Archive for 19 August 2008
Please, No More “Preneurs”
| Peter Klein |
The term entrepreneur is well-established in the academic and practitioner literatures, if not always consistently used. (As I note here, the word is typically applied to self-employed individuals or, in adjective form, to new and small ventures, but I prefer the broader, functional notions of innovation, alertness, or judgment found in the classic economics literature on entrepreneurship.) The literal translation of the French entrepreneur, “undertaker,” isn’t quite right, though I’m rather drawn to the older English terms “adventurer” or “projector.”
In any case, there’s no excuse for the seemingly endless proliferations of
“-preneur” words floating around today. An entrepreneurial individual within a large firm is an intrapreneur. With some additional skills and an external perspective she might become an extrapreneur. A good manager can hope to be a manapreneur. You in the tech sector? You’re a technopreneur. Or you might be a minipreneur, actorpreneur, agripreneur, authorpreneur, seniorpreneur, or even a mompreneur. Enough!
Let’s stick to simple ideas, like manurepreneurship.
Postcard from Scandinavia
| Dick Langlois |
Taking up Nicolai’s challenge, I offer a substance-free post in the spirit of Facebook. I am in Scandinavia, where I will have a chance to interact with both of my local co-bloggers. At the moment I am in Copenhagen, where I will participate in a Ph.D. course that Nicolai and his colleagues have organized. But I just returned from Bergen, where I met Lasse for the first time. I gave a talk at NHH and had a chance to see a bit of the city. Bergen is a beautiful place, and I was fortunate to see in it perfect weather, something I am told is rare on the rainy west coast of Norway. As I learned in the local museum, Bergen was one of four Hanseatic “office” cities (along with London, Bruges, and Novgorod), and it mainly traded salted fish and cod-liver oil — the first Norwegian oil industry — for grain products from Britain and the Baltic. I was also treated to whale meat for an appetizer at dinner last night — a politically incorrect meal in an otherwise politically correct country. (Since a whale is a mammal, it was more like beef than fish; but as it was served as a highly spiced (cooked) carpaccio, it was hard to determine the real taste: maybe just a bit gamier than beef.)
The mercantile spirit is apparently still alive and well in Scandinavia. On the Copenhagen metro a little while ago, I spotted a young Dane sporting a T-shirt depicting bars of gold and proclaiming the slogan “the original currency of kings.” I intuited immediately that this wasn’t a Ron Paul supporter but a would-be hip-hop teenager. It turns out the that the shirt is made by a company called LRG, which is lauded as an up-and-coming (American) entrepreneurial venture. Unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to find a place to buy one cheaply on the web: it would be great to wear for lectures on monetary policy or on inflation in the early modern period. I think I will skip the dollar-sign bling, though.
McNamara on Management
| Peter Klein |
From Abraham Zaleznik in HBS Working Knowledge (via Marshall Jevons):
[Robert S. McNamara] was a brilliant student at the University of California and at Harvard Business School, where he became a member of the HBS faculty. McNamara was a devotee of managerial control, an expertise he applied in his work at the Ford Motor Company and later at the Department of Defense as secretary in President John F. Kennedy’s cabinet.
His mantra was measurement. As secretary of defense, McNamara developed, along with key subordinates, including Robert Anthony of the HBS control faculty, long-range procurement cycles. He even tried to get the U.S. Navy to subscribe to a common aircraft for the three branches of the military. The Navy refused to go along, since this branch was concerned about aircraft operating from carriers.
McNamara urged field commanders in Vietnam to apply measurement to enemy losses, but did not realize until it was too late that the measurements were unreliable to assess enemy losses. The most reliable assessments came from correspondents like Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam. McNamara published a book years after he retired to reassess the Vietnam War and his role in it as secretary of defense. His main theme was the failure to examine critically the assumptions leading to U.S. involvement in this disaster. Editorial writers took no pains to spare McNamara’s feelings.
The moral I took away from his story is to avoid the perils of the fox and its reliance on a single belief, in this case measurement, and the technology of control.
For more on McNamara’s management philosophy and experiences, Deborah Shapley’s 1992 biography Promise and Power is pretty good. I also recommend The Whiz Kids: Ten Founding Fathers of American Business — and the Legacy They Left Us by John Byrne. As these books point out, McNamara was not a pioneer in this area but a follower of Tex Thornton, head of the US Army’s Statistical Control Group in WWII and later CEO of Litton Industries. It was Thornton who brought McNamara and the rest of his “Whiz Kids,” as a group, to Ford in 1945. Harold Geneen, the most famous “management-by-the-numbers” guy, was not part of this group but shared much of Thornton’s philosophy. (See Robert Sobel’s Rise and Fall of the Conglomerate Kings.)
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