Why we need more entrepreneurs
Last week I attended an Entrepreneur Country event hosted by Julie Meyer, following which Julie emailed the participants with her overview of the current state of the economy, the reasons why entrepreneurialism is so necessary now and some general advice. Most of the contents of this email can be found in a recent post on her blog, but I set out below a summary of some of the main points she makes:
• The world is going through significant structural change whereby we are moving to a new age where all business is driven by networks and the increased connectivity we now experience is in the process of producing new ways of working which obviate the need for hierarchical organisations employing lots of people.
• Government is a cost-center to society and the more people that are employed by the state the heavier the weight is around the country’s neck and the harder it is to generate market driven private sector jobs.
• As the pace of technological change leads to more globalisation, your employer, or person you contract with, is increasingly likely to be based on the opposite side of the world.
• Government and public money can do nothing to help the UK adjust to these new realities, particularly as the country has run out of money. If you want to progress you need to take responsibility for your own life, learn where the world is going and look to work with the brightest businesspeople and entrepreneurs.
• The tools now exist to grow powerful personal brands that make people more attractive to employers, enable you to create your own job and to connect and communicate with people who have the same interests and passions as you. The web enables individual empowerment as never before and allows people to become experts more easily through online education and free information, while the growing number of people working on a self-employed basis is a trend that is not going to go away.
