Entrepreneurship

“ National Entrepreneurship Month celebrates one of our Nation's proudest qualities: our innovative, hardworking, entrepreneurial spirit. American entrepreneurs invent and sell fascinating and endlessly useful new products and services, creating millions of jobs and driving American global leadership along the way. This month, we emphasize the importance of creating and maintaining an economic and regulatory environment that helps new businesses thrive and inspires generations of entrepreneurs for the future. ”

“ The strength of our economy is built on the creativity and entrepreneurship of our people. Those who own and operate our Nation's 25 million small businesses make a vital contribution to our prosperity through their ongoing work to create new technologies, products, and services. ”

“ My real work, however, is experimenting, and when I am able to turn out a machine that satisfies me, my next business will be to form a company, for one can’t do anything in this trade without capital. ”

“ The brightest minds of the business world are endeavoring to solve the problem of how best to market an article. Of course, unlimited capital, and a good article greatly lessen the problem. But to start with little or no money, build up a business, equip the plant, buy raw materials, hire help, manage a factory, establish credit, advertise, fill orders, collect accounts, and do the thousand and one other things necessary to make success of a business requires a good, virile mind, and plenty of hard work and close attention to detail, and should be a steady, gradual development. ”

“ In current economic theory the business man is spoken of under the name of "entrepreneur" or "undertaker," and his function is held to be the coordinating of industrial processes with a view to economics of production and heightened serviceability. ”

“ But the business man, or entrepreneur, in our day is the director and initiator of industry. He employs labor, borrows capital, sets the wheels of industry in motion; it is his expectations and fears and hopes which determine primarily whether the investment of capital shall take place in large or small amount, and whether the machinery of production shall move smoothly and effectively, or slowly, hesitatingly, inefficiently. ”

“ I would farm out the profits, the no-profits, or if you please the losses, to him who, being in other respects unexceptionable, offered the best terms. Undertaking an enterprise new in its extent, in the description of the persons to be subjected to his management, and in many other circumstances, his success in if, if he does succeed, may be regarded in the light of an invention, and rewarded accordingly, just as success in other inventions is rewarded, by the profit which a monopoly secured by patent enables a man to make; and that in proportion to the success which constitutes their merit. ”

“ In the year 1909, what chances do you think an inventor would have in starting a business in competition with the United States Steel Corporation, or the American Sugar Refining Company, or the Standard Oil Company, or the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, or the Paper Trust, or the Bell Telephone Company, or the Moving Picture Trust, or the American Can Company, or the Baldwin Locomotive Works? These enormous aggregations of brains and capital would make it quixotic to attempt to compete with them in the markets of the world. ”

“ Through the doors of the different rooms passed an endless procession; men from the front with the marks of the desert sun on their faces—engineers, superintendents, bosses, messengers, agents—servants of the Company; laborers of every sort and nationality came in answer to the cry: "Men wanted!"; special salesmen from foundry, factory and shop drawn by prospective large sales of machinery, implements and supplies; land-hungry men from everywhere seeking information and opportunity for investment. ”

“ And often, whole new industries are created when entrepreneurs found new companies to bring new products and services to market. The drive that is required to begin and run a small business illustrates the determination, hard work, and community involvement that are so essential to our free enterprise system. ”

“ How the Entrepreneur contributes to Production under Dynamic Conditions.—In a dynamic state the entrepreneur emerges from this passive position. He makes the supreme decisions which now and again lead to changes in the business. "Shall we adopt this new machine?" "Shall we make this new product?" "Shall we enter this new market?" are questions which are referred to him, and on the [Pg 124] decisions he reaches depends the prospects of profit for the business. ”

“ Enterprises, namely, which are carried on by private entrepreneurs by utilizing capital (money or goods with a money value) to make a profit, purchasing the means of production and selling the product, i.e. undoubted capitalistic enterprises, may at the same time have a traditionalistic character. ”

“ By freeing commerce from the fetters of mercantilism, our Founding Fathers released the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit of the American people. Small merchants and businessmen provided the simple beginnings of what has become a vast and innovative economy. ”

“ It is this theme, coöperation in industry, that I desire to develop.
We must ask ourselves at the outset certain fundamental questions:
First, what is the purpose of industry? Shall we cling to the conception of industry as an institution, primarily of private interest, which enables certain individuals to accumulate wealth, too often irrespective of the well-being, the health, and the happiness of those engaged in its production? Or shall we adopt the modern viewpoint and regard industry as being a form of social service, quite as much as a revenue-producing process? ”

“ In this manner you may not only make a profitable investment, but you are given an opportunity to become yourselves employers of labor and to share in the profits of the great enterprise which you have helped to build up. ”

“ Many of America's entrepreneurs risk everything to make their businesses successful. They are leaders of innovation, and their efforts create a wellspring of new technology, new products, and improved business processes. ”

“ Naturally enough our smoking-car conversation carried us to the discussion of just what was the measure of success in the business world and I think you can appreciate that I was not at all surprised to hear this man—this great captain of industry, whose very name in the business world was synonymous with great accomplishments—say with no little show of feeling, “If, when I pass out of active business life, it can truthfully be said of me that I was a builder of men, I crave no greater epitaph.” ”

“ The endeavors in question are beside the point in that they do not fall into the shape of a business proposition. They are, on the whole, not so profitable a line of investment as certain other ventures that are open to modern enterprise. ”

“ The entrepreneur, as we shall use the term, is neither the manager nor the capitalist, and when we have occasion to speak of either of these functionaries, we shall call him by his own distinctive name; though we know perfectly well that, in actual business, it is desirable [Pg 120] and often quite essential that the same one who acts as an entrepreneur should also put into the business some labor as well as some capital. ”

“ Often it has come to me that what is regarded as the somewhat remarkable progression of our enterprises—I will not say "success," for that word is an epitaph, and we are just starting—is due to some accident; and that the methods which we have used, while well enough in their way, fit only the making of our particular products and would not do at all in any other line of business or indeed for any products or personalities other than our own. ”

“ On the other hand, the entrepreneur, with just enough business cunning to recognise the market value of an improvement, reaps a material reward which is often enormously in excess of what is economically required to induce him to apply his "business" qualities to the undertaking. ”

“ It is not difficult to see a proprietor in the boy who sweeps the store or waits on customers—if the qualities that make a proprietor are in him—by watching him work for a single day. You can tell by the spirit which he brings to his task whether there is in him the capacity for growth, expansion, enlargement; an ambition to rise, to be somebody, or an inclination to shirk, to do as little as possible for the largest amount of salary.
When you get a job, just think of yourself as actually starting out in business for yourself, as really working for yourself. ”

“ The men actually in control of industry have been selected in manifold ways. Skill develops a small industry into a large one. A small factory owner gradually adds machine to machine, building to building, till he finds himself at the head of a great industry. Or an employee develops ability and becomes an employer. Who does not know of some one who, as a small boy, went into a store to do chores, worked up to a clerkship and, enlisting the confidence [Pg 271] of men of wealth, was enabled to establish a business of his own and become an employer? ”

“ One may adapt itself better to one locality or industry, another to another. Our business is not to copy, but to create and to develop for ourselves that which meets our own case. Much as will depend upon the character of each individual industry, all experience shows that there are other factors in the problem of scarcely less importance, and that much also depends upon the individual proclivities of the director of the school, the industrial enterprise of large firms, the far-sightedness of wealthy corporations. ”

“ My friend the business man tells me that for success in business one requires four things: a large capital, industry, insight, and caution—and then it's a toss-up. I am fain to believe this whole system of modern commerce was devised to please the amateurs of the aleatory. ”

“ These companies are the engines of growth, and it is in small business that people continue to find opportunity, pride, and dignity.
Indeed, small business is the lifeblood of America's free enterprise system. ”

“ The individual lawyer or carpenter perishes, but the profession or the trade survives, like a Platonic idea. In a stationary economic condition of a people, we might suppose that every trade and profession is an immortal, unchanging corporation. ”

“ I mean to get into the promotion of big things—big corporation business. A fellow that finances street railways and industrial plants, controls banks and makes towns grow—a builder; that’s what I mean to be. ”

“ Great business enterprises allow their success to the manufacture or sale of some simple invention or compound—usually the result of an experiment at home. With this latest book of practical formulas the boy of to-day has a far better opportunity than his father—and the mother and sisters can develop an industry of their own that will produce a comfortable income. ”

“ But the creation of the body and bulk of that business is shared by everyone who has anything to do with it. No manufacturer can say: "I built this business"—if he has required the help of thousands of men in building it. It is a joint production. Everyone employed in it has contributed something to it. By working and producing they make it possible for the purchasing world to keep coming to that business for the type of service it provides, and thus they help establish a custom, a trade, a habit which supplies them with a livelihood. ”

“ Keep, then, your eyes open and your wits about you, and you may distance all competitors; but, if you ignore all new methods, you will find yourself like a lugger contending with an ocean steamer.
It is enterprise that oils the wheels of energy and industry. Industry gathers together, with a frugal hand, the means whereby we are enabled to develop our plans and purposes. ”

“ The Entrepreneur's Proper Function not Labor of Management.—In some theoretical discussions the management of a business figures as the principal function of the entrepreneur, and all or nearly all of the reward that comes to him is represented as coming in the shape of a reward for a responsible kind of labor that calls great abilities into requisition. ”

“ Any industrial venture which falls short in meeting the pecuniary exigencies of the market declines and yields ground to others that meet them with better effect. Hence shrewd business management is a requisite to success in any industry that is carried on within the scope of the market. ”

“ A further feature of that precapitalistic business situation is that business, whether handicraft or trade, was customarily managed with a view to earning a livelihood rather than with a view to profits on investment. ”

“ Such persons might, with great success, employ themselves in finding out inventive workmen, whose want of capital prevents them from realizing their projects. If they could enter into a limited partnership with persons so circumstanced, they might restrain within proper bounds the imagination of the inventor, and by supplying capital to judicious schemes, render a service to the country, and secure a profit for themselves. ”

“ True enterprise is constantly on the alert to discover some new want of society, some fertile source of profit or honor, some unexplored field of business, and is ready to supply the one or to take advantage of the other. ”

“ In a few years he is the foreman, or an inventor, or a partner, with independent capital of his own. Again, there is a blind way of doing skilled work, or of merely doing it without noticing where it is most needed, or how the market is going for this special kind of work. ”

“ The commonplace or old-fashioned business enterprise, the competitive system of investment in industrial business simply, commonly rests pretty directly on the due sequence of the industrial processes in which the investments of such enterprise are placed. Such enterprise, as conceived by the current theories of capital, does business at first hand in the industrial efficiency of the community, which is conditioned by the time relation of the causal sequence, and which is, indeed, in great measure a function of the time consumed in the technological processes. ”