The Dangerous Rise of “Entrepreneurship Porn”
Sir Richard Branson has proclaimed 2014 “The Year of the Entrepreneur.” Breathless coverage abounds: sexy stories of the young and old who threw off the yoke and started their own businesses. It’s all goodbye cubicle — hello freedom, vitality, creativity.
Fed by media and online coverage of an idealized lifestyle, this “entrepreneurship porn” presents an airbrushed reality in which all work is always meaningful and running your own business is a way to achieve better work/life harmony.
But the reality of starting and running a small business is different from the fantasy – and I should know, because I run one, and am married to a long-time entrepreneur. Starting a company doesn’t mean being freed from the grind; it means that the buck stops with you, always, even if it’s Sunday morning or Friday night.
Moreover, it’s just not possible that every smart young graduate can launch her own successful enterprise. Part of me wants to cry every time I meet a smart young student and the notion of joining a respected, existing institution cannot compete with the thought of creating her own.
Very few of the talented young people I meet want to work for something that already exists. On the contrary, they want to create new enterprises. They want to work according to their own rules, not a boss’s rules. Part of this may be youth, but surely part of it is what these young people have seen: their parents and older friends grinding it out, feeling unrecognized and judged on the wrong criteria. Women leaving high-powered jobs once they have children and stifled in a desire to be both a good mother and good worker, and men who cannot express their need to have a life at home and at work.
I went to graduate school to study why people — women in particular — leave work, and how employers can help them to stay. I also went to graduate school to escape my own struggles with a frustrating corporate environment; I quit 10 jobs before I was 31. In the years since, I’ve spent hours interviewing both experts in human capital and the men and women who’ve left firms.
I’ve come to suspect that the rise of “entrepreneurship porn” is at least as much about escaping a company as starting one. Most Americans don’t like their work. Data on Americans’ dissatisfaction regarding their work – in corporate environments, in particular, show:
Entrepreneurial escapism thrives in such an environment. A joint study from INSEAD/Princetonshows that “Non-pecuniary motivations are more important than monetary motivations for people to start a new business. One is autonomy: People want to be their own boss. The other is identity fulfillment, which is more about people having a vision about a product or a service. But their employers do not give them the freedom to develop within the company structure. That is a key driver.”
Despite these noble yearnings, the data show the most effective workplaces with happy employees are not necessarily startups. The criteria that define happy workplaces are work-life fit, autonomy, job challenge and learning, a climate of respect and trust, supervisor task support, and financial security. None of these spells “small business” to me.
The longer the fantasy of entrepreneurship continues and the media continues to churn out entrepreneurship porn the weaker our established institutions become. The data on creating effective workplaces are clear, and can basically be boiled down into simple tenets: Create an environment that treats employees like grown ups. Focus on accountability, not face time. Allow men and women to live whole lives.
A good friend who runs a professional services firm told me with some shock that his most profitable employee is a single mother who works part time. So this year, she got a big bonus. Despite working for someone else, she feels recognized and rewarded. And by being part of a larger organization, she gets to have more time with her kids. This sort of story is rare – but it doesn’t have to be.
Entrepreneurship may always be a sexy story for the media to tell, but our needs as working people are about much more than zeitgeisty startups. We can’t all start the next Facebook, but we all deserve a work life that recognizes our diligence and unique contributions. What if 2014 could be the “year of working for someone else — and loving it”?
Morra Aarons-Mele is the founder of Women Online and The Mission List. She is an Internet marketer who has been working with women online since 1999. She helped Hillary Clinton log on for her first Internet chat, and launched Wal-Mart’s first blog. Morra tweets at @morraam.
The Dangerous Rise of “Entrepreneurship Porn”
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