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Leadership 2,070 views

Who Is the Entrepreneur: All Mixed Together

You can stumble on important ideas in the oddest places. A few years ago I was reading a summer assignment with my daughter and in a terrific short book by Kate DiCamillo a passing description of the protagonist’s name caught my eye:

…we must go backward in time to the birth of a rat, a rat named Chiaroscuro and called Roscuro, a rat born into the filth and darkness of the dungeon several years before the mouse Despereaux was born upstairs in the light. Reader, do you know the definition of the word “chiaroscuro”? If you look in your dictionary, you will find that it means the arrangement of light and dark, darkness and light together… Roscuro’s parents were having a bit of fun when they named their son. Rats, in fact, think that life is very funny. [1]

Life is funny in many ways. When I read the book, something made me take Ms. DiCamillo’s suggestion, almost as if she was leaving me a clue; I did go look up chiaroscuro, and indeed the point of the book was so obvious then. Catalina was an art history major in college, so she’s much better equipped to explain why chiaroscuro is important in painting. Understanding that, I think there’s a lesson for entrepreneurs.

Catalina: Chiaroscuro has origins in the Renaissance as drawings that mixed light and dark colors to achieve a sense of dimension and volume. It became widely popular during the Baroque period (1600’s) by artists such as Caravaggio and Rubens, who took the craft to paint and introduced greater polarity between dark and light. Images and figures almost glow against the darkness in which they are bathed, allowing not only for volume and dimension, but also power and drama. It’s hard to ignore Baroque paintings in a museum.

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Chiaroscuro was the essence of Kate DiCamillo’s rat. If you’ve seen the movie, you know he was, indeed, light and dark all mixed together, which is what made the story. What does this have to do with who is the entrepreneur? When people read an interview like ours with Phil McDonnell they hear a founder of three cool tech companies; or when they read about Tom Brady, they hear a hugely successful entrepreneur-engineer whose successful startup makes products they use every day. When we look at most entrepreneurs what we see are pure-play entrepreneurial successes—all light—the opposite of the big company functionaries who have never had a creative idea in their lives and always follow the Procedure.

What people too quickly overlook is that life is hardly so simple. Tom Brady worked 13 years for Owens-Illinois learning what made him successful as a startup founder, not just technology, but all kinds of things about business and what makes a company work, things big companies actually do well. Google is no hidebound bureaucracy, but it’s a big company and Phil McDonnell learned a lot about execution and process that’s served him well in his own startups. Catalina has been at a big insurance company since graduating college in 2009, remember? She may chafe at structure and process at times, but she told me last week she has learned so much that she thinks is infinitely valuable to her future as an entrepreneur.

Catalina: If people had told me when I was an undergrad what it’s like in a large company, I would have never believed them, no matter how much detail they gave. I just don’t think I could have understood how things work; you have to see it and experience it. It’s crazy and frustrating, but eventually you can see how it works. If the goal for startups is to become serious enterprises, they can’t scale without systems and processes. Better come to terms with that now!

Most of what we hear and read about entrepreneurship sets entrepreneurial apart from the structure, process, discipline of big organizations, as far apart as light is from darkness. But this is a flawed framing, because it’s one dimensional thinking. Despereaux is a great story because Roscuro is not all light or all darkness, or even 50-50. That kind of shallow thinking is the same as saying it’s good to be entrepreneurial and bad to be big company:

This kind of thinking sets up a tension between what we think are opposites. In this framing, if you have more of one, you have to have less of the other. If you want to be an entrepreneur of the Light, you have to purge yourself of all those dark, big company things, to be pure and unpolluted. But we know you have to have some of those things to make a company function, so as entrepreneurs we hold our noses and satisfice, feeling we’ve settled for some rotten compromise. This kind of thinking would make for a mighty poor painting. As the Renaissance artists discovered, to bring out the full richness of a work of art, you need light and dark all mixed together. That’s what Kate DiCamillo was saying. The hero of the book really wasn’t the cute, pure mouse; it was the multidimensional rat, light and dark all mixed together. That is the kind of world we live in. For the entrepreneur, we can’t be trapped into either-or thinking about entrepreneur vs. structure. It has to be both:

The discipline of the big company is as far from the creative, flexible entrepreneur as light is from darkness, not because they are endpoints on the same dimension, but because they are fundamentally different dimensions, and both are important. To be a successful builder of an entrepreneurial enterprise, someone who can start with nothing but an idea and build a successful enterprise, it takes being great at both—creativity and structure, flexibility and process, light and dark all mixed together to make a beautiful painting.

And so we need to continue on our search for the entrepreneur. Catalina is preparing her interview of Jen Gabler, up next.


[1] DiCamillo, Kate. The Tale of Despereaux: being the story of a mouse, a princess, some soup, and a spool of thread. (Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press, 2003): 85.
[2] Chiaroscuro (English pronunciation: /kiˌɑːrəˈskjʊəroʊ/, Italian: [kjarosˈkuːro] “light-dark”) in art is “an Italian term which literally means ‘light-dark’.

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