Does a degree help? Can anybody teach entrepreneurship in the classroom? Can anybody learn it?

You may have seen this post here from last week, about one problem with entrepreneurship education. That post was enhanced by John Wren’s comment there:

I haven’t seen any research that shows a connection between being a successful entrepreneur and having studied entrepreneurship, have you?

Interesting emphasis on research there. Can anything be true or false without research? Does a tree fall in the forest if there’s no rigorous research that says so? It would be hard to research this right, because entrepreneurship is a relatively new idea in university business schools. The idea has exploded in the last 10-20 years, but a lot of the all-stars didn’t really have a choice. That makes meaningful research less likely.

Research or not, education is good when it works; when it fits with life. Short cuts are good too. Knowledge is good. Wasting time is bad. All of that can be school.

Education in trade or business related subjects is about making things better, faster, and easier. If you can learn in a day in class what would take you a roller-coaster ride through the hard knocks, is that better? If Bill Gates did Microsoft without studying entrepreneurship, does that mean you don’t want to?

Things change. Shakespeare didn’t have a PhD in Literature. So how did he learn Shakespeare?

I think the value of studying entrepreneurship depends a lot on the specific case. Not that these are the only cases, or polar opposites, but:

• Start with the basic truth of studying what interests you. Don’t study business to get ahead in business; study business because you’re interested. Don’t study literature to get ahead, or science or math, either.
• If life gives you a valid choice, general education is better than business education. I’m really glad I studied Literature first, then Journalism, then business. I’m glad my children majored in education, history, psychology, and political science instead of business. First learn to think, analyze, read, and write, and you can learn business later. Not everybody gets that choice. Not everybody wants it. But if you can, that’s good.
• Entrepreneurship is the best of business. You have to get your head around the whole business, not some functional part. Studying entrepreneurship is the best way to study business.
• It’s not for nothing that I’ve spend a long time focused mainly on business planning. That’s also about getting around the whole business, not just parts. Strategy, operations, marketing, finance, they all come together in startups and small business. Which we call entrepreneurship.
• When it works out right for you it can be a big advantage, you’re already in school, and you’re interested in the subject, it’s a natural part of that time of life that people dedicate to learning, it can be a huge advantage. I did business school exactly at a career inflection point, jumping from business journalism to business, and it worked really well for me. Entrepreneurship would have been even better, but that wasn’t an option. Today, for you, it is.

Ultimately, there’s no formula here that works. You have to decide for yourself. I’m really glad for my two years in business school, even if they weren’t teaching entrepreneurship. That doesn’t mean I recommend it for everybody.

I’m not saying this is the only problem. And, by the way, I’m in favor of entrepreneurship education, when it’s done well. I think it helps … but that’s another post.

It’s a simple story. It’s a real problem with business education concerning entrepreneurship in top institutions. It happens way too often. Not that it’s the only problem with entrepreneurship education, but it’s harder to spot.

Take an imaginary person named Leslie who’s interested in entrepreneurship and wants to study it and then teach it, as a career. Here’s what happens.

First, she enrolls in a good graduate school intending to get a doctorate degree. In business grad schools, the MBAs study for two years to get jobs in business, not to teach business. Yet it takes a doctorate to teach business in a good school, as a career. Yes, there are exceptions to that rule, but Leslie is focused and motivated so she wants the best path to the best career opportunities, which means she needs the PhD degree. That’s a matter of academic records, standardized testing, essays, and recommendations, pretty much the same process people go through to get into college or university.

As she gets used to her studies and the general path to doctorate and teaching career she discovers, within the first year or so, that the academic study of business divides itself into standard groups; marketing, finance, operations, and so on, that don’t really include entrepreneurship (yet). And those functional divisions have generated a small set of academic journals, fewer than the fingers on one hand in most cases, that control her future. And the system of rewards and such within the small world of doctors of business is shockingly (to Leslie) well defined. Here is what she finds out:

1. She can’t get the doctorate without a thesis.
2. She’s not going to get into the upper echelon she wants for her career unless her thesis is published by one of those academic journals.
3. And those journals focus on the standard specialties: marketing, finance, operations, etc. Not entrepreneurship.

Result: if she’s ambitious, Leslie drops the focus on entrepreneurship and moves over to finance or marketing or something else that’s more established within the academic hierarchies. And you, dear reader, can go from there to the other logical conclusions.

Think about the impact on education in entrepreneurship at the big business schools. Maybe it’s a good thing because it means more real-world entrepreneurs teaching, even if they’re normally adjunct instructors instead of professors. And maybe it’s not so good because it relegates entrepreneurship and the study of entrepreneurship to a lower rung on the career ladder. I don’t know.

If you’re out there in academia, reading this, and I’ve got it wrong, please tell me. I’ve had a chance to watch how this works. I haven’t been down this path myself, but I’ve been an adjunct instructor for a few years, teaching one class per year at the University of Oregon.

(photo credit: lynnlin/Shutterstock (modified by me))

Did I miss something critical here? The chart at right is from my Choose your own world view post on here Tuesday. I was trying to relate choices to results and highlight tradeoffs; but I wasn’t sure whether these three factors pulled away from each other, or did they in fact work together if you find the sweet spot in the middle.

In a thoughtful email later that day, Kate Putnam said I missed something critical:

Work you like should lead to business success (however you define that). The third piece should be what you give back to your community.

I asked her permission (I think it’s rude not to, with an email) to publish her comments here. She explained:

You are not teaching your children much if you don’t do that. You are not sharing the fruits of your success if you don’t do that. Plus, if you do it right, you meet new friends who share your values and whom you would not stumble across in your regular day-to-day existence. I have learned a lot for my business from my non-profit board work and the people I met through it.

Good point, Kate. Here’s a revised version to the right. It adds community as a fourth leaf.

And the question remains: do these factors pull apart, from center outwards? Or do they come together in the middle. I can argue that either way. I think it depends on your world view, your experience, and choices you make.

Kate added this as well:

I tell my children that “to whom much is given, much is expected.”

After reading that email, I also wandered off to her website, and found her business called Package Machinery, focusing on sustainable practices in packaging. And Kate is on Twitter as wrapsustainably. So I like discovering that she is obviously not just saying it, or writing it in email; she’s doing it too. That makes her comments that much more interesting.

Posting on his Small Business Labs blog, Steve King wrote: Don’t Quit Your Job Until You’ve Talked to a Small Business Failure. Amen. Everybody even thinking about starting a business should 1.) Read that post; and 2.) do what it says, talk to a small business failure.

Steve cites a couple posts he’s done recently on research showing small business owners feel relatively safe in their jobs. But then he adds:

Several people have asked me does this data mean that small business ownership is less risky than traditional employment?  The quick answer is yes, but only if your small businesses is successful. (emphasis is mine).

I love the irony: the polltakers ruled out failures by asking existing business – which, by definition, aren’t failures – about risk. Steve’s a professional researcher, so he quickly identifies the problem as survivor bias, which he says turns up often in research. He adds:

My favorite example of survivor bias is surveying existing customers to develop satisfaction ratings.  I was once asked to figure out why a company was losing so many customers despite having stellar customer satisfaction ratings.

It turned out they didn’t include customers that left prior to the annual customer satisfaction survey.  After all, they explained, they weren’t customers anymore.

So, as Steve suggests, if you want to explore the dark side of small business, talk to the losers instead of the winners.

(Photo credit: el lobo/shutterstock.com)

The sun was coming out, just peeking through from behind the tall pine trees on the hill above my house, as I drove into the office this morning.  I’d woken up before dawn and gotten back on the computer.

Does my title to this post seem paradoxical? A twist on the old “the harder I work, the luckier I get” saying? Yes, but it’s also true. At least, and Thank God for it, it’s been true for me.

I’ve been sleeping poorly the last few weeks because I have three projects converging. I like all three.  I wake up just before dawn and instead of turning over and going back to sleep, I’m up. Because I’m excited about making progress.

And this is a good thing. Okay: not getting enough sleep isn’t that good; I tend to drag in the afternoons. But being excited about projects, waking up early because the work intrigues me: that’s a good thing.

Which reminds me that a lot of my entrepreneurship has been escaping boredom. We needed the money so I couldn’t not work, but I could determine what work was. The first time I went out on my own I left a good job because it meant supervising other people doing the work I liked to do, instead of just doing the work I like to do. In the maker/manager scale I wanted to be maker, not manager.

I built Palo Alto Software around business planning because I came to love software and business planning. So there it was: creating the company to create the job I wanted.

So the luckier I get, the harder I work. And I love it.

(Photo credit: by Bushman.K via Flickr)

I really like this video (8 minutes), not just for what it says, but also for what it doesn’t say.

As Jeff Bezos stands comfortably in front of the YouTube camera, in a garden, with a flip chart, I’m reminded of the “it’s good to be king” refrain in Mel Brooks’ classic History of the World Part 2. There are experts all over the place — the Web, blogs, Twitter, et al., generate experts more than anything else — but Bezos is someone who’s 15 years down the path now and looking back on it with engaging and seemingly genuine good humor and good intentions. There’s no urgency here, and no embarrassment about giving advice. It’s delightfully simple understatement.

As he talks about Amazon.com’s history and the recent purchase of Zappos.com, he uses the simple motif of the flip chart, hand written, to punctuate his points as well as anybody ever has with PowerPoint or Keynote. You’ll see what I mean if you watch.

He boils it down to four simple points:

1. Obsess over customers. Not competitors, not anything else, but customers. “Start there and work backwards.”
2. Invent. “Any time we have a problem, we never accept either-or thinking.  We try to figure out a solution. You can invent your way out of any box. Invent on behalf of customers. It’s not just the big things, like Kindle, EC2, the cloud, but an inventive culture. It’s so many small things.
3. Think long term. This is really critical. Most initiatives take 5-7 years before paying dividends for the company. The ability to think in five-year and seven-year timeframes is rare. It requires and allows a willingness to be misunderstood. Many inventions are misunderstood in the early innings.
4. It’s always day one. There’s always more invention in the future. And new ways to obsess about customers.

The occasion is the acquisition of Zappos.com, which generates a lot of positive comments near the end.

Note: if you can’t see the video on this site, you can click here to go to the source on YouTube.

Extra post today: I’m proud to pass on the news that Jim Blasingame won a big award at the American Chambers of Commerce meeting last week. Here’s the press release.

I’m pleased to join Jim on his Small Business Advocate radio show every once in a while. The first time I did that, back in 1997, I thought he was a natural interviewer and a good guy. I decided soon after to become a sponsor as Palo Alto Software.

His show and his fame have grown a lot since then. He’s won a number of major awards on his way up. Take a look at his website, sample his audio archives, and you’ll see why. He’s compiled more than 10 years of good practical interviews on important subjects in small business.

Jonathan Fields, author of Career Renegade, drew out the best of me for his podcast with me that he posted yesterday. He has a real knack for getting into the bigger issues, like both sides of entrepreneurship, and how important the rest of your life is, as compared to your business.

Yes, we do talk about business planning and classics of entrepreneurship in this interview, but he also got me talking about how much of my career hinged on mistakes, luck, and my wife saying things like how we’d take the risk together.

My advice: if you get a chance to do a podcast with Jonathan, say yes.

Do you want to make meaning? Solve a problem? Disrupt the status quo? Then solve this problem: figure out a way to monetize investigative journalism. In the new media world.

No, not just journalism, thanks, but investigative journalism. By that I mean the product of professional journalists paid to dig for (relatively) objective truth, like facts. To uncover the hidden scandals, expose the corruption, clear up the misconceptions, and look beyond the spin.

Don’t confuse investigative journalism with breaking news, gossip, politics, expertise, and opinion. Maybe — just maybe — citizen news and crowd sourcing will compete with straight news media. We’ve got Twitter, news blogs, political blogs, and self-styled expert and personal blogs, among other new media, supplying breaking news and opinion. You’ve probably read the arguments along those lines. I’ve posted about it on this blog here.

Watergate: Flickr image by dbking

The problem is that investigative journalism is real work. It takes digging, research, interviews, and more digging, and more work. Volunteers don’t do it; professionals do it. And the organizations that pay those professionals depend, traditionally, on advertising revenues. And we’re in the midst of a rapidly changing media landscape, in which big audiences seeking impartiality are growing harder to find. The audiences are splintering, dividing into finer groups, getting lost in the long tail.

Breaking news? We get that in the new media world. In-depth reporting? Not so much. New York Times online? Washington Post online? Maybe. But your local town government? Who covers that? And are a few online sites of former great newspapers enough? Will the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report generate budgets and credibility for proactive in-depth reporting? What do you think?

So, in this new world, is somebody going to sponsor true investigative journalism? Will the Watergates of the future  be uncovered? For that matter, who’s going to go to those town council meetings?

So there’s a problem; a need. Do you have a solution?

You know who you are. You hate selling, but here you are, making your way as entrepreneur, having to sell or sink.

Me? I’m a terrible salesperson. I’m also bad at networking, cocktail parties, and small talk with people I don’t know. Do I seem stuck up, aloof? Not really, just awkward.

I’m probably still scarred from my miserable failure at selling encyclopedias when I was in high school. I spent all summer, never made a sale, never managed to convince even a single person that I was really conducting an educational survey, and not selling encyclopedias. That miserable summer might have been what led me to hippiedom, way back when … but that’s a separate story.

And yet, hating to sell or not, I sold myself to business clients well enough to support a big family on my business plan consulting for 15 or so years, while simultaneously starting to build Palo Alto Software as a product business.

And I’ve had the privilege of working with and watching some greats in this category. I watched, and I learned. It comes down to 5 points:

1. Really listen

Really. Shut up for a bit and listen to the other person. No, don’t half listen while your mind races ahead to the next point. Really listen, and absorb what they’re saying. I like this quote in a Time magazine interview with Larry King:

I never learned anything while talking.

2. Empathize

There’s no way to avoid it: you have to actually feel what this other person is feeling. Jump into their skin, or into their head, and look out from inside their head at the rest of the world. My mother used to call it putting yourself into the other person’s shoes. My sister-in-law used to say “borrow my eyes and see through them for a while.” See if you can imagine how he or she feels and he or she sees it. What experiences have they had which led to that point of view?

There’s no substitute for empathy. It’s the most important quality in business.

3. Always tell the truth

Lies come out, in the short term or long. Even plausible lies are time bombs.

When asked questions you shouldn’t answer — it happens; in the software business, for example, some questions about platforms and programming code and such — just tell the truth, and say you don’t feel comfortable answering that question. Explain why not.

When asked questions about weak points or flaws, answer them. You’ll gain some credibility and avoid the long-term loss you risk if you lie and your customer finds out later.

Your credibility, which is inseparable from your integrity, is the key to long-term relationships.

4. Solve the other person’s problem

One of my favorite things when I used to take sales calls, from back when my company was just starting up to just a few years ago (even as president, I used to grab the sales phone on random calls a few times a month), was to recommend a competitor’s product instead of our own. It went something like this:

“If you want a business plan just because you need a stack of papers on a banker’s desk in two days, and nobody’s really going to read it, then you don’t want our product. Ours likes you to think. You want __________.” Ours doesn’t write any text for you, it’s not fill in the blanks …

And I would end up giving them the toll-free number of a competitor. There was great satisfaction in that. And, in the long term, it’s good for the business. People see that you realize what your product is good at, and that other products might be better at different things.

I’ve seen our best salespeople do it over and over: they listen, empathize, and solve the other person’s problem either with our own product or by suggesting something else, that isn’t ours, that will solve the problem. We’re dealing with humans here; not everybody is a potential sale. Some of those people whose problems we can’t solve now will come back to us later, when they have a problem we can solve.

5. Grow thick skin

The first person who ever worked for Palo Alto Software as a full-time salesperson was amazingly persistent. He would leave voice messages for key gatekeeper people once a day for months, without ever getting a returned phone call. And, at least in several key accounts, those months of unanswered phone calls eventually got him — and our product — in the door.

Yes, I know, it’s somewhat contradictory to include empathy and thick skin in the same post. If you really empathized with the people who ignore messages, you might not persist in calling back. But business and life is full of paradox. I can’t resolve this one.