July 10, 2013 5:48 pm
FT
Review by Jonathan Moules
Worthless, Impossible and Stupid: How Contrarian Entrepreneurs
Create and Capture Extraordinary Value, by Daniel Isenberg, Harvard
Business Review Press, $27/£17.99
This is a good time
to be an entrepreneur. As the global
economy has teetered on the edge of collapse, and former pillars of
society from bankers to politicians have become mired in scandal, business
founders have been lionised across the world as the saviours of capitalism and
a source of hope for the future.
The general interest
in the subject means that it is also a good time to be writing
a book about entrepreneurship. Daniel Isenberg is the latest to do
this with what he regards as an alternative look at the subject.
Isenberg is a widely
respected authority on the subject, having spent the best part of three decades
working with start-ups as an angel investor, a venture capitalist, an adviser,
an academic tutor in entrepreneurship and a business founder in his own right.
He taught for 11 years at Harvard Business School and is a professor of
entrepreneurship at Babson College. He has travelled the world to prepare case
studies about entrepreneurial businesses, several of which find their way into
the pages of his book. He also spent many years working with fast-growing
companies in Israel, a country now renowned as a start-up capital of the world.
The first thing that
Isenberg wants to tell us is that entrepreneurs are not what they seem
(although he is not the first to do this).
The first three
chapters of the book attempt to dispel three common myths about the nature of
entrepreneurs: that they are innovators (the best ones actually just sell
existing ideas better); that they have to be experts in their industry (the
best ones are just good at spotting an opportunity); and that they have to be
young (several studies show that the sweet spot for starting a business is in
later life and that the average age of founders is actually rising).
“Nothing is obvious
in entrepreneurship,” Isenberg states. His theme of “worthless” refers to the
way in which entrepreneurs so often succeed because they identify the
opportunity to make money from a situation that everyone else considers to have
no value.
Linked to this is the
point that entrepreneurship can happen anywhere, often in the places you least
expect it to happen – and certainly not just in Silicon Valley.
To prove his point,
in the first five pages of his book, Isenberg name- checks interesting
companies he has encountered in far-flung corners of the world.
Worthless contains several well told stories about the
challenges and failings that specific founders have had to overcome to build
their businesses.
There is also a
refreshing honesty about how some of the case study companies did not achieve
the success that their founders had expected. Isenberg even admits to having to
write off $30,000 of his own money because the intellectual property of a
business he was backing proved to be worthless.
If there is a
criticism of the book, it is that Isenberg seems to change his mind at several
points about what he wants it to be. After the chapters about
entrepreneurship myths, he changes tack to spend a couple more chapters talking
about why entrepreneurs seem crazy and their ideas worthless.
He then switches
again to a third section on the difficulty of creating companies before finally
moving to a more academic analysis on how to create value in a company. It
feels as though Isenberg had four great book ideas but could not decide which
one to publish and the movement between them jars slightly.
This is a shame
because there is an abundance of great nuggets of knowledge in this book as
well as frank confessions about how hard it usually is to create truly great
companies. That kind of intelligence is not worthless, impossible or stupid.
The writer is the FT’s enterprise correspondent
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