In this episode we explore a reframe of the term ‘entrepreneur’, and what it would mean in a more viable economics
In the previous post ‘Too much growth!’ I took what might have seemed a bit of an unfair dig at entrepreneurs, describing them as mosquito-like ‘between-takers’:
Sucking away at our resources, perhaps each only small quantities at a time, maybe, but so many of them that the losses add up fast, and the relentless irritations and distractions and minor wounds rise even faster.
But that’s actually not as unfair or invalid as it might at first seem. True, there’s no doubt at all that we need the energy and commitment of the entrepreneur: entrepreneurs do make things happen, and ideally make things happen for the good, too. Yet it’s important to remember that ‘entrepreneur’ literally means ‘between-taker’: entre, between; prendre, to take. And with that framing, and in this disastrously-dysfunctional ‘economics’, the risk and probability of the entrepreneur becoming a parasitic middle-man - ‘one who stands between, and takes’ - becomes a lot higher than most of us would like…
Again, we do need the energy of the entrepreneur; what we don’t need is the damage that they so easily cause with their efforts at ‘between-taking’. Yet it also seems likely that much of that damage arises from a misframing of the role as ‘between-taker’ - because once we describe it as a ‘taker’, then that’s what people will believe is what they’re expected to do.
So maybe we might be better off if we reframed the role in a different way?
Not as a ‘taker’, but as a ‘giver’?
Replace ‘entrepreneur’ with the term entredonneur. (Also entredonneuse, for the feminine version.) Literally, a ‘between-giver’: entre, between; donner, to give. One who stands between, and gives.
Because that’s what actually happens most often in the real-world, in nature. That’s how the real-world actually works - and why it works, too.
That’s what we can see with this somewhat blurry bee in the lavender, each party interacting with each other in the warm wind of the day. The flower provides nectar and pollen, whilst the bee carries pollen to the next flower, creating a value-flow or value-chain across the whole space. Each player in the story acting as an entredonneur to the other; each providing what the other needs, in a way in which everyone wins.
Sure, there’ll no doubt be predators and other parasites scattered around somewhere in the story, each interested only in what they can take from others, and giving nothing in return; but the between-giver relationships as entredonneur are what support the ecosystem as a whole.
All of which we could re-use, of course, as a direct analogy for economics in the human realm.
What we see most often there at present is the entrepreneur, the between-taker - which is actually what we’d expect to see in a possessionist economics, within which the only thing that’s deemed to matter is how much we can take from others and pull into our own possession. Sure, somewhere in there there’ll usually be at least some kind of ‘value-proposition’ on offer, some element of give, if only to bring the punters and the rubes into the story for long enough to prey on. We’ll often see that dressed up as ‘give and take’, for example - though in reality the emphasis there is definitely on ‘take’ rather than ‘give’.
Here, ‘the ‘enterprise’ is presumed to be the same as the organisation - an organised place where ‘between-taking’ takes place. Yet even there, perhaps, even the most self-centred of entrepreneurs must eventually realise that an economics that’s based only on ‘the take’ isn’t actually going to be viable for very long as an economics: given the literal meaning of ‘economics’ as ‘the management of the household’, that metaphoric ‘household’, under those circumstances, must eventually fall apart under the strain. By its very nature, a possessionist economics, centred so much around that entrepreneurial ‘the take’, accelerates ever faster towards its own inevitable demise - taking all of us with it, if we’re foolish enough to allow it to do so. Game Over…
Yet what we see in a responsibility-based economics is almost the exact opposite. Rather than the entrepreneur, it’s built around the role of the entredonneur, a notion of mutual giving, mutual service. In this context, ‘the enterprise’ is much larger in scope than just an individual or an organisation: as in nature, it’s actually an ecosystem in its own right, though in this case an ecosystem that emerges from a story and commitment that is shared in some way by all players in that space.
Here too, each player does have their own ‘value-proposition’, though one that is much more real than that in a possession-based economics: it is literally a description of how that player proposes to deliver value to the shared-enterprise as a whole. And because it’s an economics that is based on mutual giving, rather than self-centred taking, it is far more self-adapting and stable than in any classic ‘boom-and-bust’ possession-based economics - in fact, like nature itself, is likely to remain viable over periods of time that are more geological than merely social.
So let’s try that reframe: from entrepreneur to entredonneur; from ‘between-taker’ to ‘between-giver’. Doing that could well lead us to a form of economics that might at last actually work.
(Many thanks to Bard Papegaaij and Nate Gerber for their help in developing this theme.)