John Koten at Cleveland Ohio

John Koten - Editor in Chief of Inc and Fast Company addressed business owners in Cleveland Ohio. You can find the podcast HERE

Following are some of my notes from listening to this podcast:

Only two things that kill a business

· Ego
· Fear

Their opposites are:

· Excellence
· Humility

Entrepreneurship views the world marketplace as a blank canvas rather then a fully developed picture.

Entrepreneurship is both Concept and Execution

Entrepreneurs are sometimes:
· Impolite
· Frustrating to deal with
· Talk more than they listen

Entrepreneurs see the world as they want it, they don’t like the word ‘no’, they don’t like authority when it is forced on them.

If a business owner’s business hankerings do not make his/her spouse nervous, he/she is not an entrepreneur.

Cultures have come here to help us develop our entrepreneurial and capitalistic model. Only America has a cross-cultural model of entrepreneurship.

There is a triangle with the creative class on one side, the entrepreneurship class on the other side, and small-business on the bottom.

In Vietnam & China, there is a unique coop mentality where they avoid conflict, and they’re in each other’s business. They don’t need to keep their property separate. The U.S. allows us to own property, capitalize on that property, and keep that property as our own. In China, they think property belongs to the world. They don’t see a need for protecting individual property. If the property, technology, etc exists, then anyone should be able to use. Things in the world belong to everyone. This is a major problem, and how we solve that problem will affect how successfully we work with China.

Massive government regulation in the US undermines the American entrepreneurial capitalistic model by unwittingly encouraging giant businesses which then become bureaucratic like Microsoft, with a lot of money, but hasn’t created anything overly innovative for a long time. We’ve done this because of our fear that if we turn the power over to large, massive, powerful organizations, then they will hurt people. And we feel it’s up to the government to stop these organizations from abusing their power. As a result, these regulations are onerous for small entrepreneurial organizations and only huge corporations have the resources and lawyers to comply with such regulations. An example, Sarbanes-Oxley has created enormous red tape for small businesses to comply with. As such, many small businesses are spending millions just to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley.

We don’t have the model or the metrics to understand why one entrepreneurial model works and another fails. Academia still hasn’t truly identified how to assess any given entrepreneurial model. There really is no defined science to analyze entrepreneurial ventures to determine which ones will be successful and which ones won’t.


Click HEREto listen to the podcast.