Understanding What a Business Is

I came across an article by Nathan Baschez titled, “What is a Business?” and wanted to share some of what I took away from it.

I’m intrigued by Nathan’s idea of having a deeper understanding of what a business is. Combining this understanding with knowing what we have control over, and knowing what we don’t can increase our odds of success; subject to whatever our definition of success is.

For me his idea on the interchangeability of business with ‘the economy’ really struck a chord. Couple that idea with business as an evolving complex adaptive system, similar to biological evolution, and you end up with a different, albeit on I’d never thought of, concept of what a business actually is.

His ideas on this evolutionary process within business and the economy as a whole, leads me to believe disruption is simply a change in pattern of economic activity; each mutation building new patterns on the old.

Nathan notes a lot of times people are ashamed of their ideas if their ideas are derivative. Yet too many times we spend too much time looking for the new when maybe the key to business success is simply building on the old?

We spend too much time trying to be ‘original’ when it comes to entrepreneurship. I’ve fallen into this originality trap many times over the last five years., but as Mike Rowe points out on Dirty Jobs, there’s a lot of money to be made shearing sheep, or even cleaning out septic tanks. Maybe true entrepreneurship is simply derivative? And maybe building a better mousetrap is the way to go? In the end, Nathan recommends we stop worrying about making one perfect idea — make a lot of ideas and see what happens.