Entrepreneurship LO7884
As Michael Erickson replied on
>Fri, 14 Jun 1996 07:55
>Fear.... The mind killer
>DUNE by frank herbert
>
snip
>When you are halfway up an ice sheathed headwall in a snowstorm with a
>cranky partner and in ill fitting boots, you recognize pretty quick, how
>mortal you are. Yet I found the Glacier to be a wonderland that I
>couldn't resist exploring no matter how low the temperature dropped.
>While I was deathly afraid of many social interactions, the starkness and
>power of nature you whitness on a mountain top made me feel alive and
>the fact that I could enter that world and come back with my skin (even
>if I was a mite bit snowblind) gave me confidance to face the human factor
>fears that previously were so daunting.
CRAMPONEURSHIP: What is it like to find that the partners that you
are climbing with have a different definition other than the usual
one for "crampons?" That they have been working in another area
of climbing and have been using the word "cramponeurial" to mean
the ability to use their rubber shoes like spikes that dig into the
rock as if the rock was ice. But these same people, you are now on
an ice waterfall with, had never done any work on ice before with
real crampons. They "talked the talk" but had never "walked the
walk" at least not on ice.
As I said earlier, and I don't mean to put anyone's experience
(with the difficulty of "getting creativity acknowledged" or the
problems with "complexity arising from the interactions of
individuals on a team") down, I just don't think that this
contemporary use of the word "Entrepreneur" is specific enough
to solve the problems you have all described. These are real
problems, but I experience your calling yourself entrepreneurial
as a kind of "put down" to the rest of your team, company or your
company's policies. I just don't see it building trust or creating
solutions to the problems you describe. A team needs to feel
confidence in expertise because everyone cannot know everything.
It seems that something else is going on in the situations you
describe to sabotage your work. The noun or name Entrepreneur
does not IMHO offer you those options. It is not specific enough
to your skills.
I have been an Entrepreneur in several different venues of
Entertainment production and am at present, but only when I have
to. I would never select being an Entrepreneur over being a
conductor/ stage director / teacher / singer or anything else I
can imagine. Having all of your money involved and your friend's
money involved in the production of a concert, opera series or CD is
more frightening than my minimal experience on a rock wall. The
wall had been climbed and I had a guide. The weather can always be
a problem and pitons can loosen but basically it was grunt work with
fear of height thrown in. I did once, very foolishly start down a
ravine on a mountain that I did not know and got caught on ice without
equipment. Not a cool thing to do, barely escaped with my and my
friend's lives intact. You should know the meanings of things and
the specificity of difficulty. Being an Entrepreneur reminds me
more of that ravine on Mount Evans. (Mount Evans is a "drive-up"
mountain but even though your auto can reach the top you can still
be killed using the wrong tools and not paying attention to your
environment.)
>Having faced one kind of fear successfully gave me the nerve to try
>something REALLY SCARY.... (public speaking). One "survival" lead to
>another, and my fears (based on a certain amount of child abuse in my
>youth-therefore-pretty big in my head) fell away one by one.
The issues of skill focus, commitment to correct practice, courage
to be the job you are practicing and willingness to maintain the
above as worthwhile communication to an audience, has been eliminated
from public education for budget and non-pedagogical reasons. It has
created a great number of managers who perform from the emotion of
anger, as a cover for fear, rather than the pleasure of the practiced
mastery involved in communicating singularly with large groups.
>So how do you face, and overcome your fear? How do you inspire others to
>take on the challenge? One thing I always point out to my fear laced
>work mates... No matter how bad the corporation "screws up", NO ONE IS
>GONNA DIE OVER IT. (unless you work for the post office, and someone
>shows up with an uzi).
You can also find pleasurable activities that put you in performance
situations that are tough in front of audiences as a part of your
recreation. Do something that is more like your work than sports
however. Do something that involves the practice of a skill and the
perfect demonstration of that skill in front of an audience. Goal
oriented recreation (winning) involves (like river rafting) getting
to the goal alive. Flamenco on the other hand lets you live humiliated
in front of your friends, relatives, and business colleagues if you
are bad at it. I would suggest river rafting for freedom and Flamenco
for discipline.
>Since the ultimate "thing to fear" doesn't even enter the picture, there
>is a certain amount of perspective gained.
Our Escamillo the Bull Fighter in Carmen was a partner in a Wall
Street firm. I prepared him to succeed and he did magnificently, not
only for his friends but the NYTimes as well. This changed his life
at the office as far as performance was concerned. It kicked him
upstairs and eliminated both singing and Flamenco for a while. They
wanted his ease of delivery and performance skills as a Manager.
Ray Evans Harrell
mcore@soho.ios.com
--mcore@soho.ios.com (Ray Evans Harrell)
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>