Seattle Post Intelligencer:
So, who is an entrepreneur? Are you born an entrepreneur and can you become an entrepreneur?
First, a quick look at the history and the meaning of the word across different cultures:
The French economist J.B. Say said around 1800 that ‘An entrepreneur shifts economic resources out of an area of lower, into an area of higher productivity and yield’. In the United States, entrepreneurs are typically thought of the people who starts his own, new and small business.
It’s quite interesting that Germans actually identify the term ‘Entrepreneur’ with power and property, which is even more misleading. The ‘Unternehmer’, the literal translation into German of J.B. Say’s ‘entrepreneur’, means a person who owns and runs a business. (the English term would be ‘owner-manager’). It’s actually used to specifically distinguish the owner from the ‘hired’ managers and everybody else for that matter.
But, there’s something specific about the entrepreneur that differentiates it from a regular business owner or an owner-manager. Something unique… and it’s not the popular personality traits commonly showcased in Hollywood films or Donny Deutsch’s shows in CNBC. It’s true that they are the ones who are more extrovert and visible with probably a good PR person behind them. Since they are the ones who are more out there in the field, it skews the perception of the entrepreneur within the public eye in a certain way: the typical high risk-taking, natural curious-adventurist, or up-to-the-challenge extrovert stunt boy… No, I’m not talking about a personality trait here. In fact, on the contrary, I know so many entrepreneurs who carry the opposite personality traits.
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