Facing a class filled with business students, Professor Kerrin Myres of the Wits Centre for Entrepreneurship has learned to look past the “big mouth in the front” when wondering which one of them will become entrepreneurs.
“It’s the quiet guy at the back of the class who’s picking his nose, and hardly ever comes to class, who looks like he’s sleeping half the time,” says Myres. She says 50 years of research internationally has shown that you simply can’t predict.
But what are the chances that the real entrepreneur would even be in a classroom in the first place? Some of the world’s most famous entrepreneurs — guys such as Bill Gates, Michael Dell and Richard Branson — all dropped out of school. A recent study by the Cass Business School in London showed that a staggering 35% of US business owners are dyslexic, compared with 1% of corporate managers. An earlier study found that 20% of British business owners were dyslexic — five times more than the average Briton. And 70% of the dyslexic entrepreneurs had failed at school.
Although no broad conclusions can be drawn from the research, there’s no denying that it offers intriguing glimpses into the nature of entrepreneurship and it doesn’t do much to reassure the formal education system about its importance in fostering entrepreneurship. Well, except perhaps by banishing a number of clearly talented individuals who had to learn to fend for themselves.
Can entrepreneurship be taught? Or are you born with it? Ask the educators who design and teach the increasing number of courses called Entrepreneurship at business schools around the world — important sources of income for universities — and the answer is: “yes, it can be taught”. Sometimes the “Yes, it can”, is voiced in the hyperbolic, motivational-speaking style that often reverberates in the auditoriums where entrepreneurship is lectured.
Teach it and they will come
If demand for entrepreneurship courses is anything to go by, many aspirant entrepreneurs have confidence that they will get a return on the considerable course fees they invest.
“One of the things that keeps [entrepreneurship training] alive both locally and internationally is that when you put an entrepreneurship course into a curriculum, the demand for it is generally high relative to other courses,” says Greg Fisher of the Gordon Institute of Business Science (Gibs).
Mike Herrington from the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the UCT Graduate School of Business believes the proliferation of entrepreneurship courses is a good indication that it can be taught. “There are many business schools now, all over the East, Europe, the United States that teach entrepreneurship. In fact, there are probably more than 80 universities in the States alone. They wouldn’t be investing all that money if they didn’t think it could be taught.”
Such crowd wisdom would normally suffice. Whether the training works or not, if people want it and are willing to pay for it, let them have it. But in South Africa the question has surpassed the purely philosophical. The economy is dependent on this type of training yielding results — and fast.
“In the US you have 200-million people,” Myres says. “They’re well educated, they’ve all had lots of early childhood development and they’ve been fed properly. You can sit back and wait for the innovators and entrepreneurs to naturally emerge. You can afford to do that, because there’s enough of them.
“We do not have that luxury. We have got to artificially stimulate that emergence.”
It’s one thing to teach someone who has chosen to become a business owner the practical processes of starting up a business, but can entrepreneurs be created out of people who have never considered working for themselves before?
Myres believes it can. But there is a difference between the education of self-selected entrepreneurs who are already dabbling in business, and what she calls “nascent” entrepreneurs, who need a programme that can raise their awareness and build their confidence.
“We have a programme that we run for unemployed graduates, and I can tell you that they never thought about starting their own business as a career option,” she says. “If you stand in front of a group of 50 of those kids and you just make them believe it’s possible, it changes the whole way they think.”
Myres says programmes aimed at turning the unemployed into entrepreneurs in South Africa fail because they are aimed at unskilled people with low levels of education. Those with university education are much more likely to succeed.
Discovery Health founder Adrian Gore believes there are degrees of innate desire in people “to build something that reflects their dreams” that can be awakened by teaching. But he stresses the importance of combining education with work experience.
“I studied as an actuary,” Gore says. “So from an academic perspective I had a very good, thorough grounding, and then I worked in a great company, which I think in its own way was quite entrepreneurial. So having that combination of a good academic training plus thorough institutional business training gave me a very good leg up. I think it was very important.”
Appetite for risk
Linda McClure from Junior Achievement, an international NGO that has been raising awareness about entrepreneurship in South African schools for the past 30 years, points to a factor that may have little to do with education, awareness or work experience.
“The practical stuff, the theory absolutely can be taught,” McClure says. “But we are not saying every one of the kids who come on to our programme are going to be entrepreneurs. I do believe there has to be that kind of spirit for risk taking.”
UCT’s Herrington agrees. “I think that the basic fundamentals of entrepreneurship can be taught, how do you come up with ideas, how do you progress to raising money, how then do you start the business and how do you go through the growing pains — all that can be taught. But the one thing that I don’t think can be taught is the ability to take a risk,” he says.
The perception of the risk can be minimised through the teaching of planning processes and knowledge, which may be enough to convince a few to start up, but some “just say it ain’t for me, I’ve got a nice job, there’s no way I’m jeopardising it, bugger off”, says Herrington, who reckons that about 20% of the students he teaches go on to start their own businesses.
But hard data of success rate in teaching is hard to come by. In fact, Herrington was the only entrepreneurship expert interviewed for this article who could give any indication of the efficacy of entrepreneurship training, locally or internationally.
Taking it to the next level
Starting up and growing a business draws on such a wide range of skills and knowledge, which often come solely from the one entrepreneur himself, that almost all of their businesses suffer from a constant skills deficit. Early-stage business owners not only have to recruit and manage staff on their own but they also have to build the foundations of an HR system from scratch. Even if some functions such as accounting, marketing or operations are outsourced and delegated, the owner needs to know enough about each area to manage it successfully.
Business owners a few years into the game make the best MBA students, says Fisher from Gibs. ”They’re radically invested in what they’re learning because they usually paying for it out of their own business’s pocket, they’ve got a big-picture overview of business, they’re not just coming from a specialist background, they genuinely want to learn and grow and they can apply their learning very quickly,” he says.
“Over the years we’ve had a number of people in that position — started their own business, it’s five or six years down the line, and they want to take the business to the next level.”
For Fisher, the idea behind an entrepreneurship course is to teach as much as possible before the business is started. It helps to avoid some of the expensive mistakes beginner business owners inevitably make. And a good entrepreneurship course, as opposed to a general business-management course, teaches business principles from a start-up perspective — how to build an HR system from scratch, for example, as opposed to just learning the broad principles of an existing HR system.
But not all entrepreneurship courses do this. Wolfgang Thomas, an economist who teaches at the Stellenbosch Graduate School of Business, describes ”an ambivalence” which infuses the entrepreneurship training industry. For some, it is an attempt to teach a kind of innovative thinking that all managers can use — especially those in big corporations — what’s called “intrapreneurship” in management jargon. Others try to teach the practical processes of starting up a business. And then there are those who try to teach business start-up as a form of art.
Martin Challenor of Graduate School of Business at the University of KwaZulu- Natal says his course teaches “intangible things” such as courage, perseverance and “that it’s OK to be an entrepreneur”. His exam question remains the same every year: “Defend the statement: ‘Entrepreneurs are national heroes’ ”.
Where does the puffery come from that often make entrepreneurship teachers sound like missionaries, even in courses where the focus is on practical skills? Fisher reckons it was inherited from a style of lecturing at Harvard University in the US, where the first entrepreneurship course was offered in 1947.
“It’s a mind game,” says Myres. “Starting a business and persisting in a business is a mind game. You need some of that flaky stuff.” And maybe it’s that flaky stuff with a bit of practical application and some empirical research thrown in for good measure with a solid dose of good luck that just might be the makings of South Africa’s next great entrepreneur.
Those who know what it takes
Anita Roddick
founder of the Body Shop ‘They will not teach you the most crucial thing of all: how to be an entrepreneur. They might also sap what entrepreneurial flair you have as they force you into the template called an MBA pass.”
Richard Branson
founder of Virgin Atlantic ‘So I think there’s nothing wrong with a formal education as long as you don’t let it stunt you if you want to become an entrepreneur— when you actually go out and you are willing to take risk and you are willing to fall flat on your face and you are willing, you know, to have the embarrassment of actually going bankrupt.’
Adrian Gore
founder of Discovery ”You need a coalescing of vision and dream, as idealistic as that is, with very nuts-and-bolts financial skills. I think that’s the art.”
Craig Newmark
founder of Craigslist ”We don’t have much in the way of a business strategy. Like no business plan. Which I say to torment all my friends who are vice-chancellors or [have] MBAs. That’s always entertaining. The deal is, it’s a mixture of luck and persistence.”