My father was an entrepreneur or, more precisely, he exhibited some of the characteristics of an entrepreneur. But the word itself and the characteristics it suggests have become popular among Americans only in the last 15 years as everyone, not just immigrants and their children, struggles for a place in a rapidly changing, increasingly competitive economy. Responding to the demand, graduate business schools are initiating courses on how to be an entrepreneur, although the lectures are not nearly as specific as those in a statistics class or a management theory course. And corporate America is spending billions of dollars on the restless, entrepreneurial endeavor to develop popular new products or to rejigger old ones to boost sales. Only a volatile stock market threatens to curtail this energy by depriving entrepreneurs, particularly small entrepreneurs, of some of the financing they need to carry out their ideas.
Big companies have more cash savings to draw on and easier access to credit.
As soon as people started worrying about this, they said that Japan was entrepreneurial and America had lost the spirit of entrepreneurship. And we began self-consciously to reacquire that spirit. My father, getting started in the 1920's, never thought of himself as an entrepreneur and did not use that word. For him, opportunity and prosperity meant self-employment. He was proud of a journalist son who worked for a big wire service and then a big newspaper.