ENTREPRENEURSHIP AS AN ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE
a lecture delivered in Dr. E’s freshman seminar, October 2006
by Dr. Elliot McGucken, October 2006
BACK STORY
“When storytelling declines, the result is decadence.” –Aristotle, Poetics
“Flawed and forced storytelling is forced to substitute spectacle for substance, trickery for truth. Weak stories, desperate to hold audience attention, degenerate into multimillion-dollar razzle-dazzle demo reels. In Hollywood imagery becomes more and more extravagant, in Europe more and more decorative. The behavior of actors becomes more histrionic, more and more lewd, more and more violent. Music and sound effects become increasingly tumultuous. The total effect transnudes into the grotesque. A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling. When society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out , pseudo-stories, it degenerates. We need true satires and tragedies, dramas and comedies that shine a clean light into the dingy corners of the human psyche and society. If not, as Yeats warned, ‘…the center cannot hold.’”—Robert Mckee, Story
Yet while Vanguard too has emerged as a sort of prototypical 21st century firm—a virtual organization, enormous in size, heavily reliant on process, on real-time communications and computer technology, and managed largely by the contemporary numeric standards of modern management—its founding values remain intact. At our core, we remain a prototypical 18th century firm, thriving on our early entrepreneurship, on our simple investment strategies, on eternal verities such as service to others before service to self, and on putting the interests of shareholders ahead of the interest of managers, doing our best to hold high the belief that ethical principles and moral values must be, finally, the basis for any enterprise worth its salt. –John Bogle, Founder and former Chairman of Vanguard
There's a difference between us. You think the people of this land exist to provide you with position. I think your position exists to provide those people with freedom. And I go to make sure that they have it. –William Wallace in Braveheart, by Randall Wallace
Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute. –Joseph Campbell, author of Hero With a Thousand Faces
THE CALL TO ADVENTURE
The modern university can benefit vastly from the academic field of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship serves the students by teaching them that the classical, eternal precepts of a liberal arts education are most useful tools. The field of entrepreneurship can exalt universities to higher roles of leadership, where rather than costing more via spiraling tuitions outpacing inflation to support esoteric studies, education regains a practical spirit, becoming an entity that creates wealth for the greater community, fostering small businesses run by and employing students and professors.
Entrepreneurship focuses a liberal arts education on practical, meaningful results; encouraging students to work for more than a grade—to work for their future, to take ownership in their lives and in investments of their time and money—to assess risk, call the bluff of the promised pension, and make their passions their professions. Artistic entrepreneurship can return the moral premise—that seed of every lasting work of art and epic business venture, of faith and the family—to Wall Street and Main Street; to Hollywood and the Heartland. And the Academy can lead the way.
In the digital age, rather than just studying case studies in entrepreneurship, the students can become the case studies on a small scale. With little capital risk, they can register domain names, file for copyrights and trademarks, and launch ecommerce sites. And when students have ownership in their own projects and visions, the textbook’s case studies come to life. It’s no longer merely academic—suddenly the university is about acquiring the practical and aesthetic tools to follow one’s dreams.
Entrepreneurship provides a method and means to unite the professional schools and the classical liberal arts disciplines that have become artificially separated on the modern campus. Business, law, art, and technology congregate in a single classroom, just as they must in the real world so as to provide useful and meaningful results such as the iPod and the xBox 360; and just as they do when a freshman shoots a digital picture, defines her rights, and uploads it for sale in a span of a few minutes. The field of entrepreneurship can inspire the academy with an exalted rigor, wherein students are inspired to read works such as the Constitution and Great Books more deeply, while working more diligently so as to further the projects they have ownership in.
CROSSING THE THRESHOLD
The Artistic Entrepreneurship & Technology class I am teaching at Pepperdine University and which I have taught at UNC Chapel Hill, whose syllabus maries Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey to the entrepreneur’s quest, offers an "artistic" and efficient way to communicate the natural value of entrepreneurship's classic ideals. Qualities such as character, honor, and integrity are perhaps the most important assets in entrepreneurship, just as they are in enduring literature, and there is no better way to teach them then via classical myths. All law derives from epic storytelling, and entrepreneurs such as Steven Jobs, Richard Branson, Randall Wallace, and John Bogle of the Vanguard Group, have all followed the Hero’s Journey in their entrepreneurial quests, which students may be introduced to via entities they already know, such as The Matrix, Star Wars, The Lord of The Rings, and Braveheart. Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces makes an excellent central text for the class.
APPROACH TO THE INNER-MOST CAVE
In addition to hosting guest lecturers and successful entrepreneurs, in addition to case studies, an academic discipline must seek out the eternal precepts and principles of the field, which serve as practical tools when applied in the student’s living projects and ventures. Artistic Entrepreneurship and Technology is where the rubber hits the road, where Shakespeare, Homer, and Dante—and Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison—provide practical inspiration complementing Jobs, Bogle, Branson, and Cuban. And over time a textbook may emerge, along with a workbook, based on the general structure of the Hero’s Journey, showing the importance of the moral premise in all lasting ventures, and offering accompanying workbooks and websites to help the students along in entrepreneurial endeavors.
MEETING THE MENTORS
We need to listen to distinguished mentors, both classical and contemporary, who are calling upon us to place the higher ideals over the bottom line—those who have taken risks and bet on moral precepts that have become blockbuster movies such as Braveheart and enduring ventures such as Vanguard. In a speech entitled, Capitalism, Entrepreneurship, and Investing The 18th Century vs. the 21st Century (January 25, 2006) John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group, writes:
But at its best, entrepreneurship entails something far more important than mere money. Please do not take my word for it. Heed the words of the great Joseph Schumpeter, the first economist to recognize entrepreneurship as the vital force that drives economic growth. In his Theory of Economic Development, written nearly a century ago, Schumpeter dismissed material and monetary gain as the prime mover of the entrepreneur, finding motivations like these to be far more powerful: (1) "The joy of creating, of getting things done, of simply exercising one's energy and ingenuity," and (2) “The will to conquer: the impulse to fight, . . . to succeed for the sake, not of the fruits of success, but of success itself.”
In order to reform Wall Street, Bogle is calling for nothing less than a literary renaissance, for as General Macarthur said, “It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.” On the first page of his book The Battle for The Soul of Capitalism, Bogle quotes not an economist, but Joseph Campbell and the Bible.
. . . The most recent episode witnessed the culmination of an era in which our business corporations and our financial institutions, working in tacit harmony, corrupted the traditional nature of capitalism, shattering both confidence in the markets and accumulated wealth of countless American families… at the root of the problem, in the broadest sense, was a societal change aptly described by Joseph Campbell: “In medieval times, as you approached the city, your eye was taken by the Cathedral. Today, it’s the towers of commerce. It’s business, business, business. We had become what Campbell called a “bottom-line” society. But our society came to measure the wrong bottom line: form over substance, prestige over virtue, charisma over character, the ephemeral over the enduring, even mammon over God. –John Bogle, The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
Bogle’s Vanguard index fund—an entrepreneurial startup based on his senior thesis at Princeton—is one of the world’s largest and most-trusted. It is a maverick fund that bypasses the intermediaries and provides maximum returns for small investors—a fund that embodies entrepreneurship’s central maxim—the risk takers ought get the rewards.
Wall Street will be reformed when the Academy is reformed—when the Academy again places the higher ideals over the bottom line and requires the study of the epic myths and everlasting principles. And the academic field of entrepreneurship could accomplish this.
The immediate case studies will change over time, and the student’s projects will have to surf the cutting edge of their day’s technology; but the textbooks on entrepreneurship must be founded upon those precepts that never change, from Homer’s Odyssey on down—the humble hero’s journey. So it is that the class becomes a core institution, serving freshmen and business and law students—teaching all that the greater wealth is to be had by keeping he higher ideals over the bottom line—serving film students in a most efficient manner by teaching them that the story of their films, lives, and business ventures—all based upon common moral precepts—are parallel journeys.
FORMING THE FELLOWSHIP
Entrepreneurship unites the professional schools—the business and law schools—with the undergraduate program, and my classes have included students from all, ranging from a freshman with a successful record label to a third-year law student. All forty-five of us learned from one-another and the classics, and even the student who came in with an anti-capitalist bent soon agreed it was a good thing that her favorite band get paid, so that they might make more songs. We learned that just like the “force” in Star Wars, capitalism can serve exalted or degraded purposes, and that its rightful role is letting creators protect and profit from what they do; rewarding not the bureaucracy nor the intermediaries nor the tech-transfer departments, but the risk-takers—the authors, inventors, investors, and innovators on the front lines of entrepreneurship. Simply put, we learned the United States Constitution:
The Congress shall have Power to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; —The United States Constitution, Section 8, Clause 8
And I ask each class—“imagine what would happen if the CEO of Apple or Sony or Yahoo or Microsoft were to neglect the art, the business, the law, or the technology. Imagine if you worked your whole life for a pension that evaporated, whereas you could have invested in your greatest asset—your passions and dreams. Imagine if you could endow video games with epic storytelling—with a soul so that the photo-realism might gain a spiritual realism, so that video games might become enduring art; thusly increasing their markets and enhancing their brands. The world is yours for the making, and a renaissance is yours for the taking.”
THE ROAD OF TRIALS: TEST, ALLIES, AND ENEMIES
While MBA programs typically want the liberal arts students to walk on over to the business school to learn about accounting and business structures before launching ventures, MBAs have just as much to gain by walking over to the arts and literature departments, to learn of aesthetics and the everlasting principles expressed in Homer on down--for who has ever created a greater brand than "homer's Odyssey?" Would that more MBAs who ran the likes of Enron and Worldcom and the countless other postmodern debacles had read classics such as Dante’s Inferno and The Iliad, in which Achilles said, “For as I detest the doorways of Death, I detest that man, who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another.” Would that more artists had read the classics too, so that we might have avoided the recent scandals in NY publishing of plagiarism and fake memoirs, and so that the Hollywood box office might be revived with classical ideals performed in the contemporary context, rather than soulless remake after remake after remake.
As Aristotle said, “When storytelling declines, the result is decadence.” And so it is that Artistic Entrepreneurship is after that higher exit strategy, that, in Herman Melville’s words, cannot be “counted down in dollars from the mint.” The wealth of a renaissance might not show up on the immediate balance sheet of the day-trader or intermediaries seeking to maximize transaction fees, but there is no better long-term investment for civilization.
Einstein noted, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” Too many economists, by neglecting the family, literature, and our cultural heritage; and instead focusing on obscure equations that the world’s greatest investors—such as Bogle and Buffett—deem as useless at best and devious at worst, end up as siphoners and transferrers of wealth instead of creators of wealth. The field of entrepreneurship must recognize the source of wealth—the individual creators and those systems, recognized by classic economists such as Adam Smith—that benefit and bolster the individual creator. The study of entrepreneurship must be a study of those systems that recognize and protect the natural rights of every person to say what they want and own what they do.
In his 1906 address concerning copyright delivered to Congress, Mark Twain paid homage to these natural rights, citing two fundamental documents which are either ignored or taught only to be deconstructed:
I am aware that copyright must have a limit, because that is required by the Constitution of the United States, which sets aside the earlier Constitution, which we call the decalogue. The decalogue says you shall not take away from any man his profit. I don't like to be obliged to use the harsh term. What the decalogue really says is, "Thou shalt not steal," but I am trying to use more polite language. . . The laws of England and America do take it away, do select but one class, the people who create the literature of the land. They always talk handsomely about the literature of the land, always what a fine, great, monumental thing a great literature is, and in the midst of their enthusiasm they turn around and do what they can to discourage it.
So it is that in seeking to teach entrepreneurship, we must be careful of discouraging it. “Can entrepreneurship be taught?” is a question that echoes of Socrates’ classic question— “Can virtue be taught?” Socrates wasn’t sure, and his humility should serve as a guiding beacon in devising curriculums on entrepreneurship, as it did for Benjamin Franklin, whose thirteenth precept was, “Humility: Imitate Socrates and Jesus.”
The eternal aspects of art are no stranger to the world’s greatest investor. Warren Buffett claims, “I am an artist—not an investor.” And too, he says that his favorite time for holding a stock is eternity—that would be the very same eternity Shakespeare and Dante wrote for, based on the very same classical entities Buffett studies—the fundamentals of truth and beauty—of simple, honest arithmetic over convoluted, pretentious, postmodern, and ultimately devious financial chicanery with but one intent—to transfer all the wealth to the intermediaries and the all risk to the investors, workers, and creators. ‘Tis a world inverted, and it brings to mind Hamlet’s words, “The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!”
Buffett says, “It has been helpful to me to have tens of thousands students turned out of business schools taught that it didn’t do any good to think.” Buffett is making his point in a comic manner, as one laughs that one might not weep, but there has been tragedy too. As John Bogle points out, the lack of higher, exalted knowledge amongst the MBAs on Wall Street has not benefited the common worker—the teachers, preachers, and firemen—who trust Wall Street with their savings, investments, and pensions. Indeed—it is not Wall Street that creates wealth—it are the people of this country and the world living the free market system and taking the risks—the workers, business owners, natural entrepreneurs, and visionaries. As Buffett acknowledges, “too much intelligence and energy is being devoted to scraping the crumbs off the table of capitalism instead of preparing the meal.”
The academic field of entrepreneurship must be devoted to recognizing, bolstering, and empowering those rugged individuals who are “preparing the meal.”
THE APOTHEOSIS
The field of entrepreneurship has a wonderful power to focus diverse academic pursuits on a common goal—it calls upon education to focus on practical, tangible, and useful results—to render lofty ideals real, thusly emphasizing the great value of a liberal arts education in all pursuits. And it calls upon students to focus their energies on their passions and dreams, whereby they learn that a big trick of success is “working hard at what you love,” as Steve Jobs suggested in his 2005 Stanford commencement address.
In many ways a class on entrepreneurship is a study of American History, bringing in the founding documents on the first day, showing the students the words that stipulate that they get to say what they want and own what they do. Entrepreneurship, rather than displacing the liberal arts as some might have feared, exalts the liberal arts to a guiding role and calls upon the students to take the classical precepts to heart. For just as the liberal arts are the center and circumference of that most enduring business plan by which all modern business plans are written—the United States Constitution—so it is that the liberal arts must be the center and circumference of any curriculum devoted to entrepreneurship. Classic entrepreneurship has ever been about holding the higher ideals above the bottom line, about creating value as opposed to making money. And this is a lesson best taught by the enduring poets and prophets of yore—to be introduced in classes devoted to entrepreneurship, answering the natural yearning in every student’s heart and soul to serve a greater purpose, and create wealth via exalted meaning.
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
--Henry David Thoreau
In seeking out its defining precepts, the academic field of entrepreneurship looks towards those classic stories told over and over, with similar themes but ever-changing characters. From Braveheart, to The Matrix, to The American Founding, it's always about “we the people” stepping up and creating “a better form of government,” or business, or enterprise in the context of property rights where one gets to profit from the fruits of one’s labor, where integrity and honor walk hand-in-hand with owning what one creates; where freedom comes with the responsibility to do something useful with it. It's about long-term investing paralleling Odysseus's journey—forgoing the temptations of the Lotus Eaters and Sirens to serve one’s men—one’s employees and shareholders and customers—to make it on home. Entrepreneurship emphasizes value-investing as do Buffett and Bogle—investing one's time in worthwhile pursuits that have solid foundations—based in truth, beauty, and duty—based in service not of the bottom line, but the higher ideals. Based in service not of the managers, but of the customers.
THE ULTIMATE BOON
The world is ready for a renaissance, and entrepreneurship as an academic discipline can lead the way. The higher ideals must be placed above the bottom line on Wall Street and in Hollywood, on Main Street and in the heartland. And who better to accomplish this than today’s Academy—by communicating the vast opportunities of applying classical ideals, to every student? So it is that the academic discipline of entrepreneurship could exalt and entertain the contemporary culture, taking it to a better place.
Thinking entrepreneurially can also help students in the context of established companies and institutions—all of which must serve the customer in novel, ever-changing ways that surf the cutting-edge of technology—all of which must seek to continually reward the risk-takers and reign in the bureaucracy. Entrepreneurship can provide the student with the basic tools to launch new ventures centered around the novel, useful ideas that their boss’s bureaucracy rejects.
While most business schools hold business plan competitions and teach classes on entrepreneurship, they don't always do a great job at reaching out to the world's natural entrepreneurs and authentic founts of wealth—artists, coders, web designers, creative writers, science grad students, and local small-business owners—those reluctant heroes who’re following their passions and dreams. They possess the natural integrity and idealism that will allow them to follow those dreams come hell or high water—on past all those hurdles—on towards rendering sustainable ventures, as the rugged precepts in their souls become the character of their enterprises. Such naturals need to meet one-another—they need a class or two providing them with all the fundamentals of incorporation and intellectual property law. That is the purpose of Artistic Entrepreneurship and Technology 101.
I knew so many indie labels in Chapel Hill, so many coders running small but profitable ventures—so many grad students with cool ideas who never made it over to the business school—true entrepreneurs who could benefit from an efficient, useful class that taught of entrepreneurship’s immortal precepts and the practical tools of the trade, and married it all to technology and most useful books resources on the web. Those who would benefit most not from handing over their creations to the bureaucracy of the technology-transfer departments, but from networking with one-another, and learning how to incorporate, leverage technology, and protect and profit from their intellectual property. Who would benefit not from studying venture capital, which is oft little more than a lingering legacy of a bygone era which corrupted entrepreneurship by making it a tool of elite insiders to profit off of fake companies in 1999, but who could benefit from learning about entrepreneurship from that original American entrepreneur—Benjamin Franklin—who emphasized virtues first and foremost—virtues such as frugality and humility. For what does it profit one to gain the world and lose one’s soul?
THE ROAD HOME
So I created a business class for artists and an art class for MBAs—a class for the creative types across all disciplines, as every artist is an entrepreneur and every entrepreneur is an artist—and I based the class on Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey." The classic hero’s journey speaks to all levels, to all cultures, to all religions. There are multiple parallels between the entrepreneurial journey and the classical myth that pervades movies ranging from The Matrix to The Lord of The Rings to Star Wars—the call to adventure (seeing an opportunity), refusal of the call (it's too hard—somebody else would have done it—working a corporate job with a pension is safer), meeting the mentor (finding the angels/professors/books/coaches/leaders/entrepreneurs who can help), crossing the threshold (the point of no return—signing the lease/hiring employees), seizing the sword from the stone (getting the patent/raising funds), the showdown/ordeal (facing down competitors), tests, allies, and enemies (collaborators, competition, and shapeshifters). And even after all that, even after the patent has issued and the funds have been raised, there's still the classic road on home (getting the product to market!) and the return with the elixir—the exit strategy.
And too, there's the belly of the whale (Steve Jobs being kicked out of Apple by the MBAs and into the darkness of NEXT) and the resurrection (Steve Jobs returning on home, reinventing Apple with the iPod, and leading it to new heights). And it's always the least likely suspect—the reluctant hero—who somehow succeeds by keeping the higher ideals over the bottom line—Frodo was just a little Hobbit, Neo was a lowly cubicle worker—and Jobs, Branson, and Gates have not a college degree between them.
The class teaches that failure isn't failure, so much as a small step along the greater journey. In tirelessly testing different filaments, Edison said, "I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb."
The rigor of the Great Books and Classics is present every step of the way, along with practical applications of that wise rigor. We read the US Constitution wherein the only place the word “right” is mentioned is with respect to the right of the creator to own what they do. And then we surf over to the uspto.gov website to see how simple it is to conduct trademark and patent searches, and to find the forms for patents, copyrights, and trademarks. The class mixes the eternal, abstract principles of entrepreneurship—most of which can be found in the classics—with cutting edge, living examples.
RETURN WITH THE ELIXIR
Again, the field of entrepreneurship serves the typical liberal arts students first and foremost, as it calls on them to contemplate the eternal precepts and wisdom of the classics they are reading; and it brings the ideals to life by having them apply them to real-world scenarios in the form of their living ventures. So it is that their projects become the primary case studies, and suddenly “textbook” case studies come to life with more pertinent meaning. Entrepreneurship calls upon the student to take ownership in their ideas and their future, and it teaches that to lead is to serve—that the best way to get rich is to create wealth.
AE&T comes to life in the classroom, and developing the curriculum is akin to asking, “What eternal principles, books, and resources can form a lasting syllabus and course of study?” It's about respecting those things that never change, and once arming students with those ideals, telling them that they've got to respect that the state of life and business is constant change, and then encouraging them to go forth and capitalize on that change, as they take the responsibility of manifesting the eternal ideals in maverick manners on their very own Hero's Journeys. The greater risk is not in following dreams and ideals, but forgetting them.
Too often the liberal arts are viewed as a useless pursuit, and a Great Books education is thus replaced by business and marketing classes that offer but “cliffsnotes” versions of the fundamental principles by which all business and art last. To often entrepreneurship is viewed as the art of exploitation—MBAs marching into companies and exiting with the pensions and investments of the duped workers and stockholders—and humanities students are rightly discouraged from walking over to the business school, for in the wake of all the corporate scandals, what business school has ever passed judgment or apologized? Famous entrepreneurs such as John Bogle and Warren Buffett regualrly pass judgement on Wall Street, but MBA programs do not teach their works. Sure, the business schools offer a class on “ethics” here and there, but does that imply that accounting can be done without ethics? Sadly enough, accounting without ethics has time and again proven to be far more profitable to the short-term investors and insiders who do not get caught—and all too often to even those that do. Although Wall Street firms have been fined millions in the wake of the scandals, it all amounts to a tiny slap on the wrist--fractions of pennies on the dollars--after seven trilion was transferred circa 2000. So it is that they earn a reputation that the main requirement is not a pursuit of the truth—the classic calling of the vast majority of students—but a tacit circumvention of it. And the students they attract further reinforce the atmosphere.
How ironic it is that in this era of celebrated and revered business books such as Built to Last, nothing lasts. The family, like the pension and postmodern politician’s promise, are as ephemeral as the modern movies Hollywood produces and hypes, which less and less people are seeing. To build meaningful ventures that truly last, the moral precept must be returned to the center and circumference of every institution. This is the role of rugged entrepreneurs. And vast opportunities exist for those bold enough to lead the renaissance that places the higher ideals above the bottom line--on Wall Street and Main Street--in Hollywood and the Heartland.
Tying entrepreneurship to classical myth is a lot of fun, and if the students don't quite know who Richard Branson or John Bogle is yet, if Joseph Campbell seems a bit esoteric, they know Frodo and Neo and Luke Skywalker—a farm boy who felt there was something more out there—who heard that call to adventure and went on to save the universe. If they’ve not yet heard of Randall Wallace, the author of Braveheart, they yet know William Wallace, who lived a parallel journey. And the class reminds them that life is a great adventure to be lived with a brave heart and a free spirit.
During the most recent class the students discussed how they're watching movies and reading books differently—how they're extracting the eternal principles—the classic call to adventure, the meeting with the mentor, the road of trials, tests, allies, and enemies, the showdown/ordeal, and the return on home. And how they’re growing to see the act of following moral precepts are why the very same plot points appear in Steve Job's and Branson's careers.
In reading both The Odyssey and The Battle for The Soul of Capitalism, they see that it was simple moral precepts that guided Odysseus on home, and which inspired John Bogle to found Vanguard based on higher ideals that countered Wall Street's wisdom—the higher ideals he had felt as a senior at Princeton—that paying people to manage money was by and large a waste for the investor. Regarding Vanguard, Bogle writes,
The first invention took place only months after we began, when a simple thought, indeed one that had first occurred to me when I wrote my senior thesis at Princeton University in 1949-51, began nagging at my mind. If mutual funds as a group fail to deliver stock market returns by the amount of their heavy costs, why not own the entire market at the minimal cost we were prepared to deliver? Then, investors could capture almost 100% of that annual return, rather than the 70%-80% fraction that would likely be achieved by our peers. This banally obvious insight quickly led to the simple invention that has been the most powerful manifestation of Vanguard's philosophy—the first index mutual fund in history. Today, "Bogle's Folly"—now Vanguard 500 Index Fund—is the largest mutual fund in the world.
Bogle was a common worker on Wall Street for twenty years, just like Neo in The Matrix, before he finally launched Vanguard; to follow that ideal that he alone saw, that nobody could ever convince him wasn’t real—that fundamental moral premise that the risk takers ought to reap the rewards of their investments.
Bogle was lost his job on Wall Street during the seventies recession; forcing him to finally follow the youthful idealism of his thesis and found Vanguard, just as Randall Wallace was fired from his job in TV before being “forced” to write his very first feature film—Braveheart. So it is that failure and setbacks are contextualized—they become steps along a greater journey, where one trades ones job for one’s higher ideals; which although they pay nothing today, are infinitely better long-term investments.
I recently heard Randall Wallace speak, and he said, “I had never written a feature-length screenplay before. But I decided that I would go down swinging. I was going to write what I wanted to write, and if Hollywood decided it wasn’t good enough, that was how I was going to go out—swinging.” And Braveheart, as you know, won numerous Academy Awards, including best picture and best director. Wallace was nominated for an Academy Award.
So there it is—in the personal journeys of Bogle and Wallace—they lived epic myths centered about a moral premise, and created enduring ventures in their wake. One might call them risk-takers, but look closer, and each knew that the bigger risk was in forgoing one’s moral premise to merely “go with the flow.” So it is that entrepreneurial risk has nothing to do with the roulette wheel that Wall street has become—it has nothing to do with MBAs risking pensions in hedge funds—but risk has everything to do with the lone individual following higher ideals—providing true leadership in going against the establishment; and creating lasting wealth for all.
Wallace had lost his job in TV after telling his boss that Hollywood could do better—that Hollywood could aim higher and voyage deeper. The producer had said, “If we tried for anything deeper, the backwoods folks in Nebraska wouldn’t get it.” To which Wallace said, “I am from the backwoods folks from Tennessee, and not only would they get it, but they would love it. And it is our duty to give it to them.”
And that very same exchange became the moral premise of Braveheart,
There's a difference between us. You think the people of this land exist to provide you with position. I think your position exists to provide those people with freedom. And I go to make sure that they have it. –William Wallace in Braveheart, by Randall Wallace
And too, it is the moral premise of Vanguard:
Just as my book points out, mutual funds are the paradigm of the triumph of managers' capitalism over owners' capitalism. Yet the winning strategy ultimately is held by the firm that provides a community advantage that serves shareholders and owners, simply by taking the lion's share of those oppressive costs out of the investment equation. It is hard to imagine that Dr. Franklin, reborn in our age, wouldn't have sought to serve, not himself, but the community in exactly the same way. –John Bogle, Capitalism, Entrepreneurship, and Investing—The 18th Century vs. the 21st Century, Founder and Former Chairman, The Vanguard Group At the Greater Philadelphia Venture Group
January 25, 2006
And too, it is the moral premise of Joseph Campbell’s life and works—of the Hero’s Journey:
Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute. –Joseph Campbell, author of Hero With a Thousand Faces
And when students hear these epic stories, courage is gained—the courage to fail for the moment, or get fired—but only because one is adhering to higher principles while dreaming of an exalted goal—of freedom as it was meant to be. The courage to believe in and follow Jefferson’s eloquent words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The courage to build those better ventures based on those higher ideals. Such courage will be needed to lead a renaissance; and I see that courage in each and every student I meet. May the Academy embrace it, and never stand in its way.a
