You may have more pressing
questions in your life than to wonder if former Spice Girl Victoria Beckham is
an entrepreneur or not, but just such a debate raged across my LinkedIn Pulse screen last week. Beckham had recently been crowned UK Entrepreneur of the Year by a British magazine, and columnist Gene Marks took issue.
“I don’t think Victoria Beckham is an
entrepreneur,” he wrote. “That’s because
entrepreneurship is not just about business savvy. . .Or celebrity. Or wealth.
Or even about financial success.
She’s got all that too. It’s
about the risk one takes to achieve those objectives.”
Marks then invoked the spirits of Sam Walton, who borrowed
money to purchase a variety store, and Richard Branson who “started his record
business with next to nothing in a church basement.” He also conjured up the
story of a person who left her job selling wholesale clothing to pitch her own
jewelry online, and another who left college and went into “their dad’s
business selling electronic components to the computer industry.” Marks
added, “These are the risk takers. These
are the dreamers. These are the
entrepreneurs.”
This might make for a good slogan for a weekend Tony Robbins
retreat, but it’s hard to find a definition of entrepreneur that’s wandered
further off the path of economic impact into the world of personality than
this. Welcome, my friends, to the 21st-century
Age of Big Entrepreneurship, where the world revolves around the personal attributes of the individual. In this case, Marks believed, Beckham might be a
successful businesswoman, but she’s
no entrepreneur—just “ask any successful entrepreneur who took risks and
suffered failures and they’ll tell you there is a difference.”[2]