The coming green industrial revolution
In 1898 a group of delegates gathered in New York city for the world’s first urban
planning conference and they addressed the following question: “What will the city of
New York look like in 1998?” The consensus was that by year 1998 the city of New York
would not exist anymore. According to the planners, the reason was that to move the
ever increasing population of New York in one hundred years would have required six
million horses and the problems created by the manure of so many horses would have
been impossible to deal with. To confirm the predictions the Times newspaper in
London published an article estimating by the year 1950, every street in New York city
would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure.
The preferred mode of transportation had been, for centuries, the horse and the horse
could not meet the requirements of the new cities anymore…it was, like today’s fossil
fuel cars, too polluting. Yet the average person in the 1800’s could not imagine a future
without horses. Henry Ford famously said “ If I had asked people what they wanted, they
would have said faster horses.”
Instead by 1900 in the USA there were 1001 car manufacturing companies. In 1900,
4,192 cars were sold in the US and by 1912 there were more cars than horses in New
York city.
Small, tentative, entrepreneurial and “private sector” - the pioneers of automotive
transportation started a revolution in response to the market needs and well in advance
of market wants as demonstrated by Ford’s quote.
New solutions to the new dirt
We believe that we are confronted by many “horse manure” problems in the world and
that the need for original solutions requires a new generation of entrepreneurs to
emerge.
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What can be done to assist and expedite the work of entrepreneurs in our society? Who
are the entrepreneurs at work today? Where are they? What are they doing? Can we
predict their appearance? Can we plan for them to appear when we want them to
appear?
Old methods don’t work. “Planning”, for instance, is totally inadequate to the task .This
is eloquently stated by Peter Drucker who wrote:
’Planning’ as the term is commonly understood is actually incompatible with an
entrepreneurial society and economy. Innovation does indeed need to be purposeful and
entrepreneurship has to be managed. But innovation, almost by definition, has to be
decentralized, ad hoc, autonomous, specific, and microeconomic. It had better start
small tentative, flexible. Indeed, the opportunities for innovation are found, on the
whole, only way down and close to events. (…) Innovative opportunities do not come
with the tempest but with the rustling of the breeze.”
Facilitating Entrepreneurship
If entrepreneurs cannot be created or planned , what can we do?
There is no doubt that the present economic and social crises will bring about a wave of
innovations that are going to change, once again, the world as we know it.
We, at the Sirolli Institute, believe that to be part of the change we have to be prepared
to deal with entrepreneurs anywhere they may be, no matter how small, tentative or
inexperienced.
Enterprise Facilitation® is about capturing the passion, energy and imagination of people
in our own organizations and communities.. To do so, we have to create a new social
infrastructure that makes it possible for entrepreneurs to freely come and talk to us. A
new service that is free to them but also confidential, competent, caring and accessible.
It is about preparing and advocating for generalized entrepreneurship, no matter where
it occurs. It is also, and most importantly, about being equipped to offer, to a new
generation of entrepreneurs, the management skills necessary to start AND sustain their
ventures.
No company has ever been started by one solitary individual and we should be prepared
to educate future entrepreneurs on the fundamental principles of team work.
The economist and philosopher Ernest Schumacher once wrote:
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” I can't myself raise the winds that might blow us, or this ship, to a better world. But I
can at least put up the sail so that, when the wind comes, I can catch it.”
We may not start the entrepreneurial revolution ourselves but we can, at least, prepare
for it and encourage and guide a new generation of entrepreneurs who are already
shaping a better future for us all.
Enterprise Facilitation® is the name that we have given to the “responsive leg” of
economic development. Since 1985 Ernesto Sirolli and the Sirolli Institute have worked
with communities and corporations worldwide to build their capacity to respond to
entrepreneurs.
Dr Ernesto Sirolli
www.sirolli.com
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