Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

SELF-AWARE VERSUS NOT SELF-AWARE

Great entrepreneurs are intensely self-aware. They know exactly what they are bad at and describe it often, as in, “This is what I suck at.” Government leaders rarely talk this way. Entrepreneurs fail often and own it; government leaders rationalize why something didn’t go their way. Entrepreneurs are directly critical of themselves and others and support their viewpoints with data. Government leaders work to “impact public opinion.” It’s a different vocabulary and a profoundly different behavior pattern.

In contrast, government leaders are chronically not self-aware. This is especially true in state and local governments, where the leadership often asserts that something is happening as though they wish it were. The assertions are often about activities in which the causality is completely misunderstood. This is often the case concerning economic development, which is the category that government puts a startup community in.

This is a problem only if the entrepreneurs rely on their state or local government to lead the startup community. Because many of the government leaders, and almost all of the government employees, have never been entrepreneurs, they can’t relate to the dynamics of how entrepreneurship really works. Furthermore, although they can craft wide-ranging plans, do long-term studies, and create extensive white papers, they rarely can act quickly and precisely about a specific initiative.