Creator. Disruptor. Doer. Bullshitter

A few days ago, I posted a piece called Entering The Bullshit Zone, satirising my university for paying an unqualified therapist and author of That Bitch for 'facilitating' a conference promoting Entrepreneurship in Education. Briefly: serious scholars of management and business have long since laid to rest the notion of the Great Entrepreneur who'll reshape the world. For a short dismissal delivered by somebody rather more impressive than me, try Barack Obama's 'you didn't make that' speech, which reminds everybody that social advances require a society rather than a solitary genius. 



I worry that this discourse of capitalist individualism is socially destructive, not supported by any evidence at all, and promotes a model which is simply not that of the economy at large. Most of us work for medium to large businesses, who have acquired all the advantages. Promoting dubious and unscientific therapeutic or pyschological development models is merely the latest version of the dodgy ads found in the Reader's Digest, and before that, at fairgrounds. These people are snake-oil salesmen. Universities should be critiquing these discourses, not inviting the salesmen in, giving them lots of money (especially when the library and staff numbers are being cut) and leaving our students at their mercy. Instead, my university and I suspect other places are queuing up to fund these secular scientologists. Even more worryingly, our pedagogical specialists are up to their flaky necks in the therapeutic education discourse, in which it's how you feel about things that matters, rather than what you know and how keen your critical faculties are. I think it's dangerous. My colleague is writing papers on this at the moment: I watch him tear his hair out as he traces these academics' references back to nothing more substantial than airport-bookshop management texts, Deepak Chopra-style vaguely spiritual woo and the occasional motivational speech. 

And yet we're still at it. We run a competition/course for students, the Unipreneur Challenge. It's run by a guy we'll call Barry Paul McCartney for legal reasons (the chap in question doesn't believe in joining the debate, he'd rather complain about me to my boss), who rents an office on campus. What does Barry do?

Occupation
Entrepreneur with a portfolio of projects and businesses

Tell me more, Barry. 

• I dream, create and do, inspired by and inspiring others

• I help develop entrepreneurship in entrepreneurs, educators and employees

• I wish for my children to reach out and touch the vibrancy of life and all it has to offer.

I'd quite like to get into dreaming, creating, doing and inspiring. What's the money like? What do you do every day? What are the core attributes required?

Skills

Creator, disruptor, doer 

Wow. A creator! Like God? What have you created, Barry? What have you disrupted? Because as far as I can see, capitalism seems to be bumbling along from crisis to crisis without any serious creating or disrupting on your part. What have you challenged, Barry?

Employment
HOT500
Co-Founder, 2012 - present
Create, deliver and engage colleges, universities and businesses with challenges to simulate [yes, you read that right] and focus entrepreneurial skills towards a given goal 

BizBritain Finance Ltd
Director, 2013 - present
Support young startup entrepreneurs with finance, mentoring and training. Delivery partner to Start Up Loans Company having access to £1.6 million in loans in 2013 

Wist Ltd
Entrepreneur, 2012 - present
Building a suite of tools to acquire information, decide strategy and perform actions. All online and able to be integrated into start-up and development activities for business support, enterprise education and financial brokerage 

i2R Entrepreneur Services
Entrepreneur, 2010 - 2011
Mentor and consultant to micro business owners to help develop more robust entrepreneurship and sustainable business models 

Parker Hannifin, Chomerics Division
European Sales Manager, 2000 - 2003
Led a direct and indirect sales force to build relationships, grow value and profit into the electronics industry 

Ideas 2 Reality
Director, 2006 - 2010
Developed ideas with business owners to increase readiness for finance, access routes to market and speed up operations

Um. This doesn't look very creative, disruptive or inspiring to me, Barry. It looks like you sold components for a while, and ran a lot of very short-lived companies specialising in selling rather flaky pseudo-scientific self-help strategies to people. You don't seem to employ many (any?) people and mainly sell your skills to one organisation: my university, which also provides you with office space in which you operate these various companies. 

In a sense, Barry is a classic entrepreneur. He's parlayed basically no skills or qualifications into a rather successful career selling platitudes to suckers. There's something very circular about entrepreneurs whose only activity is to promote the idea of entrepreneurship. It looks rather like pyramid sales. 

We provide an inclusive ecosystem of empowerment and holistic support.

I believe that passion, humour and purpose are all that's needed to make great things happen. 

Really? All you need is some positive emotion and determination? Not substantial skills? Knowledge? Capital? Contacts? Ideas? Infrastructure? 

As the proverb goes, 'Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me'. I am ashamed of my university for fostering this rubbish. We have a higher calling and a social duty to explore this stuff, not to propagate and promote it. As it is, we're subverting our educational and cultural duty to the local community by uncritically allowing our students to believe that this kind of discourse is legitimate. We know better: we have a School of Business (partly) devoted to critical examination of business structures, and yet we spend students' and taxpayers' money on Barry and his friends. We should be ashamed of ourselves. 

!Whatthefuck?

Occasionally, we're all faced with periods of introspection. Our lives seem worthless, our activities pointless, our presence a drag on our families, friends and colleagues.

I have the solution. Whenever you have a self-esteem crisis, open the website of !Whatif? They're an 'innovations' company. I've read their site and still don't know what they actually do (or even how to pronounce it). I have divined that they wear zany facial hair, combats, and revere Nathan Barley as some kind of god. They charge companies big fees for sounding like they know what's hip - that's as close as I can get. Their name makes me scream with impotent fury. It encapsulates a mindless kind of trendiness, covers utter intellectual bankruptcy. This is what we've done to this country. Honest people making things have been sacked. Bullshitters with no regard for the decencies of grammar run the world. How I hope the recession sends them back to the fields (or as in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, perhaps they'll be on the first ship to a new planet. We'll follow you, honestly).

There does seem to be a total loss of confidence in company names now too. British Telecom is now officially BP. Vesper Thorneycroft is now VT. The BBC's privatised engineering wing is Red Bee. British Airways is BA. British Petroleum is now BP. West Brom's failed art-gallery-and-whatever is 'The Public' and on and on - what's wrong with a name which says who you are, or what you do? Especially for the shameful industries - BAe (formerly British Aerospace) should be Shiny Weapons of Mass Destruction No Questions Asked, Bribes Available.

Down at the trashier end of the book market

2 more books acquired today. The first is Tolkien's verse translation of the Volsungsaga, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, the ancient Icelandic/Norse tales. I haven't enjoyed Tolkien's fiction since I was 15, and have reservations about the deliberate archaicism of his Gawain translation. However, he was a professional philologist and linguist, so I thought I'd give this one a go.

Also got a Juliana Hatfield CD. Mmmmm.

The second book is a donation from Sarah, my office-mate, who knows I have a short fuse for quackery. It is Francis Marshall's Living With Spirits, which purports to contain 'authenticated, detailed case studies of actual sightings' and 'disturbing examples of the rich and famous who have been spooked, from Princess Diana to Mick Jagger'. I'm really looking forward to it. There's a 'science' chapter, and one on sexual encounters with ghosts, including that of a man in a Herne Bay pub who had sex with a ghost transvestite!

Here's Cilla Black's intro paragraph, as a taster:

Blind Date TV star Cilla Black was surprise-surprised out of her skin when the spirit of a melancholic teenager first appeared by the side of her bed one night. But there were a lorra lorra visits yet to come.

'I was shaking like a leaf - or a Blind Date virgin'.