Entreprenural Values and the Real World

Previously published elsewhere 7/20/08

I came at sailing and boat fixing as a choice, a decision about "what to do next." I had a thirty-year career in various entrepreneurial businesses, often in sales positions. My most recent job had been running an aggressive interdisciplinary team formed to take one of my company's inventions to market. We designed, manufactured, marketed and sold a new type of gas control system for semiconductor process tools. No one explains how you should succeed in an entrepreneurial business. It is your job to make it all up out of nothing. Select the team, set up shop, pick your targets and go. The more audacious your choices, the more you can inspire your team, the better you do. Provided you can keep it more or less under control. Provided the economy doesn't roll over on you. You know the odds are against you. You know success in an entrepreneurial venture also involves being in the right place at the right time. But it's exciting and gut wrenching, a real roller coaster. Knowing all this , you take initiative every day and you inspire your colleagues to take initiative. "Better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission." Perhaps you will be one of the lucky ones.  

There are rules. You stay within the law and you stay within budget. But your job is to make something extraordinary happen and there is no script for that. You keep everyone moving in the same direction but contributing all the creativity they can personally muster. When it's working at it's best, everyone is looking for ways to improve the outcome for the team, everyone has the power to make decisions. People are expected to make mistakes and there is no penalty for doing so. Just get up and try something else. "If you are not falling down you are not skiing aggressively enough."  

From this I went almost directly to starting up a one-man company to fix boats. I grew up on Lake Michigan, spend a lot of time in the water, but I had never spent much time around boats. I have a good technical background. I can understand and fix almost anything. I have been an electronic experimenter since childhood. Boats looked really interesting and here I was in Southern California, home to tens of thousands of boats. Getting older, I knew I had to become independent of corporate politics. I made too much money not to be a target at some point. Surrounded by MBAs, I had risen well above where my education should have taken me. My company was swallowed up. I didn't like the new guys. A little money became available. I rode my gold-colored parachute out. A golden parachute is a very comfortable financial landing for a high executive. In the acquisition of a small, troubled company caught in an economic squeeze there may be some parachutes for senior staff, but they are only golden colored, like aluminized holiday balloons. But I received a little cushion to ease my way to the next job.  

I have been successful in a half-dozen technical industries. What was stopping me here? There are never enough really talented professionals in any area. I had the chutzpa to believe I could recreate my previous successes in the boat repair business.  

I never suspected the way I was accustomed to doing things would get me into trouble when I started taking sailing lessons. I never suspected I would briefly suffer a reputation as a dangerous person, someone who took too many risks. I knew I had little patience for school, but I underestimated the cultural barriers I'd hit in seeking a part-time teaching position with a local community college. My customer's loved me, by and large. I knew and respected the value of their time. I returned their calls. I showed up. But it is the early cultural conflicts I want to explore here, albeit in the next post. Because there are still people I respect who just don't get how I seemed to have a habit of breaking the china when I started learning about boats.  

Postscript:  

The articles I read now about the entrepreneurial spirit in China and other newly emerged countries only sharpens the contrast I felt in my own life transitioning into boating. As a society we are too timid, too fat, too complacent or too avaricious and predatory, the powerful eating up the substance of the weak. We consume way too much energy per capita to be sustainable. The Regan Revolution has run into a rock wall and we are living the consequences, the fires, bankruptcies and explosions in slow motion. Our government is mostly in denial but the vast majority of citizens know things are not right and will probably get worse. The problems of the future are my grandchildren's to solve. My own children may contribute, but they are nearly half way through their careers. My children are hitting their most productive years. I'd like them to know how I played my cards and continue to play them. Maybe they can learn something from my example.