HOW TO BE AN ENTREPRENEUR IN ANY BUSINESS CLIMATE

Distributed at The World Zarathushti Chamber of Commerce The Twelfth North American Zoroastrian Congress Chicago, Illinois July 3, 2002 and continued editing Thank you for participating with me today. When I learned I should use a short five minutes, I asked myself what was the one most important point I could offer about forming new businesses? If I were on the deck of a burning ship and had moments to leave one insight, what would it be? The answer was clear --- the first thing, and if you don't know anything else about being an entrepreneur, the one thing you must know comes in one word: Integrity. With business scandals erupting around us every day, it is a commonplace that integrity should matter more. But little is done to explain how or why integrity is crucial to business and to making new businesses. Yet we find the basic and core integrity of a business runs through its very nature, structure, and practice. Basic understandings around which business activity occur require integrity. Businesses are a form of human cooperative endeavor. Through a business, the actions of many parties are coordinated. Businesses provide goods and services to customers. So understood, a business entails a value proposition whereby its customer gains and this value is a component of the business's integrity. This very basic integrity in the value offered is ingrained in a healthy business down the line to other crucial features for the basic understandings that form a business. The business model, that is the matter of how a business makes money, elaborates how and for whom the value of the business is implemented. Newspapers often get advertiser dollars, but we think the value they provide is for a customer, a reader of the news. Keeping the real value of the cooperative endeavor at the core of what a business is about, being true to delivery of one's goods and services, is another component of integrity. In a business's revenue model, that is, how much and how it expects to earn when, an entrepreneur offers assumptions which are conservative or more far-blown. Reflecting a genuine revenue model built on solid assumptions again comprises a feature of integrity. In addition to lying within and underneath basic understandings, integrity is a guideline for the ethical aspects that make business possible in the first case. The parties jointly cooperating in a business are held together by delicate structures of clear communication and truthfulness. A board of directors is remiss in its leadership without securing full communication of what is happening, a CEO is wasting an opportunity by not conveying difficult news to a board, teams work together better by learning and taking time to communicate well and with care. As we hear daily, accountants are meant to provide an honest picture of the state of a business. Failure of this function in the service of truthfulness, Truth, is a failing in integrity. The basic understandings of a business, its standing as a rational enterprise of human cooperation, requires integrity. A business's ethics and what holds it together in cooperative endeavor require integrity. There is a third way in which integrity is crucial for business and new business. A new business begins as a nascent idea. It is only a dream, an idea, a hope, a concept, an aspiration ---- in short, it is not yet born. But business do go from being concepts to being thriving enterprises. Business, if anything, is about real life: Business is practical. We shouldn't think giving birth easy: Making a new business is hard work. Some businesses come about like a happy song on a cheery day. But the more typical story is that a new business takes the Founder's blood, sweat and tears; and then takes these again. What does it mean then? It means you need stamina to outlast what may come your way. You will need stamina to be equal to a thousand unexpected often unmerited challenges beyond your imagination. Integrity is a wellspring for this stamina. When you have to get on the phone at noon, call the three bankers your know, explain that you must meet payroll for 14 stressed employees by 5:00, that you have not one cent for doing it, and then negotiate for enough cash to keep sickness and despair away from your 14 loyal troopers (and I did see a Silicon Valley entrepreneur make these calls) ---- you need something special in your core, in your spirit. Without stamina you would wilt and just not have the spine it takes for the marvel of business. Integrity gives you that spine. It gives you the stamina you will need. It can give you stamina beyond what you knew you would need, but stamina Life's lessons taught you did indeed need. For the rational understandings of business, for its ethics, for your very spirit itself in the midst of business, you have my one word: Integrity. It is the best I could wish for you. ___________ Natalie H. Vania is the Founder of Arshiya Ventures.