A letter to Nashville: You are the infrastructure

You are the infrastructure

I just returned from Nashville, TN where I facilitated the latest Start Up Weekend. The details about the event follow in the next blog posting. But, I want to separate one aspect of the weekend out and address it here.

One comment that I heard more than a few times was that Nashville is not as supportive as other cities of their entrepreneurs. They have the Nashville Technology Council, whose Chair and Chair Elect attended and that is a great start. But what I kept hearing was that support for entrepreneurs, for certain types of ideas, was limited. That the infrastructure for innovation and entrepreneurship was missing.

I don’t know if that is true, but I want to say this to the 70 people that I met this weekend:

You are the infrastructure.

Do you realize your collective power? You are 70 people who believe in self-reliance, self-determination, creativity, perseverance, teamwork. You are 70 people who decided Friday night to create something, and 48 hours later, you had created six companies. Do you understand the power in that? No venture capitalist made that happen, no city patriarch, no agency.

You did it.
Without any help from any one else.
Except 70 like minded individuals with passion and a drive to create something.

And here’s the thing. I bet each of you know at least one other person exactly like you. If you do, that’s 140 entrepreneurs who believe in self-reliance, self-determination. And if 70 people can create 6 companies in less than 48 hours, what can 140 people do? And if those 70 people know other people?

Collectively, you are the infrastructure

Don’t wait for permission, guidance, handouts from some other source.

Create the Nashville you want to see.

You did it in a room at the Owens School of Management. I know many of you. You can move it outside of that room, off that campus and into the city, until it becomes part of the fabric that is Nashville. I know you can do it, and deep down, each of you do too.

Thank you for an invigorating weekend. It was a privilege and a joy to work with you.

“In the face of change, the competent are helpless.” – Seth Godin

Seth Godin, who always proves thought provoking to me, wrote this article in 1999 for Fast Company magazine. ( Change Agent – Issue 31 ). This was almost ten years ago and I think his argument made sense then and it makes sense now.

Seth writes:

Oh, there’s one other thing: As we’ve turned human beings into competent components of the giant network known as American business, we’ve also erected huge barriers to change.

In fact, competence is the enemy of change!

Competent people resist change. Why? Because change threatens to make them less competent. And competent people like being competent. That’s who they are, and sometimes that’s all they’ve got. No wonder they’re not in a hurry to rock the boat.

People used to say that large, bureaucratic organizations were like slow moving dinosaurs. The argument went that this is why leaner, swifter companies were able to take business away from them – that, in essence, they could anticipate change and adapt to it at a much quicker pace. I still believe this. But I think what ultimately gives them the advantage to behave that way is the culture that fosters the ability to make mistakes, take risks, to in essence, be incompetent. (Funny I should be writing that while we are talking about a $700B bailout – obviously a different type of incompetence.)