I wrote a piece for the supplement that accompanied The Guardian’s Changing Media Summit last week:
What is an entrepreneur? “A person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so”. The dictionary definition will do but it doesn’t come close to taking in the full range of meanings. If you’re British you could probably add a secondary definition: “unemployable”, “difficult”, maybe “shifty”. Entrepreneurs are, on the whole, thought to be possessed of a personality disorder so profound as to make them impossible to accommodate in any ordinary organisation. Less fortunate sufferers from this disorder are to be found lining the shop doorways of our great cities after dark. This attitude is not universal but it’s widespread enough for us to begin to form an understanding of Britain’s problem with entrepreneurial behaviour. We interpret the activities of entrepreneurs as, well, dysfunctional, antisocial.
