Saniel Bonder

National Entrepreneurship & the (possibly) Great Recession we’re already in

My last post introduced the idea of an American program for National Entrepreneurship as a complement to any National Service program a new administration in Washington advocates or institutes over the coming months and years.

Since that post, Obama-Biden have been elected — and economists have sure enough confirmed that we’re in a serious recession and have been since around this time last year. While the experts haggle over whether or not, and if so when, this crisis might become a depression, many in the future will likely view it as a truly Great Recession. The perfect storm of interlinked economic and financial calamities shows so few signs of lightening up any time soon. And some argue that the worst by far is yet to come.

So, hope for change has been buoyed up for many in the U.S. and across the globe, but at the same time confidence, security (financial and otherwise) and hope for at least the immediate future are taking increasingly severe body blows. For millions.

While trying to learn about this largely unprecedented global crisis that, I gather, confounds even career experts in finance and economics, as a spiritual awakener, teacher, author, and counselor, I’ve been struggling to keep my wife’s and my own very small, niche business afloat. Our innovative, gratifying, small-scale spiritual successes have yet to translate into commensurate financial returns. So, like just about every other company out there, it seems, we’re scrambling to survive and thrive.

But I do know something of the challenges and vagaries, and the blessings and opportunities, of entrepreneurship. Which qualifies me to keep blowing this horn about National Entrepreneurship as an initiative for our time. For Americans especially, the current moment is such a crucial opportunity to strengthen our position in and our contribution to the increasingly integrated global economy for generations to come. The upheaval on so many sides is not just a threatening crisis. It’s an immense opportunity, one that no other country or society is in a position to make much of and take such a leadership role in as we Americans are.

The fact that our own greed and a host of our other faults and failings have stimulated this whole global mess is something we must take into account, yes. I’ve read and heard multiple tales of “who done what.” In a recent issue of Fortune, Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker twenty-odd years ago, provides a chillingly graphic story of Wall Street’s recent explosion and then implosion as, in effect, an international casino for financiers and bankers (of all people!). The downsides of our specifically American styles of entrepreneurship on Wall Street and Main Street both should be prime topics of study in our National Entrepreneurship trainings and initiatives. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t institute those trainings and initiatives. If anything, it means we should.

One of my primary sources of information and opinion these days is Financial Times, many of whose columnists seem eminently sane and free of the partisan bluster that fills so much of our own media. Just today (Dec. 3rd), from a single commentary page, front and back, here are comments that reflect to us on this side of the pond something of who we have been, are, and can become, that we don’t necessarily see.

From Luke Johnson’s column “The Entrepreneur” — Johnson runs a TV station and also a private equity firm; today he’s encouraging both the U.S. and the U.K. to “take the tough medicine of bankruptcy” rather than endlessly bail out all big-corporate beggars:

“The worry is that a giant new state industrial complex is created — perhaps to replace the diminished military industrial complex? Too many businesses now cling to public sector contracts for survival, but this is not a long-term method of wealth creation. Innovation, jobs and prosperity spring from the private sector, not bureaucrats. The state can never handle the originality, reward system and near misses essential to enterprise creation.”

Johnson says the real danger for the west is not serious recession, but a reversion to “nationalization and creeping socialism, a rising tide of regulation and government involvement in the economy.” This of course is the clarion call of those on the right in the U.S. as well. My own view is that a balance needs to be struck. But I think Johnson is also looking through the glass of a veteran entrepreneur who’s struggled against those often-rising tides in his own country for decades, in ways we haven’t but also very likely won’t ever have to here.

Why not? There’s just only so much nationalization, socialization, and regulation our essentially entrepreneurial culture will put up with. Another regular FT columnist, Scotsman John Kay, a distinguished Oxford-trained economist and a businessman himself, argues today that “the east’s innovators are no threat to the west.” Here’s his take on us sometimes “pesky” Americans as both students and businesspeople:

“What distinguishes the US is not just its innovative technologists, but its innovative manufacturers, retailers and consumers. Discoveries are made in an environment that is responsive to ideas, ready to embrace change and always willing to try out something new. People who are likely to invent things want to be part of a culture that is open to novelty, and cultures that are open to novelty are those that will reward innovators best. That is why there are so many entrepreneurs of Chinese and Indian origin in the US — and Britain — even as more and more mundane jobs are outsourced to China and India.

“The pesky American students who are ready to challenge every assertion the instructor makes contrast with students from other cultures who believe their aim is to transcribe every authoritative statement that is delivered. These voluble business students are the bane of the MBA teacher’s life. They are also the people who make American business great.”

I believe the entire world economy needs massive training of the young (and old!) in the realities of innovative, creative, challenging, novelty-prone, risk-taking, responsibility-accepting entrepreneurship. But we have such a built-in advantage here in the States. Kindly take note: the American spirit, the can-do, fulfill-the-dream, question-authority make-it-happen-ism that can get us (and everyone else) in huge trouble if its baser instincts are unchecked, is also, viewed through at least one wise set of British eyes, a NATIONAL TREASURE.

Nouriel Roubini’s guest FT column today was headlined on the front page with choice excerpts from his conclusion. Roubini is legendary, I gather, for glass-practically-empty views. He’s an economist based at NYU and chairman of an economic consultancy, a renowned world authority. Some of his trademark but far too justifiable predictions today:

“In the next few months, the flow of macroeconomic and earnings news will be much worse than expected. The credit crunch will get worse … The worst is not behind us: 2009 will be a painful year of a global recession, deflation and bankruptcies.”

Roubini and other super-bears are having a heyday (not one they necessarily like, I imagine; how pleasing can it be to be right when you’re a prophet of doom?). He and others also suggest best courses we can all take, at macro and micro levels.

In their midst, I again sound the drum for a National Entrepreneurship initiative in the United States. One advocated and facilitated in all appropriate ways by our governments, federal, state, and local, but peopled and led by proven, successful entrepreneurs. They alone can instill good business sense and stimulate multiple networks of support for the tens of millions of Americans who are already entrepreneurs and the many millions more who will be heading in that direction, if they aren’t already, after getting downsized from struggling companies across the land.

National Service is a marvelous thing. But its trainings in self-sacrifice, teamwork, and voluntary contribution to the greater good won’t by themselves inoculate us against future calamitous times like these without a corresponding program for National Entrepreneurship.

A program for National Entrepreneurship that promotes a vision of “Good Business,” valuing people and our planet equally with profit — like the vision that drives this website, and the one behind my wife Linda’s and my entrepreneurial mission too.

A program for National Entrepreneurship that will begin to orient entrepreneurs from early in life that mere gluttony for riches only demonstrates the impoverishment of one’s soul — while still helping them learn all the necessary skills to create and sustain thriving enterprises that contribute tremendously to everyone concerned.

A program for National Entrepreneurship that will send into the second, third, and later decades of this century a series of generations of American businesspeople who surprise and even astonish the world by our resilient capacity to climb out of deep deficits and to remain far more vigorous players in the world’s economy than all the present-day prophets of American decline could even imagine. We just astonished the world politically. We can do it financially and economically too — especially if we make National Entrepreneurship a priority in our schools and communities, organizations and even corporations across the land.

© Saniel Bonder 2008. All rights reserved.

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About Saniel: Harvard educated “destiny-empowerment” expert, Saniel is author of the forthcoming audio series, "Wealth Without Guilt," the provocative "White-Hot Yoga of the Heart," and many other books and programs. He hails from Sonoma, California where his unique blend of intellectual curiosity and spiritual wisdom is honed and nurtured. Saniel co-writes and co-teaches with his wife, Linda. Together they travel and teach “materiality and spirit” workshops throughout the US and internationally. His website is http://heartgazing.com/spiritmoney.