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By Anita Roddick (founder of Body Shop)
I never
went to business school. I went to the business school of life. And I did so
from an early age. I was brought up in an Italian immigrant family with a work
ethic that teetered on the verge of slave labour. We got up each morning at
five to make breakfast for the local fishermen in our café in Littlehampton and
did not close until the last customer wandered home. The other cafés opened at
nine and shut at five. This was a clue to me about what makes some people
entrepreneurs and not others. Our café was owned by ferociously determined
immigrants; the others were not. This is an important difference and the reason
that I do not advise new entrepreneurs to submit themselves first to the
rigours of an MBA is that business schools do not understand it. The
conventional advice to budding entrepreneurs is that they should groom
themselves to be the whizz-kid with a suit and a fascination for spreadsheets
that bank-managers like. Actually, potential entrepreneurs are outsiders. They
are people who imagine things as they might be, not as they are, and have the
drive to change the world. Those are qualities that business schools do not
teach. An MBA can give you useful skills that can be applied to a life in
business. But they will not teach you the most crucial thing: how to be an
entrepreneur. They might also sap what entrepreneurial flair you have as they
force you into the template called an MBA pass.
I often get asked to talk about entrepreneurship - even by hallowed institutions
such as Harvard and Stanford - but I am not at all convinced it is a subject
you can teach. How do you teach obsession - because often it is obsession that
drives an entrepreneur's vision? How do you learn to be an outsider if you are
not one already? In the business school model, entrepreneurs are most at home
with a balance sheet, a cash-flow forecast and a business plan. They dream of
profit forecasts and the day they can take the company public. These are just
part of the toolbox of re-imagining the world: they are not the defining characteristics
of entrepreneurship. The problem with business schools is that they are
controlled by, and obsessed with, the status quo. They encourage you deeper
into the world as it is. They transform you into a better example of corporate
man. We need good administration and financial flair, after all, but we need
people of imagination too. So here are 10 lessons that entrepreneurs need more
than what they teach in business school.
1. Tell stories. The central tool for imagining the world differently and sharing
that vision is not accountancy. It has more to do with the ability to tell a
story. Telling stories emphasises what makes you and your company different.
Business schools emphasise how to make you toe the line.
2. Concentrate on creativity. It is critical for any entrepreneur to maximise
creativity and to build an atmosphere that encourages people to have ideas.
That means open structures, so that accepted thinking can be challenged.
3. Be an opportunistic collector. When entrepreneurs walk down the street they
have their antennae out, evaluating how what they see can relate back to what
they are doing. It might be packaging, a word, a poem or something in a
different business.
4. Measure the company according to fun and creativity. Business schools are
obsessive about measurement. The result is vast departments of number-crunchers,
but often little progress. What is most important in a company - or anything
else - is unquantifiable.
5. Be different, but look safe. If you are different, you will stand out. But
do not take risks with people who can make the difference between success and
failure, especially if you are a woman trying to borrow money from the bank -
which is how I came to be turned down for my original loan.
6. Be passionate about ideas. Entrepreneurs want to create a livelihood from an
idea that has obsessed them; not necessarily a business, but a livelihood. When
accumulating money drives out the ideas and the anger behind them, you are no
longer an entrepreneur.
7. Feed your sense of outrage. Discontentment drives you to want to do something
about it. There is no point in finding a new vision if you are not angry enough
to want it to happen.
8. Make the most of the female element. Companies as we know them were created
by men for men, often influenced by the military model, on complicated and
hierarchical lines and are both dominated by authoritarian principles and
resistant to change. By setting up their own businesses, women can challenge
these models and will be welcomed by customers for doing so.
9. Believe in yourself and your intuition. There is a fine line between entrepreneurship
and insanity. Crazy people see and feel things that others do not. But you have
to believe that everything is possible. If you believe it, those around you
will believe it too.
10. Have self-knowledge. You do not need to know how to do everything, but you must be honest enough with yourself to know what you cannot provide yourself.
Until they can teach these lessons, business schools will remain the whited sepulchres of the status quo.
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