Book Review;Entrepreneurs

Hero-worship is out. Most serious writers are more interested in “forces” and “factors” than in heroes and heroines. And even biographers specialise in exposing feet of clay. Lord Acton's dictum that “great men are almost always bad men” has become a commonplace. Yet one group has escaped from this general cynicism: entrepreneurs. Company executives may be boring Gradgrinds, bankers the spawn of the devil and politicians crooks and liars. But all agree that entrepreneurs are a cut above the rest of mankind.

The obvious reason for this is that entrepreneurs represent the creative side of “creative destruction”: it is not hard to see how Richard Branson and Steve Jobs have made the world a better place, or even Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks. A less obvious reason is that entrepreneurs appeal to our anti-establishment instincts: some of the very emotions that lead us to dislike chief executives and bankers also lead us to admire entrepreneurs. They are impatient with stuffy conventions. They turn the world upside-down. And they get fabulously rewarded for their efforts.

John Byrne's “World Changers” is a classic exercise in hero-worship. The author provides some interesting insight into what makes entrepreneurs tick. They come in a dizzying variety of shapes. John Mackey, the co-founder of Whole Foods, was a hippie. Fred Smith, the founder of Federal Express, served in the marines during the Vietnam war. Narayana Murthy, the co-founder of Infosys, was a former leftist who found himself on the wrong side of the Bulgarian police.

But three things seem to unite them. The first is that entrepreneurs routinely see opportunities where everyone else sees problems. A surprising number of great companies were born out of fury and frustration. Reed Hastings got the idea for Netflix when a video-rental agency presented him with a $40 late fee for “Apollo 13”. This opportunism melds with determination to produce a powerful cocktail of self-belief. Jeff Bezos continued to work away at his idea for an online bookshop even after his company, which remained in the red for its first six years, had been widely dismissed as Amazon.toast.

The second is an ability to live with risk and failure. Entrepreneurs do not go out of their way to court risk for its own sake. Many of them are far more conscious of risk than more conventional business people. Mr Hastings started working on the next iteration of Netflix almost as soon as he established his company because he knew that the internet would destroy his business model. But they accept that risk comes with success. Again and again entrepreneurs have been willing to bet their futures on what sensible people might dismiss as a crazy idea. The entrepreneur's hall of fame is full of teenage flakes and college dropouts.

The third feature uniting them is a determination to run their own lives. Most entrepreneurs have a problem with authority. They would rather fail as their own boss than succeed as second-in- command. A striking number of them come from difficult backgrounds. Ted Turner's father, whom the boy worshipped, sent him to boarding school at the age of four and beat him with a coat hanger, for example. A disproportionate number suffer from dyslexia (Richard Branson and Charles Schwab are prominent examples).

Had “World Changers” continued in this vein it might have been a fascinating book. Mr Byrne is one of the most knowledgeable business writers around—a long-term writer for Business Week and the editor-in-chief of Fast Company. And he has been interviewing entrepreneurs for most of his professional life. But here he soon runs out of steam. He contents himself with printing his own interviews with his 25 world changers (or sometimes clipping together bits of other people's interviews) rather than writing interpretative essays. And he confronts them with soft questions. The likes of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg deserve to be admired. But 276 pages of hero-worship, particularly when so much of it comes in the form of the heroes blowing their own trumpets, can wear a little thin.