Final Word: The bromance is over

by Paul Moore

So the big beasts have fallen out. There is not a sane soul in the universe who did not know this was inevitable. There are a number of very good reasons for this inevitability.

Firstly, it is impossible to put two narcissists in the same room and expect them not to squabble at some point. The raison d’être for being a narcissist is to be the focus of attention and in that game there is generally room for only one player. Anyone who has lived with a narcissist will confirm this. Secondly, they are both like seven-year-old children each of whom believes they are the coolest child on the planet and no one is going to tell them otherwise.

If there is any inkling that the other big beast in the room is cooler, then the relationship is over. Thirdly, only one of them is intelligent and at some point the other one is going to realise this and not want to be outshone by the other. I will leave it to you to decide which of them is the intelligent one, which by the way, does not make him any less dangerous or unhinged. Intelligence can be harnessed for both good or ill. Fourthly, they are both obscenely wealthy. The acquisition of such wealth would, I imagine, make one feel infallible and capable quite simply of doing what one feels like doing. Anyone or anything which stands in the way of that will be seen only as an irritation and a nuisance.

The final thing they have in common is a facet which has been exercising me for some time. They are both so-called entrepreneurs. I work in an environment where I am continually bumping into people who call themselves entrepreneurs. It is so common it has come to mean nothing. Samuel Beckett has a great phrase for this type of pervasive titling when he suggests, “He had become so important he was no longer of any significance.” The term entrepreneur has reached the point where it means nothing other than a title people give themselves if they are starting out to do something but have no idea how they are actually going to achieve it.

This would be entirely unimportant if it were not for the fact that we have come, mainly through the work of business education, to think the title makes people special, so special in fact that they can be given licence to behave in ways that in any other circumstance would be found unacceptable. They are give this licence because they are supposedly not like the rest of us and are going to bring wealth both to themselves and to the economy in general. We have allowed them to become, in essence, a new type of elite. While the rest of us have to play by the rules, meet expectations and inhabit defined roles, entrepreneurs are given an elusive kind of freedom: they are permitted to invest money they have not yet made; they are given loans for things they have not yet designed or made; their business plans are often merely science fiction and, most crucially (and as seen in companies like Tesla and X) the companies they form are merely an extension of their personality. Over the last few years, when in a position to invest research funding in ideas and companies, I have seen this reverence for entrepreneurship all too often.

It is not wrong to want to invent, create or design things. Our lives depend on such creativity. But I cannot help thinking that we need a new definition of entrepreneurship which is grounded in collaboration, consensual behaviour and shared decision making. Otherwise we all end up like the big beasts, creating only, ways to destroy each other.