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Hear me out. Yes, I teach entrepreneurship at Princeton and it’s not uncommon for professors to see their discipline as the one indispensable part of the curriculum. But I don’t think I’m engaging in special pleading when I say that a course in entrepreneurship should be required for all undergraduates. Here’s why:
Entrepreneurship is primal. It existed among hunter gathers and in the stone age, long before the rise of the first monarchs, markets, or money. It did not arise with capitalism; it arose with humankind—as basic to our natures as love, jealousy, desire, power and other core human motivations. It deserves and needs to be a greater focus of the humanities.
Entrepreneurs build and topple civilizations. From the Pharaohs in ancient Egypt to dictators in command economies today, rulers have tried to suppress entrepreneurs, but they flourish anyway—even in brutal communist North Korea. Entrepreneurs create desires in people that rulers cannot fulfill, so they try to control their entrepreneurs, with little long-term success. As I write this, we face a tidal wave of societal and technological change threatening our peace and stability, nearly all of it driven by the first- and second-order effects of entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurs, past and present, are the single greatest force shaping how we live. Widespread shifts in human behavior and social organization, more often than not, were instigated by entrepreneurs. Throughout history, their innovations have greatly determined how we work, play, get around, organize collective life, make war, create wealth, get ourselves and even our planet into trouble and much more. Elisha Otis’s development of safe elevators made skyscrapers feasible and transformed urban landscapes the world over. Henry Ford’s motorcar not only rendered the horse and buggy obsolete but, decades later, automobiles altered residential living patterns with postwar suburbs and decaying cities. Thomas Edison’s light bulb made evening newspapers possible; computer and internet innovators are killing them (and morning newspapers, too).
Entrepreneurs, not inventors, rock our world. Inventions, no matter how ingenious, have little effect unless they are commercialized or otherwise widely propagated by individuals through business models and other forms of systematic application (including hard work). That’s what entrepreneurs do. Some, like Edison, are a rare combination of inventor and entrepreneur. Others, like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, were largely entrepreneurs adept at commercializing the inventions of others—and it’s their entrepreneurial side that made the difference. Someone who builds a better mousetrap has to beat a path to the world’s door, not the other way around.
The effects of entrepreneurship are so pervasive that we hardly notice them. In a brief essay called “Self Portrait,” Albert Einstein wrote: “What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?” Einstein’s point is that the most important realities of our lives are so enveloping that they are the hardest things to see and understand. Although we live in a world that entrepreneurs largely made, most of us know little about the reality of entrepreneurship beyond stories in the press of a handful of founders who struck it rich.
The arts and sciences converge in the figure of the entrepreneur. The goal of the humanities is to understand the nature of humankind. The goal of the sciences is to understand the nature of our universe. The goal of the applied sciences, including the social sciences and engineering, is to understand how to apply our understanding to the betterment of the world. A good liberal arts education imbues its students with those fundamental understandings, ideally equipping them to lead productive and fulfilling lives, no matter the area of endeavor.
The problem is—and it is an acute problem—that entrepreneurship is often taught as a kind of vocational class, attracting students who dream of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. That’s backwards. We teach children about war, crime and murder—and their ethical dimensions—before we would even dream of teaching them how to create a gun. So should it be with entrepreneurship, in which converge the Promethean drive to steal fire from the gods, the rise and fall of civilizations, the very texture of our daily lives and the most urgent ethical and policy questions of our day. The figure of the entrepreneur, lionized and just as frequently demonized, raises the most profound philosophical and most pressing practical question of liberal arts education: how, then, should we live?
On January 25, Clayton Christensen, one of the most important business thinkers of our time, passed away. A beloved professor at Harvard Business School (HBS), he had been an executive, an entrepreneur and the celebrated author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, arguably the most influential business book of all time. After all of his success, he published an article in 2010 entitled “How Will You Measure Your Life?” (the basis for a subsequent book of the same name). In it, he reflected on his most important function as a teacher and concluded this: “I promise my students that if they take the time to figure out their life purpose, they’ll look back on it as the most important thing they discovered at HBS.”
That’s the burning issue undergraduates need to answer. Few courses are better suited to address it in its widest personal, ethical, social and practical implications than a wisely designed class in entrepreneurship.
