I admire entrepreneurs; ultimately, they've made the modern world. (Unfortunately, I don't think I've had an entrepreneurial idea in my long life.)
One knee-jerk, drooling reaction to entrepreneurialism/business is that it generates **profits** [sometimes]. Quelle horror! "People are more important than profits."
Anyway, this brings to mind a Kevin Williamson quote from 2010. It seems pertinent:
"Profits are evidence of the creation of social value.
…
"It’s kind of interesting, a sort of society-wide science experiment: Nobody really knows what will create social value, so businesses just throw their best ideas out there into the marketplace, which is basically a big social-value laboratory, and see which hypotheses fly. A lot of success happens by accident: Take eBay, which was not really meant to be eBay, originally: The company’s founders thought that the underlying Internet-retailing software was going to be their profitable product, and the actual auction site was set up mostly just to demonstrate how well the software worked. (Seriously: The name “eBay” started as a joke about ebola — not exactly a Harvard case study of a marketing plan.) Some businesses get it right, some get it wrong. Some entrepreneurs have really good ideas, some are daft, and some are really lucky in spite of themselves — but nobody knows in advance how things will turn out. What really helps to ensure that businesses create social value is competition among firms. If a business is not producing social value (social value = what society values), it fails, and its competitors succeed. So goes the theory. You know how theories are."
Thanks for the comment, and for sharing the KW quote. I've not heard it before but it very much resonates—no one knows how things are going to turn out in what often is a long series of experiments.
Because entrepreneurism seems to run in my DNA, I used to think everyone had or should have the same interest, but then we'd be missing some crucial societal stability.
I admire entrepreneurs; ultimately, they've made the modern world. (Unfortunately, I don't think I've had an entrepreneurial idea in my long life.)
One knee-jerk, drooling reaction to entrepreneurialism/business is that it generates **profits** [sometimes]. Quelle horror! "People are more important than profits."
Anyway, this brings to mind a Kevin Williamson quote from 2010. It seems pertinent:
"Profits are evidence of the creation of social value.
…
"It’s kind of interesting, a sort of society-wide science experiment: Nobody really knows what will create social value, so businesses just throw their best ideas out there into the marketplace, which is basically a big social-value laboratory, and see which hypotheses fly. A lot of success happens by accident: Take eBay, which was not really meant to be eBay, originally: The company’s founders thought that the underlying Internet-retailing software was going to be their profitable product, and the actual auction site was set up mostly just to demonstrate how well the software worked. (Seriously: The name “eBay” started as a joke about ebola — not exactly a Harvard case study of a marketing plan.) Some businesses get it right, some get it wrong. Some entrepreneurs have really good ideas, some are daft, and some are really lucky in spite of themselves — but nobody knows in advance how things will turn out. What really helps to ensure that businesses create social value is competition among firms. If a business is not producing social value (social value = what society values), it fails, and its competitors succeed. So goes the theory. You know how theories are."
Thanks for the comment, and for sharing the KW quote. I've not heard it before but it very much resonates—no one knows how things are going to turn out in what often is a long series of experiments.
Because entrepreneurism seems to run in my DNA, I used to think everyone had or should have the same interest, but then we'd be missing some crucial societal stability.
…Christmasy blob…
Hello, so happy to connect with you 🤍 I just subscribed to your content, and I hope you feel like subscribing to mine too 💌 xx