Here’s an excellent post by Ernesto Sirolli: Horse Manure and the next Entrepreneurial Revolution.
While we have spent millions bailing out the auto industry (just before BO drives a tent peg into its head with the latest emission standards!), we are stifling the people who might actually help us dig out of this hole: the entrepreneur.
And by definition – government CAN’T plan it at all. Read what Sirolli says: What can be done to assist and expedite the work of entrepreneurs in our society? Old methods don’t work. Planning, for instance, is totally inadequate to the task as eloquently put by Peter Drucker who wrote: “Planning as the term is commonly understood is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy. Innovation does indeed need to be purposeful and entrepreneurship has to be managed. But innovation, almost by definition, has to be decentralized, ad hoc, autonomous, specific, and microeconomic. It had better start small tentative, flexible. Indeed, the opportunities for innovation are found, on the whole, only way down and close to events. (…) Innovative opportunities do not come with the tempest but with the rustling of the breeze.”
This flies in the face of what the bureaucrat boys (and girls) in Washington promised to do of course. They want to play Messiah and micromanage everybody and everything when we know they’re totally incompetent for the task.
I hope people in authority – if they can shed their messianic delusions for a moment – will read Sirolli’s book (see the cover above). It’s well worth reading and LEARNING.
About Ernesto Sirolli: After six years of economic development work in Africa, Ernesto Sirolli witnessed how little most foreign aid programs were actually doing for the people they hoped to help — from creating a communal tomato field on the banks of the Zambezi river (only to be demolished by the river’s hippos at harvest time) to donating snow-ploughs to African nations! However well intentioned, Sirolli points out, inappropriate development often creates more problems than it solves. Thus was the genesis of this exciting and unique alternative to traditional economic development termed ‘Enterprise Facilitation’ — where depressed communities can build hope and prosperity by first helping individuals to recognise their talents and business passion, and then providing the skills to transform their dreams into meaningful and rewarding work.
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