Dr. Earl R. Smith II

By Dr. Earl R. Smith II
DrSmith@Dr-Smith.com
www.Dr-Smith.com

I recently had two conversations with decidedly different people who had the same perspective on business – most notably, their businesses. When something like that occurs, I tend to stop – light up a good cigar – and settle down for a think. Most often, the results of the effort are at least therapeutic – and sometimes enlightening. Well this time the results were somewhere in the middle – sorry to you folks who were anticipating enlightenment!

Both individuals were waxing philosophical about their business and career goals. Both were about to launch into entrepreneurial efforts. One was about to found a new business while the other was running one in an early start-up phase. For what it is worth, here is a snapshot of the conversations.

“I want to run my own shop – be my own boss – be in command of my own destiny. I don’t want to report to anybody – be beholden to anybody – or controlled by anybody. As captain of my own ship, I can make the decisions – take the actions – and suffer the consequences without asking permission.”

Midget Hitlers – Naive Napoleons – Minor Machiavellis: Whenever I hear something like this, I shake my head and sigh – mostly metaphorically, of course – I try to avoid awakening the assiduously asleep whenever possible. There is no good reason to disturb the self-worshiping or misapprehending that goes into such an antisocial and repressed worldview. I say ‘good reason’ based on lots of personal experience. In earlier days, I might have donned my armor, mounted the sturdy Rocinante and set off a-tilting at windmills. However, those were younger days when I was too full of myself and confident that I could face any challenge successfully. Now, after building six businesses and helping a couple of dozen others build theirs I have come to understand that there are some swamps that are best left undrained.

Madness is, of course, a relative matter and one of interpretation – thereby doubly subjective. However, delusion is continually self-inflicted. Self-deluded people form the gods that then turn and destroy themselves – a kind of one man circular firing squad.

Let’s get to the nub of the matter. The very idea behind the comments posited by my two errant entrepreneurs – the very concepts that they rest on – are both a delusion and a snare. Like Plato’s allegory of the cave, an idealized reality that, although completely imaginary, leads to tragic misunderstandings and broken dreams – wasted lives and efforts.

No one runs their own shop – no one is their own boss – no one is control of their own destiny. Business is a collaborative team sport – the team the works most closely and effectively together regularly buries the lone riders and dysfunctional gaggles.

Ok – you got me – there is an exception if you are operating your own lemonade stand on an uninhabited island. However, you do rely on the trees for lemons and the spring for water. Ahhh well!

The common characteristic of my two ‘declarers of their own independence’ was that they were both deeply anti-social. Their view of the world was essentially egocentric – ‘me centered’ – they were absolutely determined to keep people at a distance. Both seemed to be suffering from a repressed adolescent fantasy – a kind of Never-Never Land imagining of the human race and their place in it. Of course, you can probably guess who was filling the role of Peter Pan in their fantasies. Americans seem particularly susceptible to this ‘perpetual youth until perpetual death’ fantasy.

The reason that I no longer spend much time working with these Peter Pans is that I have lost my passion for making kamikaze raids on vacant lots. Business is a team sport that requires all team members to have a strong inclination to collaborate, communicate, learn, teach, evolve and contribute. Over the years, I have helped numerous entrepreneurs build their businesses. The good ones – the successes – have come when the understanding of the ‘business of business’ is not an issue – when there is a maturity that has vanquished adolescent fantasies.

The fading memory of the tech bubble bust has diminished the appreciation of how damaging and costly these adolescent attitudes are. Today they are mostly limited to small business and start-ups that will probably go nowhere. However, there were days when Midget Hitlers, Naive Napoleons and Minor Machiavellis strode the stage – sucking up financial resources and declaring that they were going to change the world as we know it – denigrating the weakness and stupidity of their clients and potential clients (all of whom were running larger and much more successful businesses by the way) and exuding a sense of manifest destiny. Mercifully, most of these megalomaniacs are now productively employed in the fast food service industry. The path of destruction that they left – the broken lives and misdirected careers – are still with us. The hugely wasteful loss of capital still echoes.

The truth of the matter is simple to state – and just as difficult to deploy. Before you get into business in an entrepreneurial role, try to find a non-instrumental reason that people are co-habiting this world with you. Slay your own daemons before you allow them to savage the people you attempt to work lead. In other words, grow up Peter.

Related Articles:

• Assumption is the Mother of All … – Lessons for Young Wannabees
• Good Reasons Not To – Lessons for Young Wannabees
• Change Aversion – Coming to Terms
• Yes You Can
• Building Productive Relationships
• A Non-Cumulative Life

Dr. Smith is a proven senior executive, successful entrepreneur, published author and public speaker. He serves on boards of directors and advisory boards or as a strategic advisor to CEOs. Dr. Smith specializes in turnaround management, strategic planning, leadership development and executive coaching. He also works as an executive and/or life coach in the areas of personal growth and spirituality. He is the author of Amazing Pace: Turbo-charged Business Development – a book that shows how Advisory Boards can dramatically increase revenue. Dr. Smith is also the author of Dream Walk: Parables for the Living – a book of Raven Tales and exploration.

By Dr. Earl R. Smith II
DrSmith@Dr-Smith.com
www.Dr-Smith.com

You can finish the title of this article any way you learned it. The way I learned it cannot be repeated here. The message, however, is one that every entrepreneur and start-up team needs to learn and, in my experience, almost none of them do learn. The postmortems that I have done on dead and dying start-ups show a clear pattern of mistakes and oversights which lead to the eventual demise of the company – and dissipation of the resourced and energy of the founders. At the center of most of these patters is the same mistake – made by team after team repeatedly. Read the rest of this entry »

By Dr. Earl R. Smith II
DrSmith@Dr-Smith.com
www.Dr-Smith.com

At times, I lecture to a class of undergraduates or MBA students. Mostly the courses center on entrepreneurism or some other aspect of business. A professor who is helping his students come to terms with what being in business really means generally invites me. I am able to speak from experience – having started and built six businesses – and I have learned that much of what I have learned as an entrepreneur was not well covered during my time in business school. Here are some examples of what I tell the students: Read the rest of this entry »

By Dr. Earl R. Smith II
DrSmith@Dr-Smith.com
www.Dr-Smith.com

Change is the one unavoidable aspect of living. Time and our lot as humans see to that. A good way to see personal growth is as the process of responding positively to that change. We all know that the idea of change can be unsettling. Many people see it as stepping from the known to the unknown. However, the only way that you can see it this way is to ignore that change is an unavoidable part of your every day. You are changing all the time. Read the rest of this entry »

By Dr. Earl R. Smith II
DrSmith@Dr-Smith.com
www.Dr-Smith.comRead the rest of this entry »

By Dr. Earl R. Smith II
DrSmith@Dr-Smith.com
www.Dr-Smith.com

I enjoy my life coaching engagements because often they result in life-changing realizations. Many of my clients have had the experience of the light finally going on. Some of these epiphanies have involved a realization of the work that they should be doing or the kind of company that they should be running. I have helped clients who started out in the ‘tech’ space end up running companies as diverse as wine tourism, international charities and jewelry design and manufacture. The common theme is that they all left lives that they had fallen into for live that they choose – lives that matched their temperament, skills and passions. Read the rest of this entry »

By Dr. Earl R. Smith II
DrSmith@Dr-Smith.com
www.Dr-Smith.com

Today, many of us we feeling that our lives are horribly out of balance. We are aware that our work-life balance is out of sync but we do not always recognize what we can do about it. It is important to reset the balance, otherwise pressure will build and we can become stressed and then other problems will subsequently develop in our personal lives. Read the rest of this entry »

By Dr. Earl R. Smith II
DrSmith@Dr-Smith.com
www.Dr-Smith.com

Many of my coaching engagements are with CEO’s who are dedicated to improving their abilities and growing into their ever changing and expanding roles. One of the areas which we tend to focus on is the decision-making process. Interestingly, it is actually the pre-decision part which gives most of them problems. I regularly encounter clients who spend a great deal of time and energy dreading the meeting or situation in which they will have to make and implement an important decision. Then there are clients who, under the pressure to make such a decision, race right to making it in order to relieve the tension. Both end up with unanticipated first and second order effects from their actions. Read the rest of this entry »

By Dr. Earl R. Smith II
DrSmith@Dr-Smith.com
www.Dr-Smith.com

It is a typical conversation which generally comes more than once during the initial months of most of my coaching engagements. The client – generally younger and less experienced than I am – will insist that something is beyond their capability. I will insist that it isn’t. And so I urge them to attempt – and they demure. Read the rest of this entry »

By Dr. Earl R. Smith II
DrSmith@Dr-Smith.com
www.Dr-Smith.com

If I am faced with the option of coaching someone who is too cautious or someone who is too rash, I inevitably choose the former. There are a number of reasons for this but the most important is that progress always comes faster when working with a client who is learning to gradually put more pressure on the accelerator. I know what the ‘common wisdom’ is when it comes to entrepreneurs – that they love risk and are relatively immune to it – but I have found that to me only true for ‘wannabee’ entrepreneurs. The successful ones are risk averse and incredibly good risk calculators. Read the rest of this entry »