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If you are a new or aspiring entrepreneur, according to HBS Professor Joseph B. Lassiter, you must not give in to feelings of hopelessness.
Comparing the current market chill for start-ups with Boston's first weather forecast for winter, Lassiter said firmly, "This snow too will pass."
As he told the audience of business students and new entrepreneurs at the School's student-run Entrepreneurship Conference, the starting of any business is nothing less than a 10-year career commitment. Those 10 years, he explained, may well be marked by two extremes: brilliant successes that could come deceptively early, and perilous moments of near-failure.
But gradually, over time, you build a business that can be sustained.
Loss of self-confidence
"The real world grinds the courage out of each and every one of us," Lassiter told the group. His office is filled these days, he said, with students who fear they missed the chance to start businesses. He also fields telephone calls from recent alumni whose businesses have crashed or fallen dramatically, and whose "sense of success that they had enjoyed a year ago has been taken from them relatively cruelly.
"The loss of self-confidence that can accompany that can be overwhelming, where they feel that they've really let a bunch of people down.
"It's in those moments we—meaning you and I—can give one another courage: to keep faith in the businesses that we're pursuing, to keep faith in the opportunity that is still out there. But more importantly, to keep faith in ourselves: that we're bright, able, and capable of surviving change."
The key to each business opportunity, Lassiter said, is the person who's determined to understand the customer, has the insight to try to figure out how to turn a profit for doing it, "and has the commitment to change as the world around them changes." These qualities come only from an equally strong determination to face reality, he said, "to assemble around you people who will talk frankly and bluntly about the world as it is. So that you join the world, deal with its issues, and overcome them."
The opportunities for entrepreneurs are, and will continue to be, tremendous over the next 10- and 20-year period, he predicted. The main reason for this is a huge change in demographics. "The world that was ruled by the post-war generation is being turned over to you."
Tough times?
That world is a better world than anybody else has received. "Yet there are challenges that are unbelievable in certain parts of the world," Lassiter continued.
"We sit here and talk about how tough our times are. I had a student last year who is chief of a tribe in Kenya. Over 30 percent of the tribe is currently infected with HIV/AIDS. You think you've got it tough? There are parts of the world where tough has a whole different meaning."
Despite these crises and many others around the globe, Lassiter said entrepreneurs have a unique opportunity to leave the world a better place than the one they inherited.
With such a conference at HBS, he said, students can spend time with "truth-speakers: people who will talk about the world as it is, who will take a measured stance between the euphoria that once was, and the depression that all too often seizes people at the moment.
"To each of you," he concluded, "I urge you to make the world your world. Make it turn out what you want it to be. Because you go this way but once."
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