They are a treasure

Um último recorte do livro "Small Giants" de Bo Burlingham, um sobre o criador da revista Inc., Bernard A. Goldhirsh:

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"Although it’s hard to imagine now, there was a time when it was not considered a compliment to be called “entrepreneurial.” Back in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, entrepreneurs were generally looked upon as shifty characters with little or no redeeming social value. The media ignored them, academia deplored them, and their companies got no more respect than they did. When people talked about business, they were referring to large, well-established, publicly traded companies.

Smaller, private companies were regarded as fringe elements, and therefore unimportant by definition.

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Bernie frequently talked about an aspect of entrepreneurship that other people sometimes overlooked - the intensely creative, almost artistic, part of the process. His thoughts on the subject grew partly out of an experience he’d had as an undergraduate at MIT, when he had taken a semester off to work for Dr. Edwin Land at Polaroid. There he had joined a small group of people charged with inventing the cameras of the future.

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“Dr. Land [was] like a hero to me,” he recalled. “Here was this fast-growing company, creating all kinds of jobs, created by this one man with an idea. And I thought, ‘This is so fantastic, that one person can do so much in terms of creating a business, creating an enterprise, creating jobs, increasing the tax base. So much good comes out of this one person and his idea and his willingness to go ahead and start a business.’”

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To be sure, the phenomenon was hardly limited to Dr. Land. Entrepreneurship, Bernie realized, was the means by which an economy continually renewed itself. Without it, a country would lose

its vitality, its energy, and become impoverished—just as a culture would become impoverished without the ongoing creation of art. “I kept thinking that the entrepreneur is like an artist, only business is the means of his expression….” he said. “He creates [a business] from nothing, just a blank canvas. It’s amazing. Somebody goes into a garage, has nothing but an idea, and out of the garage comes a company, a living company. It’s so special what they do. They are a treasure""