Uberpreneurs

How to Create Innovative Global Businesses and Transform Human Societies

Peter Andrews, Fiona Wood

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137376145
• eBook ISBN: 9781137376152
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

Exploring the lives and achievements of 36 extraordinary individuals from across 18 nations and every continent, this books champions innovators: the disruptive individuals whose heroic visions and indomitable spirits are redefining the economic and social structure of our world.

Chapter 1

ÜBERPRENEURS. OVERTAKERS!

THE FIRST 14 YEARS OF the 21st century have been steeped in doom and gloom.

Everyone is talking about the huge and insoluble problems facing mankind.

How will we feed 9 billion people? Tackle climate change? Rein in obesity? Overcome economic crises? Eliminate AIDS? Build more inclusive societies?

But who will provide the solutions?

In this book we introduce you to 36 extraordinary individuals who are addressing and resolving all of these issues. They come from all continents and 18 nations. They come from all walks of life, and they operate in all spheres of human endeavour.

We call them überpreneurs.

Why überpreneurs? Why not just “entrepreneurs”?

Simply put, despite the armies of academics who have devoted their careers to the study of entrepreneurship, there is still no consensus as to who these entrepreneurs really are, or what they actually do.

Are they the old immigrant couple running the corner grocery store? The snake-oil salesman flogging “get rich quick” schemes? The retailer who franchises her business model into a global cosmetics industry? The executives who drive the development of products that transform their companies into multinational enterprises? Or the young guy who makes billions of dollars overnight floating his Internet company on the stock exchange?

Yes, on all counts.

The literal translation of the original French word “entrepreneur” is someone who undertakes something, most commonly a business endeavour. In the 18th century, it referred to an individual who undertook the risk of buying at certain prices and selling at uncertain prices. More recently, entrepreneurs have been defined as business innovators who recognise opportunities to introduce new products or services, and who undertake to assemble the necessary resources, and take the necessary risks, to exploit those opportunities.

In short, it’s all about undertakers. Deathly boring stuff.

We are not interested in undertakers. We want to go way beyond that. We want to get to grips with the people who are addressing and meeting the grand economic, social and environmental challenges of our times.

The people upending our world.

Überpreneurs. Overtakers!

The 36 überpreneurs who populate this book are transforming all our lives.

Nine of them are business leaders who have redirected the energies of entire industries in the West, and built brand new industries in the developing world.

Nine more are visionaries who are driving the discovery and implementation of stunning new developments in biotechnology, clean energy, and information and communications technologies.

Another nine are bond-builders who have brought renewed happiness to billions of individuals whose social networks have been disrupted by the anonymity of life in modern megacities.

And the final nine are change-makers who have begun the Herculean task of bridging the gap between the haves and have-nots of the developed and developing worlds.

How do they do it? What makes them tick? Are they all different, or are there vital shared characteristics that give them the unique ability to create innovative global enterprises and transform human societies?

We think there are. As we explored the lives and achievements of our übercast we found remarkable consistencies in their motives, their characteristics, their tactics and their achievements.

First, there’s the driving force. All of them are driven by an epic ambition to change the world. All of them have seen and seized opportunities for change, sensed the way forward, garnered the necessary resources, and pursued their dreams, regardless of the odds. All of them, in the late Steve Jobs’words, “push the human race forward”.

Second, they all - irrespective of the nature of their enterprises, or their personal or cultural backgrounds - share a set of definitive characteristics. They are all:

–  opportunistic and visionary, constantly on the lookout for new ideas and intuitively grasping their potential implications, seeing and seizing opportunities for change;

–  innovative, yet pragmatic, willing and able to jump cultural, organisational and geographic boundaries as they sense their way toward novel but practical solutions;

–  persuasive and empowering, offering irresistible investment propositions and attracting talented and loyal followers as they garner the resources to pursue their goals;

–  focussed and confident, indomitable spirits who assume total control and drive full steam ahead toward the realisation of their dreams; and

–  resilient and courageous, taking bold but calculated risks, learning from their mistakes, and thriving on change and uncertainty as they upend your world, regardless of the odds.

And third, there are the outcomes. All of them have created massive new capital, be it financial or technological, social or spiritual. All of them have transformed the condition of mankind - for the better.

In each of the following 14 chapters, we describe one of the grand economic, technological, personal or societal challenges facing mankind, and the innovative ways in which it is being tackled, successfully, by two or three individuals. And, at the end of each chapter, we provide tabular overviews demonstrating that, despite the massive diversity of their ambitions and achievements, all 36 of these men and women are indeed driven by the same powerful forces and share the same key attributes.

So, where do they come from?

That’s the perennial question asked by governments who want to build smarter economies, businesses who want to capture the economic, social and environmental benefits of new technologies, philanthropists who want a fairer and more prosperous society, and ambitious young students - and their parents - who just want to know what it takes to change the world.

In the last chapter of this book we explore the lessons learnt from the lives and achievements of these 36 extraordinary individuals. We analyse their vital characteristics and assess the extent to which they are made or born. To the extent that they are made, we review the impact of government policies, parental supervision and training programs on the quality and quantity of their creation. And to the extent that they are born, we explore how best we can identify and nurture their talents.

Part I

BIG BUSINESS

THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS OF 2008 revealed not just the inherent fragility of Western financial systems, but also the accelerating movement of economic power away from the West toward the rapidly expanding Asian economies, with their burgeoning middle classes and growing aspirations.

Already burdened with unprecedented levels of household and government debt, Western nations were faced with massive losses of manufacturing jobs and associated unemployment. And, to make matters worse, the stream of immigrants skilled in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, a key driver of postwar Western innovation, had begun to dry up as more technically demanding jobs became available in the developing world.

And there, among the developing economies, new issues arose as emerging industries sought to meet rising demand for quality goods and services, against a backdrop of scarcer and more expensive natural resources and a backlash of mounting environmental concerns.

Who can help us to meet these daunting economic challenges?

By far the most likely candidates were first identified and celebrated just over a century ago by the brilliant and colourful Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter. Schumpeter called them “high-level entrepreneurs”, and described them as “the primary agents of economic development and change”, who employ innovative products, processes, markets, sources of supply and organisational structures to drive the “creative destruction” of the status quo, and thus lead us to a better, more prosperous, world.

Although not always “better”, of course, as pointed out by another influential 20th-century economist, William Baumol, who astutely separated Schumpeter’s high-level entrepreneurs into three distinct categories:

• productive entrepreneurs, who apply their entrepreneurial talents to activities that produce valuable goods and services. Think Thomas Edison or Eiji Toyoda, founder of Toyota Motor Corporation;
• unproductive entrepreneurs, whose sometimes equally formidable entrepreneurial skills are applied to activities that simply move the deck chairs, such as litigation, company takeovers and arbitrage, without producing additional value. Think Bernie Ebbers or Alan Bond; and
• destructive entrepreneurs, whose activities are seriously detrimental to our communal well-being. Think Mafia chiefs and Colombian drug lords.

In the next three chapters we introduce nine of Schumpeter and Baumol’s productive entrepreneurs, business überpreneurs whose “creative destruction” of stagnating industries and stalled economies sheds light on the ways in which our current economic woes might be met.

Three of them, Ingvar Kamprad, Chuck Feeney and Amancio Ortega, helped drive the Western world’s economic recovery in the aftermath of the Great Depression and the Second World War. They changed the w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Überpreneurs. Overtakers!
• Part I Big Business
• Part II High Technology
• Part III Happy People
• Part IV Better World
• Part V The Origin of the Species
• Index