The Entrepreneur Myth
Our national myth of the heroic entrepreneur is dangerous, says Esther Dyson. Encouraging everyone to strike out on their own robs industry of effective middle management.
Sometimes I think this hero-entrepreneur myth is dangerous. In an economy such as the United States, where start-ups are revered, people who would make perfectly good project supervisors or salespeople establish their own companies, starving the ecosystem of middle managers. Thousands of perfectly smart and highly useful people feel inadequate because they are not heroes. Many make the wrong career choices in search of glory. … Both in the US and elsewhere, most education systems aren’t churning out the kinds of people start-ups need to hire. The problem is not just a lack of engineers, but also of people with the necessary business, financial, and communication skills.
