The One Minute Entrepreneur

Techno-utopia: Norfolk in 10 years

Have you ever heard of or read the One Minute Manager written by Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson?

MBAs, managers and those who wanted to be MBAs and managers, dreaming of an office in the executive suite, were captivated.

For 20 years, the authors raked in millions based on a cookbook of common sense, common folklore and the KISS theory. (President Ronald Reagan mesmerized a nation with this theory, and then he took a nap.)

You have a choice, readers, aspiring entrepreneurs and self-styled nerds.  

You can listen to Zack Miller, the hot head honcho of Hatch Norfolk, an incubator for impoverished startups, for an hour in his headquarters on Granby Street. 

Or you can follow this guide, and it will only take you a minute or less.

For the first time ever, I give you the One Minute Entrepreneur in ten easy lessons.

1. Don’t listen to anyone over 35 – unless they give you lots of money. Then pretend to listen.

The new nerd

2. Pepper your conversations with words like “creative community” “engaging the community,” “transforming the community,” “creative culture,” “ re-invent,” “re-engineer,” “critical mass,” “entrepreneurial density,” and “vibrancy.”

3. Quote extensively from Richard Florida’s book, The Rise of the Creative Class, although you have never read the book but instead read a Wiki page encapsulating his theories.

4. Tell everyone you have a program to download digital sex or something like that. But say it with authority. Say it in digi-speak, so no one understands what you are talking about but are too embarrassed to ask.

5. Always have an answer to everything, even if you have no clue to the answer.

6. Promise, promise, promise…

7. Act like an over achiever and over producer.

8. Create an incubator, accelerator or hatch program. Or say you’re going to create an incubator, accelerator or hatch program. Brand it as an exclusive affair, open only to aspiring nerds, so you can charge big bucks.

9. Ask for anything – money, free space, desks, computers, wi-fi, utilities, parking, free breakfast at D’Egg Diner every morning.

10. Preach that technology will solve disease, ignorance, poverty and improve your city’s image, and write a techno-utopian book with a title like this one: Infinite Progress: How the Internet and Technology Will End Ignorance, Disease, Poverty, Hunger, and War

"Silicon Valley is guilty of many sins, but lack of ambition is not one of them."

Evgeny Morozov, author of To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism.

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