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> Business schools fetishize entrepreneurial innovation, but their most prominent heroes succeeded because they manipulated corporate law, not because of person

> Business schools fetishize entrepreneurial innovation, but their most prominent heroes succeeded because they manipulated corporate law, not because of personal brilliance. Another week, another swipe at successful people. It’s really interesting to see academics who have never built a business, hired employees, etc deflate and downplay the value of hard work. How many reports like this until everybody is ready to give the wealthy a bath? Or better yet, hand over economic independence to our loving, caring government? Time will tell.

sedeki 8y ago
What academics are you talking about?
- vertline3 8y ago
  Well the author's bio is Nan Enstad is the Robinson Edwards Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and author of Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism
- ccleve 8y ago
  Way too many to list. Read the article itself, there are links and references. Anti-free market thinking pervades academia, despite the fact that free markets have generated an unprecedented level of material wealth. Markets feed, cloth, and employ academics who haven't the faintest idea where the money comes from. No one disputes the fact that monopolies capture an undue amount of wealth. But to launch a general attack on entrepreneurship is fatuous and offensive. I'm sitting here are my desk living that life right now, creating a product that, down the road, will indirectly make that smug academic wealthier. Maybe he should spend five minutes in the business world. He might learn something.
  - pcstl 8y ago
    I like the idea that anti-free market thought pervades academia so deeply because people who succeed in academia tend to see the modern school with its strict hierarchical structure as the ideal model of society, missing the fact that they only find it such because they thrived within it.
creaghpatr 8y ago
> Business schools fetishize entrepreneurial innovation, but their most prominent heroes succeeded because they manipulated corporate law, not because of personal brilliance. Sounds pretty innovative to me.
- nilskidoo 8y ago
  Nothing innovative about being a self-serving chode. Lying, cheating and stealing all require effort, while refraining from those does not. People choose to be dicks, and that's nothing to celebrate.
claudiulodro 8y ago
> Duke’s American Tobacco Company (ATC) moved to the cutting edge of this process when it repelled legal challenges to its monopoly by drawing on new notions of corporate personhood in the wake of the Fourteenth Amendment [...] Though the amendment referred to “persons born or naturalized in the United States,” which suggests human persons, lawyers attempted to use the amendment to shield corporate “persons” from state regulations. With the ATC’s win in court, the corporation claimed an enhanced legal personhood, protection from states, and status as a private rather than public entity. Unrestrained, the ATC rapidly gobbled up companies across the United States and the globe, catapulting Duke to spectacular wealth and power To be fair, this is corporate legal shenanigans, not scrappy, innovative, hard work.
OldSchoolJohnny 8y ago
Yeah...no. Increasingly fewer people are buying this narrative anymore. Hard work is something everyone can get behind, but cheating is just cheating even if it has a veneer of legality behind it we all now know how easy it is for people of means to make the laws that work best for them.
- nilskidoo 8y ago
  As evidenced by the current college admissions scandals. Success in a capitalist culture does not arrive from good intentions, merit or luck. Wealth affords favorable PR.
  - nilskidoo 8y ago
    ...and religious fervor does the rest.
knightofmars 8y ago
You come across as completely dismissing the existing relationships between corporations and government (revolving door appointments, lobbying, being chosen to craft legislation, pre-drafted pro-business legislation ALEC, etc) and the role those relationships play in choosing the winners and losers in the market. If in reality hard work was the only measure of whether or not a business will succeed then it would be fine to claim that this article is attempting to "donwplay the value of hard work". But that's not at all the reality of how systems interact in our quasi-capitalist country. Anecdotally, numerous friends who are ideologically conservative lament the state of corporate influence over government regulation. They believe that a handing over of economic independence to our loving, caring government has already happened but it's a proxy for the corporations who have the most influence. Which removes the ability of the free market to choose the winners and losers.
lower 8y ago
> academics who have never built a business, hired employees, You don't seem to know much about what academics do. A large part of their work consists of project planning, obtaining funding, hiring people to do the research work, advertise the results to get other people to contribute and so on. Only junior academics can really focus on the research. From a certain level of seniority, many academics are really research managers. It's very much building a business.
- Nrsolis 8y ago
  I think you're stretching a bit here. Without personal financial risk, there is no comparison between the two. I've seen up close how unbelievably perilous it can be to risk your personal fortune (sometimes a meager one at that) on an entrepreneurial venture. Don't kid yourself. If running a business was easy and without downside, everyone would be doing it. Lots of folks try their hand at business only to find out that they don't have the will to ride out the very tough times. Comparing a person who is trying to build a business on a (possibly) new and unproven innovation to a (likely) tenured professor is worthy of a chuckle.
  - lower 8y ago
    Do you know how hard it is to get tenure? You have to work extremely hard for a decade and beat the best. If you don't manage to get tenure then you're left with nothing. In fields like computer science this isn't so bad, because there are good opportunities in industry. But in the arts, pursuing a career in academia means taking a big risk. I'm not saying that building a business is easy. But neither is building a career in academia. It takes many of the same skills.
    - Nrsolis 8y ago
      I actually do know how hard it is to get tenure. My point still stands. Very few academics declare bankruptcy when their businesses fail. Very few academics pour their life savings or retirement funds into their academic career only to walk away with less than nothing and owing money they might never be able to repay. Comparative skills is one thing. Comparative risk is another.
minikites 8y ago
The stories by Horatio Alger were fables, they don't depict reality.
normal_man 8y ago
Oh no, poor successful people. Let's never think critically about our economic system, where most people have stagnant wages and a few people are wealthy beyond measure. The blind worship of "entrepreneurship" and capitalism in general on HN and other sites is far more worrying to me than those wiley (((academics))) writing an article.
- dang 8y ago
  Would you please stop using HN for ideological battle? Also, please don't post snark or do flamewars here. All these things are destructive of what this site is for, as explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Edit: actually it looks like you've been using HN exclusively for these things. That's not ok, so I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll use the site as intended in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
5trokerac3 8y ago
Let me propose a third option: there is a top tier of success, whether in business, government or academia, which often, if not always, requires one to be a corrupt and/or cutthroat PoS. The universe usually rewards this behavior, at least materially. It's certainly possible to be significantly successful in any of those areas by being a hard working and ethical human being. But the kind of person who is hellbent on being in the top 0.01% (a Fortune 500 CEO, a top-level bureaucrat, the head of a prestigious academic department/institution) is someone who, to some degree, values their personal success over the suffering of others. This is how you get Monsanto, Communism and $100k+ in debt for a BA in English. What dogmatically anti-academic, anti-government and anti-capitalism arguments miss is that the fault is in sociopathic behavior, and not the arena that a given sociopathic individual excels in.
cmiles74 8y ago
It's unfortunate to see how deep this myth of entrepreneurship runs, and I think this sentiment really highlights the issue. In the statement above, successful people are literally conflated with the stories being told by these business schools. In my opinion, the majority of successful people (and, surely, some of those are entrepreneurs) do not fit into the mold fetishized by the business schools in this piece. Indeed, that type of alleged "super entrepreneur" strikes me as very rare. I believe successful people in general have no need to feel attacked by this article. It's those who have accrued bizarrely large amounts of wealth by leveraging someone else's innovation through legal cleverness and rent-seeking that should be (somewhat) concerned.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
kirkules 8y ago
Why did you quote that line, of all the lines in the article? What does "swipe" mean to you? Who is subsumed by this weird monolith of "successful people", and how is it that academics avoided being included? Why is "downplaying hard work" something you think this article does? Do you seriously think that claiming many "prominent heroes" did not succeed because of personal brilliance is the same as the claim that personal brilliance is never a factor in [business] success? Whatever "economic independence" means to you, why do you think you have it? Do you think everyone has it?
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
>> Another week, another swipe at successful people. I don't remember ever seeing "swipes" at successful scientists, doctors, nurses, midwives, school teachers, etc etc whose hard work has tangible benefits for the entire community. It is obvious that the article is targeting people who are successful at being "egotistical assholes" that "succeed" by harming everyone else's prospects. I don't find anything strange in that. I find it strange that this is not a more widely adopted attitude.
- pcstl 8y ago
  Of course you haven't seen swipes at these kinds of people. All the professions you mentioned are strictly hierarchical and highly regulated, and rewards to them come much the same as they come to schoolchildren - due to the benevolence of a higher authority. When someone succeeds as a doctor, people are hardwired to think "they deserved it" because of the very human drive to seek a hierarchical tribal structure, while when a businessman succeeds without going through what is seen by polite society as the "proper channels", they are vilified for not respecting the structures of authority, regardless of them contributing to society or not. It is a very widely adopted attitude. I'd say over 90% of human beings find the professions you mentioned to be the most "respectable" of all, while businessman are seen as the lowest of the low. Policemen also used to be treated that way, but they've fallen out of favor a bit. I find it sad that people who don't feel the need to cringe and submit to their supposed "betters" get treated as troublemakers who wish to destroy the harmony of society, except at the highest levels of business achievement (which are in turn disproportionately lionized)
  - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
    You're saying that e.g. doctors don't work hard, or that the work they do is not inherently worthy, so their value is granted to them by a higher authority?
    - pcstl 8y ago
      I am not saying they do not work hard or that their work is not inherently worthy. All I'm saying is that society tends to value professions based on how much they fit into and uphold the idealized social hierarchy, and that is much more relevant to the social appreciation of a profession than "hard work" or "benefit to society"
digitaltrees 8y ago
Understanding why people succeed, and how the rules of society contribute to such success is a valid criticism not a “swipe at successful people”. And all members of society have a right to examine the consequences of the rules we mutually create; business owners are not a special class of citizen that has superior right to examine society. I say that as a business owner with 500 employees. If the rules of society have been used in unexpected ways and created unintended consequences, why not examine them and evaluate a better alternative. If some one is talented they will successful under different rules. Your last sentence ignores so much reality. China has lots of large successful businesses and clearly ignored “economic independence”. Commerce is merely one arm of multiple vectors of state objectives. Time will tell if America, with its libertarian, government hands off ideal will prove to be the most effective system. Let’s be clear. There is nothing free about a market dominated by monopolies. There will be less successful people, less new business formation, less innovation, and less wealth creation over time if monopolies and dualopolies stifle competition.
growlist 8y ago
I generally tend towards Hayek in thinking that the market is an amazingly useful creation, and one that we tinker with at our peril. But on the other hand, there are some that become successful whist contributing nothing to the greater good - no innovation, no efficiency - and just succeed at being better hoarders of wealth. > academics who have never built a business, hired employees When I see this type of argument made I often think a. as if someone else wouldn't have come along and created/serviced the market sooner or later, yet we heap praise upon the person that happened to get there first and b. the wider benefits are really just happy side-effects - if a business's costs could be lowered by automating all tasks and employing zero staff, wouldn't it be compelled by capitalism to do so? If it's employment we want, we can just follow Keynes and employ people to bury money and dig it up again..

sedeki 8y ago

What academics are you talking about?

vertline3 8y ago
Well the author's bio is Nan Enstad is the Robinson Edwards Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and author of Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism
ccleve 8y ago
Way too many to list. Read the article itself, there are links and references. Anti-free market thinking pervades academia, despite the fact that free markets have generated an unprecedented level of material wealth. Markets feed, cloth, and employ academics who haven't the faintest idea where the money comes from. No one disputes the fact that monopolies capture an undue amount of wealth. But to launch a general attack on entrepreneurship is fatuous and offensive. I'm sitting here are my desk living that life right now, creating a product that, down the road, will indirectly make that smug academic wealthier. Maybe he should spend five minutes in the business world. He might learn something.
- pcstl 8y ago
  I like the idea that anti-free market thought pervades academia so deeply because people who succeed in academia tend to see the modern school with its strict hierarchical structure as the ideal model of society, missing the fact that they only find it such because they thrived within it.

creaghpatr 8y ago

nilskidoo 8y ago
Nothing innovative about being a self-serving chode. Lying, cheating and stealing all require effort, while refraining from those does not. People choose to be dicks, and that's nothing to celebrate.

claudiulodro 8y ago

> Duke’s American Tobacco Company (ATC) moved to the cutting edge of this process when it repelled legal challenges to its monopoly by drawing on new notions of corporate personhood in the wake of the Fourteenth Amendment [...] Though the amendment referred to “persons born or naturalized in the United States,” which suggests human persons, lawyers attempted to use the amendment to shield corporate “persons” from state regulations. With the ATC’s win in court, the corporation claimed an enhanced legal personhood, protection from states, and status as a private rather than public entity. Unrestrained, the ATC rapidly gobbled up companies across the United States and the globe, catapulting Duke to spectacular wealth and power To be fair, this is corporate legal shenanigans, not scrappy, innovative, hard work.

OldSchoolJohnny 8y ago

Yeah...no. Increasingly fewer people are buying this narrative anymore. Hard work is something everyone can get behind, but cheating is just cheating even if it has a veneer of legality behind it we all now know how easy it is for people of means to make the laws that work best for them.

nilskidoo 8y ago
As evidenced by the current college admissions scandals. Success in a capitalist culture does not arrive from good intentions, merit or luck. Wealth affords favorable PR.
- nilskidoo 8y ago
  ...and religious fervor does the rest.

knightofmars 8y ago

You come across as completely dismissing the existing relationships between corporations and government (revolving door appointments, lobbying, being chosen to craft legislation, pre-drafted pro-business legislation ALEC, etc) and the role those relationships play in choosing the winners and losers in the market. If in reality hard work was the only measure of whether or not a business will succeed then it would be fine to claim that this article is attempting to "donwplay the value of hard work". But that's not at all the reality of how systems interact in our quasi-capitalist country. Anecdotally, numerous friends who are ideologically conservative lament the state of corporate influence over government regulation. They believe that a handing over of economic independence to our loving, caring government has already happened but it's a proxy for the corporations who have the most influence. Which removes the ability of the free market to choose the winners and losers.

lower 8y ago

> academics who have never built a business, hired employees, You don't seem to know much about what academics do. A large part of their work consists of project planning, obtaining funding, hiring people to do the research work, advertise the results to get other people to contribute and so on. Only junior academics can really focus on the research. From a certain level of seniority, many academics are really research managers. It's very much building a business.

Nrsolis 8y ago
I think you're stretching a bit here. Without personal financial risk, there is no comparison between the two. I've seen up close how unbelievably perilous it can be to risk your personal fortune (sometimes a meager one at that) on an entrepreneurial venture. Don't kid yourself. If running a business was easy and without downside, everyone would be doing it. Lots of folks try their hand at business only to find out that they don't have the will to ride out the very tough times. Comparing a person who is trying to build a business on a (possibly) new and unproven innovation to a (likely) tenured professor is worthy of a chuckle.
- lower 8y ago
  Do you know how hard it is to get tenure? You have to work extremely hard for a decade and beat the best. If you don't manage to get tenure then you're left with nothing. In fields like computer science this isn't so bad, because there are good opportunities in industry. But in the arts, pursuing a career in academia means taking a big risk. I'm not saying that building a business is easy. But neither is building a career in academia. It takes many of the same skills.
  - Nrsolis 8y ago
    I actually do know how hard it is to get tenure. My point still stands. Very few academics declare bankruptcy when their businesses fail. Very few academics pour their life savings or retirement funds into their academic career only to walk away with less than nothing and owing money they might never be able to repay. Comparative skills is one thing. Comparative risk is another.

minikites 8y ago

The stories by Horatio Alger were fables, they don't depict reality.

normal_man 8y ago

Oh no, poor successful people. Let's never think critically about our economic system, where most people have stagnant wages and a few people are wealthy beyond measure. The blind worship of "entrepreneurship" and capitalism in general on HN and other sites is far more worrying to me than those wiley (((academics))) writing an article.

dang 8y ago
Would you please stop using HN for ideological battle? Also, please don't post snark or do flamewars here. All these things are destructive of what this site is for, as explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Edit: actually it looks like you've been using HN exclusively for these things. That's not ok, so I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll use the site as intended in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

5trokerac3 8y ago

Let me propose a third option: there is a top tier of success, whether in business, government or academia, which often, if not always, requires one to be a corrupt and/or cutthroat PoS. The universe usually rewards this behavior, at least materially. It's certainly possible to be significantly successful in any of those areas by being a hard working and ethical human being. But the kind of person who is hellbent on being in the top 0.01% (a Fortune 500 CEO, a top-level bureaucrat, the head of a prestigious academic department/institution) is someone who, to some degree, values their personal success over the suffering of others. This is how you get Monsanto, Communism and $100k+ in debt for a BA in English. What dogmatically anti-academic, anti-government and anti-capitalism arguments miss is that the fault is in sociopathic behavior, and not the arena that a given sociopathic individual excels in.

cmiles74 8y ago

It's unfortunate to see how deep this myth of entrepreneurship runs, and I think this sentiment really highlights the issue. In the statement above, successful people are literally conflated with the stories being told by these business schools. In my opinion, the majority of successful people (and, surely, some of those are entrepreneurs) do not fit into the mold fetishized by the business schools in this piece. Indeed, that type of alleged "super entrepreneur" strikes me as very rare. I believe successful people in general have no need to feel attacked by this article. It's those who have accrued bizarrely large amounts of wealth by leveraging someone else's innovation through legal cleverness and rent-seeking that should be (somewhat) concerned.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

kirkules 8y ago

Why did you quote that line, of all the lines in the article? What does "swipe" mean to you? Who is subsumed by this weird monolith of "successful people", and how is it that academics avoided being included? Why is "downplaying hard work" something you think this article does? Do you seriously think that claiming many "prominent heroes" did not succeed because of personal brilliance is the same as the claim that personal brilliance is never a factor in [business] success? Whatever "economic independence" means to you, why do you think you have it? Do you think everyone has it?

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

>> Another week, another swipe at successful people. I don't remember ever seeing "swipes" at successful scientists, doctors, nurses, midwives, school teachers, etc etc whose hard work has tangible benefits for the entire community. It is obvious that the article is targeting people who are successful at being "egotistical assholes" that "succeed" by harming everyone else's prospects. I don't find anything strange in that. I find it strange that this is not a more widely adopted attitude.

pcstl 8y ago
Of course you haven't seen swipes at these kinds of people. All the professions you mentioned are strictly hierarchical and highly regulated, and rewards to them come much the same as they come to schoolchildren - due to the benevolence of a higher authority. When someone succeeds as a doctor, people are hardwired to think "they deserved it" because of the very human drive to seek a hierarchical tribal structure, while when a businessman succeeds without going through what is seen by polite society as the "proper channels", they are vilified for not respecting the structures of authority, regardless of them contributing to society or not. It is a very widely adopted attitude. I'd say over 90% of human beings find the professions you mentioned to be the most "respectable" of all, while businessman are seen as the lowest of the low. Policemen also used to be treated that way, but they've fallen out of favor a bit. I find it sad that people who don't feel the need to cringe and submit to their supposed "betters" get treated as troublemakers who wish to destroy the harmony of society, except at the highest levels of business achievement (which are in turn disproportionately lionized)
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  You're saying that e.g. doctors don't work hard, or that the work they do is not inherently worthy, so their value is granted to them by a higher authority?
  - pcstl 8y ago
    I am not saying they do not work hard or that their work is not inherently worthy. All I'm saying is that society tends to value professions based on how much they fit into and uphold the idealized social hierarchy, and that is much more relevant to the social appreciation of a profession than "hard work" or "benefit to society"

digitaltrees 8y ago

Understanding why people succeed, and how the rules of society contribute to such success is a valid criticism not a “swipe at successful people”. And all members of society have a right to examine the consequences of the rules we mutually create; business owners are not a special class of citizen that has superior right to examine society. I say that as a business owner with 500 employees. If the rules of society have been used in unexpected ways and created unintended consequences, why not examine them and evaluate a better alternative. If some one is talented they will successful under different rules. Your last sentence ignores so much reality. China has lots of large successful businesses and clearly ignored “economic independence”. Commerce is merely one arm of multiple vectors of state objectives. Time will tell if America, with its libertarian, government hands off ideal will prove to be the most effective system. Let’s be clear. There is nothing free about a market dominated by monopolies. There will be less successful people, less new business formation, less innovation, and less wealth creation over time if monopolies and dualopolies stifle competition.

growlist 8y ago

I generally tend towards Hayek in thinking that the market is an amazingly useful creation, and one that we tinker with at our peril. But on the other hand, there are some that become successful whist contributing nothing to the greater good - no innovation, no efficiency - and just succeed at being better hoarders of wealth. > academics who have never built a business, hired employees When I see this type of argument made I often think a. as if someone else wouldn't have come along and created/serviced the market sooner or later, yet we heap praise upon the person that happened to get there first and b. the wider benefits are really just happy side-effects - if a business's costs could be lowered by automating all tasks and employing zero staff, wouldn't it be compelled by capitalism to do so? If it's employment we want, we can just follow Keynes and employ people to bury money and dig it up again..