This is the Dawning of the Panpreneurial Age

What is a panpreneur? Great question.

I just now coined the word by tacking the prefix “pan-,” which means all-inclusive, onto the back end of the word entrepreneur. Pan – preneur. See?

We all know what an entrepreneur is, right? That’s someone who undertakes a business venture – the owner, that is.

Some of us know the term “intrapreneur.” That’s an employee, usually at the management level, in a large corporation; a person who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product.

A panpreneur is someone who has elements of both.

• A panpreneur is any employee who undertakes his or her job as a business venture.
• A panpreneur takes direct responsibility for turning that job into added value for the company where she works.
• A panpreneur focuses on results – her own as well as the company’s overall results – instead of defining work as putting in time, accomplishing designated tasks,  and picking up a paycheck.
• A panpreneur sees the connection between his ideas, his behavior, his own results, and the overall results of the company.

Why do we need panpreneurs? Excellent question.

We’ve just concluded the age of the entrepreneur. You can tell because if you search on the word, you get 50 billion hits. Also if you go to Amazon and search for books on that term, you get positive rafts of hits.

In other words, that field of knowledge and practice is saturated. Entrepreneurialism is firmly entrenched in our cultural landscape, as well as implicit in business theory and practice.

By now, we probably know all there is to know about the concept of entrepreneurship, and not much is new under that sun.

Yet small businesses continue failing at alarming rates. So clearly entrepreneurialism is not enough.

We probably still need intrapreneurs for big businesses. But honestly, that’s not where the immediate future of the economy lies. In the book “Here Comes Everybody,” Clay Shirky writes that there is such a thing as a business becoming too big to manage. The cost of managing a business that gets too big starts to tip at some point and erodes profit.

The panpreneur transcends the entrepreneur and the intrapreneur. Panpreneurialism is what the world needs now.

The concept of panpreneurialism recognizes three important things.

1. The old servant model of employment no longer serves the needs of modern business and the modern economy. Let alone the modern individual who prefers dignity over servitude.
2. A successful business does not generally succeed (or fail). It very specifically succeeds (or fails) in each of its parts. Therefore each of its parts requires entrepreneurial panpreneurial attention.
3. Dear business owner, you cannot grow your business by yourself. You can conceivably remain a small sole-proprietorship and do it by yourself, but the minute you want to grow past your personal capacity to produce, you need to engage another person. A panpreneur, if you can get one.

You can really only have as many entrepreneurs as you have owners in a business.

You can only have intrapreneurial managers, not intrapreneurial line employees.

What you really need is panpreneurs, one and all.

That’s what I think. How about you?

3 Reasons Why Small Business is the Future of the Economy

The modern economy in the wake of The Great Recession needs three things: growth, inventiveness, and jobs. We need those things fast. We don’t have time for big businesses to reinvent themselves; look how long it’s taking the American auto makers to get with the program.

Small business is the future of the economy because it has the capacity to grow, invent, and add jobs on the kind of pace we need. Specifically:

1. Small Business is personal, intimate, and transparent. In the aftermath and ongoing carnage of the Great Economic Crash, people are deeply, truly cynical about Big Business. Almost everyone has a personal story about how a big business let them down – by laying them off, taking their savings, raising their interest rates, changing their terms, foreclosing on their home, and in any number of other ways.
2. Small Business can create an employee culture that lives and thrives, where the employees do things because they want to from the bottom of their hearts, not because there’s a rule or a system that tells them what to do. It’s a lot harder for Big Business to build an engaged employee culture, and it’s the employees who most influence the customers. In Big Business, the culture is often heavy-handed, top-down, and rule-bound. Employees do things because they must, not necessarily because their heart is in it.
3. Small Business can zero out in order to survive. Zeroing out means being willing to revisit what used to work that now no longer works. Big Business can’t zero out, at least not without shooting itself in the foot. In a Big Business, a whole infrastructure teeters on the scaffolding of long-held and rarely-revisited beliefs and assumptions. Even an assumption that no longer holds any validity at all stays in the scaffolding, because no one can figure out how to throw it out without also throwing out the infrastructure.

Big Business wishes it were Small Business in today’s economy. Small Businesses can get closer to their customers, move quickly to respond to their customers, and take creative risks that would bring a big business to its knees.

That’s what I think. How about you?

Down with the Underclass at Work

“Modern” business is a lot like turn of the century England.

Why? Because it’s got servitude built into its very foundations, that’s why. Hold on, don’t change the channel – stick with me here.

I have been watching the British period drama Downton Abbey. It romanticizes a time in England where a servant class kept the nobility afloat, and where the nobility felt noble for providing jobs to the underclass.

In one episode, the newly-landed young  Matthew Crawley meets his manservant, who presents himself ready to do up his master’s shirt buttons. Accustomed to doing for himself, Crawley dismisses the servant with a kindly wave. Surely a grown man can do up his own shirt buttons, and surely another grown man can find something better to do with his time than buttoning someone else’s shirt.

What Crawley does not realize is that his manservant’s sole purpose in his working life is to follow the rules and traditions of his professional servitude. These include doing up buttons for perfectly capable members of the nobility. If he is deprived of doing up buttons, then he is deprived of his job description. Too much of that that would lead inevitably to the loss of his job.

Is this sounding familiar yet? It should.

If you’re an employee, chances are very, very good that you’ve got a bit of the servant in your attitude toward your employer.

If you’re an employer, chances are equally good that you’ve got a bit of the nobility in your attitude toward your employees.

And since these attitudes are unpleasant if you really think about them, no doubt you’re not consciously aware of it if you do harbor them. If you were conscious of it, you’d either want to defend it (that’s what a coach would call “resistance”), or wash your hands.

So let’s take a closer look.

In the business where you work, there’s an operations manual, right? The operations manual is chock-a-block with rules. And the purpose of the operations manual is to regulate employee behavior because employees can’t be counted on to act invariably in the best interests of the company.  When someone breaks a rule, even if they get a better result than the rule itself would have produced, they might actually get hauled over to HR for behavior correction. Am I close?

Moving on, you’ve got an org chart, right? And it’s hierarchical, I’m sure; most are, because that’s how we manage. The higher one climbs on the org chart, the higher one’s pay grade. The “higher-ups” are more important and therefore more valued than the cogs in the wheel. The farther down the org chart one finds onself, the more the job is treated as a series of rote tasks that don’t require a lot of skill,  education or experience to do. Right?

Time is money, and a person’s got to look busy to be considered productive, right? If it takes someone 10 minutes to accomplish a job that they were given 2 hours to do, that means (a) they must not have enough to do, or (b) they couldn’t have done a proper job of it, or (c) the company isn’t getting its money’s worth.

I’m confident I’m right on that last one. It makes company owners and managers, and even most employees, deeply suspicious and uncomfortable if someone isn’t bent over his work for the full 8 hour work day. If he’s not, he must be screwing off on company time.

And finally, a brief discourse on a most powerful force in an entrenched servant model business: the boss’s mood. If you’re an employee who spends time thinking about the boss’s mood, and wondering if her mood means you’re about to get a raise, or fired, or scolded, or frozen out, then you’re living in a servant model business. If you’re an employer who gets depressed and shows it, loses your temper, or thinks in terms of whether or not you “like” your employees, then you’re running a servant model business.

If you really look at just these few examples of servant model business behavior, you’ll find some solid reasons why they are not legitimate ways to act.

Many employees really DO care about the company’s best interests; piling rules on them is insulting to their integrity.

Every job in a company is critically important, or else it should be eliminated. There is dignity and grace in every job. The person at the top of the chart has no more and no less value than the person at the bottom. The chart itself is meant to show work flow – not human worth.

Time is not money, and it is the wrong measure to watch. The correct measure to watch is results. Putting in seat time and looking like you’re busy has nothing whatever to do with results.

The boss’s mood is neither here nor there, unless it’s intrusive or abusive. The correct measure for the enlightened workplace is RESULTS, not anyone’s emotions. Trying to make the boss happy does not directly relate to the results. Getting the results should make the boss happy.

Possibly the assumptions underlying these examples never have been true, but that’s another story. For now, perhaps we can just agree that as a workplace culture, we all buy into these conventions because that’s the way it’s always been. We’ve stopped questioning them. It’s just the way it is.

In his excellent (no, FABULOUS) book, Flash Foresight, author Daniel Burris calls that “legacy thinking.” Nothing, and I do mean no – thing, is holding your business back more determinedly than legacy thinking.

I say, it’s time to zero-base our collecting thinking on this one. What do you say?