Conservatism has overwhelmingly hampered the spirit of entrepreneurship. Conservatism kills the will to create new things and to be innovative.
An entrepreneur is ultimately responsible for the success of a venture which can be a company, a project, or any other endeavor. You are the initiator, a starter, a challenger, and a driver. You are to a greater extent a trailblazer. You are not comfortable with the norms. You want to bring about changes.
Entrepreneurship is more than financial gains. An entrepreneur continues to pursue goals when difficulties arise. You refuse to call it quits and to venture into the unknown and possibly murky waters. You are willing to explore and tap unutilized resources often bracing the odds. It’s all about the attitude when running the show.
On the contrary, however, conservatives like to stick to ancient ways of doing things. They constantly worry that abstract blueprints may produce disasters. Winston Churchill was reported to have said ruefully that he “preferred the past to the present and the present to the future.” A conservative is worried stiff of dabbling into the unknown and completely abhors adventurism.
Conservatism can be any of the following forms, liberal, conservative liberalism, libertarian, fiscal, national and traditional, cultural and social, religious, progressive and authoritarian. Whatever form it takes, the totality of it all is hampering the conquering spirit of an entrepreneur.
Conservatism tries to create a “super” class of people. A class of these conservatives believes in the importance of preserving a role for the traditional ruling class while others believe in the importance of creating an educated minority, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge referred to as “clerisy.” This learned class of state functionaries is expected to be responsible for the preservation and dissemination of the national heritage.
There is definitely no way you as an entrepreneur will fit in into this arrangement. You can never aspire to become a member of this superclass of people. Their whole ideals are channeled towards perpetuating the old order and there is absolutely no room for “small-minded” people or commoners like you in the system.
You will be viewed more like a revolutionist or nonconformist who has come to cause disruption. Their thinking will most likely run along this frame of mind, who is this “nonstarter” that wants to assume the status of a trailblazer? If you are allowed to flourish, there is always the tendency that you could rise to the position of power and affluence to question their so much cherished and hard-won authority.
To further cement the fact that conservatives are seriously injurious to entrepreneurs, Coleridge offers in The Friend that “A society is far better off with an existing imperfect order than the promise of a future perfect society.”
Diverse problems call for varied responses and that is where entrepreneurship comes to play. Quite unlike the conservative whose fears for the unknown leads to rigid thinking and subsequently blocks abundances, the entrepreneur is open to challenges. They wage war on habituated patterns and are able to conquer their fears and go on to succeed.
Rigidity discourages initiative thinking and creativity. It often provides the cover to avoid responsibility for failures. Assignments are carried out mechanically without giving consideration and room for individual’s needs, contributions, and emotions.
The entrepreneur sets out to sustain unrivaled innovation and Steve Spear, a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) explains that when companies get it “right,” they win big. Even your employees should be encouraged to act more like entrepreneurs and self-direct their work instead of reporting to a certain constituted authority that incidentally may be savoring conservatism, to tell them what to do. That’s holacracy (a term made popular by online shoe retailer Zappos) in practice, where power is removed from the management hierarchy and distributed across the organization.
To the entrepreneur, everybody should have an equal opportunity of trying out potentials with the attendant view of making wealth to go round the greater majority. Nobody who has the urge of foraging for a better standard of living should be deprived of the opportunity. All should have a fair playing ground and equal opportunities.
Conservatives are worried about the free movement of people, freedom of expression, and the ability to carry out innovative projects. They believe that when people are given the opportunity to air their views and venture into entrepreneurship, people will be positively empowered and the society will turn into a nexus of contracts, rather than a “homeland” that is occupied by people who share a common history.
The entrepreneur knows that it will work better for the business by furthering all employees’ goals, helping them be more hands-on in their impact on the company, customers, and society as a whole. This is amplified by the ADP report, The Evolution of Work — The Changing Nature of the Global Workplace that says 89 percent of employees will choose to work on personal interests/things that impact society.
An entrepreneur knows perfectly well that the customer’s satisfaction is supreme and is driven by the passion to succeed along this line. Without the customer, there is no deal, no business. For this reason, the entrepreneur is very sensitive to the feelings of the customer.
A conservative entrepreneur, if there could ever be anything like that will prefer to push everything down the throat of the customer. The feelings of the customer count little or nothing. The customer is not a member of the “educated minority.”
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