Kaplan Research Company Founder of the Business IQ project
Business Intellect Project This began when I set out to find the reason for the high "mortality" rate in entrepreneurship.
I had been wondering why only 3 out of 10 entrepreneurs survive to their ten-year anniversary. These numbers, of course, vary from country to country and industry to industry, but the overall trend is typical.
Albert Einstein wrote: "It is impossible to solve a problem at the same level at which it arose. You have to get above the problem by 'rising to the next level'."
If this is true, where is the next level at which we can solve the problem?
At that time, admittedly, not without some doubt, I formulated the central hypothesis of this study: "the reason for such a high 'death rate' in small business is probably the fact that entrepreneurs in their activities overlook a major task, the solution of which would ensure their survival".
It was assumed that this missing task would have to be closely related to the overall context of such entrepreneurial activity.
It was then that the idea was born to find a universal method by which to effectively formulate and solve this new type of problem, which five years later I would call the "entrepreneurial problem".
In the process of studying and systematizing a large amount of data, I came to the conclusion that various business systems have common patterns that can be represented as a set of rules that largely determine their future effectiveness.
Additionally, looking ahead, I have discovered a curious phenomenon: the issue of employee productivity cannot be solved by simply dividing the work into such parts as recruitment and retention, compensation, job descriptions, and project management and treating these components separately.
Typically, entrepreneurs solve their problems with managerial problem-solving - breaking down tasks into parts and then coordinating those "separate" jobs. This is such a standard way, but let's agree that it doesn't make much sense to give a new liver transplant to an alcoholic without him changing his lifestyle.
Moreover, in entrepreneurship, there is no point in changing the BUSINESS of entrepreneurs without first changing their THINKING.
This problem is well documented in L.S. Vygotsky's book "Speech and Thinking". He analyzed an example of double representation of water. The chemical formula of water H2O represents water as a compound made of two elements. Looking at water through this prism, we can never explain why and how water extinguishes fire. After all, hydrogen itself burns and oxygen supports combustion. Why, then, does water put out fire?
Here we see that the "dissection" of water into chemical elements cannot explain the fact that water extinguishes fire. In order to explain this phenomenon we need another way to "dissect" water into parts.
We see something similar in entrepreneurship - simply "dissecting" an activity into elements of activity - recruitment, sales, marketing, production, management, manufacturing and so on cannot explain why one business dies and another thrives.
Focusing on all sorts of fancy solutions in each of these areas in isolation can be compared to putting a bandage on a cancerous tumor in the hope that it will cure it.
Labor productivity is a phenomenon that has to do with the business system as a whole. It brings together everything that lies in the space between the entrepreneur and the consumer, including factors at the boundary of these two worlds. It is these phenomena that entrepreneurial tasks deal with.
A new factor soon came into the focus of my research that sheds light on these patterns and general patterns of behavior in entrepreneurship.
The factor which was central to the entrepreneurial task, I labeled as the perceived value of products and services.
Since the entrepreneurial task is not a managerial task that requires one to deal with division of labor and coordination issues, it has to be fundamentally different from it.
After I was eventually able to find and formulate this task, I became convinced that the original hypothesis was quite correct.
Although my understanding of the question at the beginning of the research was a bit simplistic and even naive, the overall choice of research direction was the right one.
Today, I see my primary goal as changing the mindset of entrepreneurs rather than guiding their actions.
It took me more than six years to conduct research, systematize a huge amount of data, bring it to a common denominator, study hundreds of sources, interview thousands of people around the world and write this book. To some extent, my book "Business Incognita. How to Push the Boundaries of Entrepreneurial Thinking" (Alpina PRO Publishing, 2023) is a fragment of my research journal that I have kept all this time.
I can admit that this has been challenging for me with my tendency toward creative clutter. With the journal, I was accomplishing two things:
1) recording the slightest changes in my understanding of the objects of study;
2) recording the extent of my own progress over the course of the study.
All along, I had a dream of creating a method by which virtually anyone with no specialized training could solve problems related to entrepreneurship at a substantially higher level than they had done before.
I see a great need for this, especially as I write this - early 2023. Entrepreneurship has always been and will continue to be the daily bread-and-butter of people on the planet, especially during periods of shifting technological platforms, often referred to by the term "industrial revolutions".
However, the new realities require changes that are not even about the scale of operations, but about the mindset of the entrepreneurs themselves. As long as people think in the old way, they will not be able to act in new ways.
This is another central idea I got from my research. We are now living in a kind of intertemporal period. Vaclav Havel described the processes taking place in a remarkable way:
"...Today, many things indicate that we are going through a period of transition. Everything looks as if something is leaving and something is being born in agony. As if something is crumbling, disintegrating, exhausting, and something else, still unclear, is emerging from the wreckage...".
When we move from one worldview to another, we do not always have enough words to describe the new concepts. Abrupt changes in our understanding of the world are characterized by a lack of terminology. Note that we still say "sunrise" or "sunset" even though N. Copernicus proved five centuries ago that it is the Earth that moves around the Sun.
It is important for a modern entrepreneur to realize that at the moment of transition from the old worldview to a new one, we face certain barriers and difficulties, and uncertainty is growing. We can try to ignore this, but this will not solve the problem. Spending extra energy on putting our lives in order does not eliminate uncertainty, but only increases our fatigue. The world is undergoing global change.
These are not pretentious words - this is a real transformation due to the exhaustion of the traditional mechanism of value creation and exploitation. This "old streetcar" can no longer take us along the usual route. It is as if the invisible hand of the market has dismantled the rails and left us with a legacy of eroded clay, horrifying potholes and bumps.
I believe that in the near future we will all face fundamental changes in the arrangement of market leaders: from the places where we buy our food to entire product categories and industries. Against the backdrop of rising inflation and a falling economy, it will be virtually impossible to rise from the downturn using the old, familiar approaches to business.
At the same time, the destruction of markets creates unique opportunities for takeoff. I think it's no secret to many that crises, if used correctly, offer great opportunities.
All we need is a new look at entrepreneurship and what "doing the right thing" means in business today.
In essence, this is what the Business Intellect project is all about - a new look at entrepreneurship.
Jaroslav Kaplan Author of the book "Business Incognita. How to push the boundaries of entrepreneurial thinking". Expert in the field of sustainable development of organizations and discovering new sources of growth. Developer of the methodology of contextual market research. Member of the International Association of Strategic and Competitive Intellect Professionals SCIP (USA).
In this light (yet profound) business fable a very magical and sincerely nice goldfish, Goshio, navigates her aquarium and the seas of the Paraquarian world beyond. The heroine's journey is an allegory of the entrepreneurial world (and of life) – based on the author's own research journey to circumnavigate the fascinating World of Entrepreneurship. www.goshio.com