Published in the Independence Daily Reporter, April 27, 2016
There’s a “new” entrepreneurial capitalism emerging in the United States. Actually, it’s been here a while except that many of us didn’t recognize it at first; many don’t recognize it now.
Carl J. Schramm, then president of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri wrote a book about this subject in 2006 called the “Entrepreneurial Imperative”. He recognized what was going on several years ago and in fewer than 200 pages does an excellent job of explaining the reasons that entrepreneurial capitalism has come about.
He speaks of the old bureaucratic economy that started after World War II and ended a few years ago. In that economy, we were led to believe-and we still imply to our young people-that big business will hire you when you get your college degree. Back in the 1950’s and 1960’s, you could stay with a company your whole career and then retire to collect a nice pension. During that time it looked like big business, the labor unions and government would take care of all our needs, but funny things began to happen on the way to the recessions of the last few decades. Pensions and life-time employment have pretty much gone away and all three, big business, labor unions and the government have became bureaucratic and unresponsive to the changing marketplace.
Meanwhile, the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980’s, followed by the proliferation of the Internet were the ingredients for a global marketplace, one in which people around the world want a piece of the market pie, including the huge American pie. The complacency of the old American bureaucratic economy has been replaced by a fiercely competitive global marketplace.
Businesses that have recognized what has occurred, promoting and embracing a new entrepreneurial organization, have done well, even after the last big recession that started in 2008. Many businesses, both large and small that haven’t responded to the entrepreneurial economy, are well, not doing so well. The future will be dominated by smaller, agile, entrepreneurial firms that keep their ears to the marketplace, providing the customized individual products and services made possible by the digital age.
An entrepreneurial economy, not only here in America, but around the world is the best hope of expanding the economic pie, allowing everyone that wants to work to be successful and build wealth and well-beingfor themselves and their families. Those of us that figure out how to operate in this “new” entrepreneurial economy will be the ones that enjoy the fruits of the global marketplace.
Jim Correll 