A Meandering Thought on Entrepeneurship and Adaptability.

Growing up, like some of my generation and generations before, there was a culture of staying with a company throughout a lifetime. This culture was changed sometime in the 1980s, when companies started aggregating and sacrificing 'human resources' to the 'bottom line'.

My father's advice, which he sparingly gave, was to find a niche and build within it. It worked for him in its own way and it has worked for me as well. Yet within those niches so built and grown there was a core of work ethic that I was raised with - and I was raised both as an employee and an employer within family businesses. I grew up being the 'kid/nephew/grandchild of the boss' with responsibilities not just to the company but the people above, below and next to me. This was reinforced in the Navy and particularly with working with the Marine Corps - your ability was always dwarfed by the ability of the unit. Cohesion was a necessary part of getting anything done - sometimes you're the  weak link, sometimes you're the strong link, but if you throw yourself into it things get done.

Nowadays that ability has to be able to dynamically mesh with  more and more groups. There is  no 'hiding' in a niche and living there until retirement - and I have met a few of those people in my working life. Nowadays there is a need to be able to react and mesh quickly - and this requires communication. A failure to communicate, be it lack of acknowledgement of emails or simply skipping meetings so consistently it is dependable, is a liability. The feedback process is necessary throughout any organization - and more importantly these days, it is important outside of the organization as well.

The thought that there is one person responsible for the interfacing of an entire company is not only ludicrous - it's self limiting for the organization itself. And just as a person must adapt in a team, an organization must adapt with other organizations within its greater environment in much the same way. Communication is king. And like individuals having to adapt more quickly than in previous generations, so it is with organizations themselves. People often talk about, 'Agile', particularly in the context of software development, but 'Agile' isn't as agile as it used to be. There's a flow and rhythm that has to be felt by the organization at every level, much like the skin of any creature: A change here or there can be important. A burning sensation on the posterior should cause the creature to move long before it smells the acrid smell of burning flesh.

That's the real trouble with entrepeneurship these days. So many seem intent on reinventing the bureaucracy that adaptability paradigms were created to defeat. Why? It's a matter of structuring inputs and outputs such that the burning sensation doesn't make it to the brain before the smell of burning flesh does.