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William Baumol, who holds positions at both Princeton and New York University, has been laboring for years to come to a better understanding of entrepreneurs - "the leading men of capitalism" - and to "create more space for entrepreneurship and innovation in economic theory", according to the Economist (Mar 9th 2006 edition).
Read the article for more on Baumol's theory. Here, let's look at the word itself and see what we can come up with.
Americans have more big-shot entrepreneurs today than the Japanese, English, Germen, or the French. But the French remain the only ones who can pronounce it properly, as the word "entrepreneur" is borrowed from French.
It's derived from two words - 'entre' (enter) and 'prendre' (take). In English it means "to do something", or "one who undertakes" (Economist). During the last few centuries, however, that "something" became exclusively something new, something innovative and market-driven, something done with an aim for profit.
In other words, getting up late, having a brunch, taking a long nap, having another meal at dinner, watching television or simply going to bed at sunset without a care where the next day's meal comes from as long as it's going to come one way or another may still be a grand lifestyle, but these adventures (or the lacks thereof) are no longer considered entrepreneurial.
An entrepreneur the animal as we know of today refers to someone who creates a new business venture. As an action leads to a consequence, the entrepreneur also bears the risks inherent in venturing out to do something never done before, or to do a same old thing in a new way in the dog-eat-dog business world.
This trait, the willingness to take risks, is what separates entrepreneurs, or potential owners, employers from the working class, the salary makers, those who also work hard, if not harder, but somehow have little to show for it at the year end.
"In 1730, Richard Cantillon used entrepreneur to mean a self-employed person with a tolerance for the risk he believed was inherent in providing for one's own economic well being. Toward the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (1830), Jean-Baptiste Say further expanded the definition of a successful entrepreneur to include the possession of managerial skills" (The Notion of Entrepreneurship: Historical and Emerging Issues, Charles Outcalt). Richard Cantillon (1680-1734) was an Irish banker. Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832) was the French economist best known for the "law of the market" theories - "supply creates its own demand". He was a champion of the free market (laissez-faire).
This explains why this country has not historically been known for churning out entrepreneurs in droves.
In fact, businesspeople (known previously as traders, profiteers, merchants) have never been held in high renown. The Chinese are (or rather used to be) easily contented with life insofar as they could make daily ends meet. Many realize, correctly, that however rich they may be, they can only have three full meals a day (when they are not on diet). All give their riches away, either during their life time, or after they jump ship and move to the nether world.
So what's the point of accumulating wealth? Apparently, emperors liked this thinking best (it made them feel safe) and had for centuries encouraged the masses to keep thinking that way.
Even when a farmer happened to have an unusually bumper harvest (perhaps due more to the weather than the sweat of their eyebrows), they seldom would venture out to sell for a profit what they could not consume by themselves. Not in a large scale and a pompous way at any rate - it was not worth it to get frowned upon and tongue-lashed by the neighbors, not to mention alerting the attention from avaricious officials who believed they were the only ones that were worthy of luxuries and wealth.
That's why this country had always seen "petty merchants", but never the likes of a Thomas Edison in the error of the emperors.
Entrepreneurship began to take hold in this country during the second half of the 19th century, after the locals were force-fed the idea by Western colonialists. Even then, Chinese businesses never gained the respectable social status enjoyed by their Western counterparts. Protection of private property was virtually non-existent. Businesses had to buy their way into politics if they knew what was good for them. Well, this latter point is not unlike what is happening in the capitalist world in general, but still, the Chinese venture into capitalism in the beginning was nothing to write home about.
During the early history of New China, businessmen as a group was also considered as lowly, being the last in social classification (workers, farmers, army men, students or Little Red Guards to be exact, and businesspeople).
Entrepreneurship in the proper sense of the word has only begun to thrive in earnest since the late 1970s. In fact, such is the pent-up energy, that the commercial fever that grips the country at present is simply staggering. No examples necessary, you say, we experience it every day. Precisely.
But our understanding of entrepreneurship appears to be a tad one-sided. If you ask the average person what their idea of entrepreneurship is, more often than not, they'll come up with something along the line of a big pay day - Bill Gates, stock-market bonanzas, Fortune 500, or the Forbes list of the world's wealthiest.
They won't address the other side of the deal - the risks that come with it.
That's because it's early days yet for the Chinese in terms of being creative with an aim for profit. After all, few have ever dipped their hands and feet in the sea of business to enable them to know better. Still fewer have suffered the daily struggles to keep a company afloat.
It'll take awhile for the Chinese to properly understand that those who have made it big dared take the risks involved in the first place and therefore deserve the fruits of their labor, that one can not have it one way without the other.
What really helps, though, is for all to remember the root meaning of the word "entrepreneur" - "a self-employed person with a tolerance for the risk he believed was inherent in providing for one's own economic well being", as was quoted above.
At the end of the day, being an entrepreneur is about just doing it, about being adventurous and willing to do work, about taking one's financial well-being into one's own hands (so that one can have a proper chance to worry about higher pursuits, such as the meaning of life and how to spend all the money made).
Being adventurous and willing to put in the days and hours is what life is about any way.
Thomas Edison (1847-1931), who patented 1,093 inventions in his life, is arguably the greatest entrepreneur of all time. He was credited to have said: "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration."
He might have exaggerated a bit, on the genius and the inspiration. In his case, it looked like 100 percent effort - To create a workable light bulb, the man did thousands of experiments. The reason he alone succeeded could be down to the simple fact he alone undertook so many experiments, going through more failures than everyone else. Edison was also credited to have said to the effect that he succeeded because he had exhausted all the possible ways to fail.
He later made his millions when he partnered with another entrepreneur, J.P Morgan, to form a company called General Electric. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Well now, if you follow Edison's example (don't have to take it literally) and do something about your life with creativity and daring (to take calculated risks), you may indeed be able to do something with your life.
And if you make it, no-one should begrudge you making it, whatever it is.
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