The United States was founded by entrepreneurs, including George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. In fact, even today, our ethos and roots are inextricably tied to entrepreneurship. Being an entrepreneur represents the things we love: freedom, upward mobility, and being rewarded for what we produce as individuals, not what our parents produce. Most everyone agrees on these things.
In Washington, D.C., this week, the axiom that politics makes strange bedfellows was proven. Apparently, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) agree about cutting waste in the Pentagon (I do wonder if the agreement will hold when a proposal is made to cut back on social spending). While the backlash about President-elect Donald Trump’s loyalist picks for his Cabinet and the leadership at the new Department of Government Efficiency has been swift and loud, I believe the U.S., like Sanders, may begin to see the benefits of having more entrepreneurs in Washington.
There are a few things about entrepreneurs that first need to be understood. Even if you did not vote for Trump, you can acknowledge that you may not understand how he and those who surround him think. Take a moment to imagine that entrepreneurs approach the world and its challenges with a distinct perspective and style.
Let’s start with style. As entrepreneurs, we say things that are illogical or even absurd. We will build a wall and have Mexico pay for it. We are going to Mars. We are going to secede from the world’s strongest military power (at the time) with a bunch of ragtag, untrained, and undisciplined farmers. What the media does not get, which most voters apparently do get, is entrepreneurs lead from a vision and solve back to reality from a dream. We make a new reality. This is basically the starting point for us. The hard truth is that anyone who is logical would never start a business.
Even after a whole term of Trump’s leadership, the media still don’t understand and cannot accurately interpret his style and approach. The hyperbolic seems to be lost on smarty-pants elites.
Now, let’s go to tactics. First, entrepreneurs make moves with the goal of fixing broken or inadequate systems. In fact, we assume inefficiency and imperfection. Consider the disruption created by Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and OpenAI. Entrepreneurs don’t start businesses thinking the particular market they’re entering — in this case, the federal government — is already efficient. Rather, entrepreneurs assume they can make things better. The great ones can and do make things better most of the time.
Second, because of their solutions-oriented worldview, entrepreneurs often take a destructive approach to analyzing problems and bringing about improvements. They are prone to poking big holes or even entirely disassembling the status quo to get a fresh perspective and improve a product, service, or market. Some people who haven’t built a business often misinterpret this disruptive side of entrepreneurship as irrational or harmful.
Third, entrepreneurs have a bias for action. In business, unlike politics, you’re not paid to talk, and the market doesn’t reward those whose words don’t come with results. Today, we need results. Consider the decadeslong, unabated rise of our national debt. Maybe we could have benefited from more action-oriented leadership around basic ideas such as “no government or organization can exist in perpetuity with no ability to pay back what it owes.” With entrepreneurs, everything is geared toward solving problems, which is why such leaders are willing to consider sweeping, possibly errant, moves such as the creation of a whole new department in order to address challenges.
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Fourth, entrepreneurs are willing to make mistakes. In fact, they accept mistakes as an inevitable part of their iterative creative process of making things better. While some might argue that a trial-and-error approach is no way to run a government, look no further than former President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Great Depression-era maneuverings for an example of a leader who used such tactics. Here is the basic idea: We try something. If it does not work, we try something else.
Trump is coming back to Washington with a team of entrepreneurs with the aim to change things. If you believe the nation is facing threats and challenges that can’t be solved with minor adjustments, you might take some short-term solace (at least during the holiday season) in the fact that entrepreneurs in Washington see the world in much the same way you do. The new administration hasn’t proven whether it can solve some of our nation’s biggest problems, but who knows, the way we started out 250 years ago might work again.
Brian Hamilton is a leading expert on entrepreneurship. He founded Sageworks (now Abrigo), America’s first fintech company, which helped millions of business owners translate complex financial information.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
