[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][12.28]

霁月难逢UID: 2718354

关于REBORN FROM THE ASHES组COMMENTS活动的说明&汇总
https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1042733-1-2.html


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sorry 今天发的晚了

作为补偿把这篇拿出来给大家做做

这篇文章对写作有很多可借鉴的词句和例子，是以前我选出来的写作积累五十篇精品文章里的一篇，大家慢慢看哈

——草木也知愁

A special report on entrepreneurship

Global heroes

Mar 12th 2009 From The Economist print edition

Despite the downturn, entrepreneurs are enjoying a renaissance the world over, says Adrian Wooldridge
IN DECEMBER last year, three weeks after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai and in the midst of the worst global recession since the 1930s, 1,700 bright-eyed Indians gathered in a hotel in Bangalore for a conference on entrepreneurship. They mobbed business heroes such as Azim Premji, who transformed Wipro from a vegetable-oil company into a software giant, and Nandan Nilekani, one of the founders of Infosys, another software giant. They also engaged in a frenzy of networking. The conference was so popular that the organisers had to erect a huge tent to take the overflow. The aspiring entrepreneurs did not just want to strike it rich; they wanted to play their part in forging a new India. Speaker after speaker praised entrepreneurship as a powerful force for doing good as well as doing well.
Back in 1942 Joseph Schumpeter gave warning that the bureaucratisation of capitalism was killing the spirit of entrepreneurship. Instead of risking the turmoil of “creative destruction”, Keynesian economists, working hand in glove with big business and big government, claimed to be able to provide orderly prosperity. But perspectives have changed in the intervening decades, and Schumpeter’s entrepreneurs are once again roaming the globe.
Since the Reagan-Thatcher revolution of the 1980s, governments of almost every ideological stripe have embraced entrepreneurship. The European Union, the United Nations and the World Bank have also become evangelists. Indeed, the trend is now so well established that it has become the object of satire. Listen to me, says the leading character in one of the best novels of 2008, Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger”, and “you will know everything there is to know about how entrepreneurship is born, nurtured, and developed in this, the glorious 21st century of man.”
This special report will argue that the entrepreneurial idea has gone mainstream, supported by political leaders on the left as well as on the right, championed by powerful pressure groups, reinforced by a growing infrastructure of universities and venture capitalists and embodied by wildly popular business heroes such as Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson and India’s software kings. The report will also contend that entrepreneurialism needs to be rethought: in almost all instances it involves not creative destruction but creative creation.
The world’s greatest producer of entrepreneurs continues to be America. The lights may have gone out on Wall Street, but Silicon Valley continues to burn bright. High-flyers from around the world still flock to America’s universities and clamour to work for Google and Microsoft. And many of them then return home and spread the gospel.
The company that arranged the oversubscribed conference in Bangalore, The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), is an example of America’s pervasive influence abroad. TiE was founded in Silicon Valley in 1992 by a group of Indian transplants who wanted to promote entrepreneurship through mentoring, networking and education. Today the network has 12,000 members and operates in 53 cities in 12 countries, but it continues to be anchored in the Valley. Two of the leading lights at the meeting, Gururaj Deshpande and Suren Dutia, live, respectively, in Massachusetts and California. The star speaker, Wipro’s Mr Premji, was educated at Stanford; one of the most popular gurus, Raj Jaswa, is the president of TiE’s Silicon Valley chapter.
The globalisation of entrepreneurship is raising the competitive stakes for everyone, particularly in the rich world. Entrepreneurs can now come from almost anywhere, including once-closed economies such as India and China. And many of them can reach global markets from the day they open their doors, thanks to the falling cost of communications.
For most people the term “entrepreneur” simply means anybody who starts a business, be it a corner shop or a high-tech start up. This special report will use the word in a narrower sense to mean somebody who offers an innovative solution to a (frequently unrecognised) problem. The defining characteristic of entrepreneurship, then, is not the size of the company but the act of innovation.
A disproportionate number of entrepreneurial companies are, indeed, small start-ups. The best way to break into a business is to offer new products or processes. But by no means all start-ups are innovative: most new corner shops do much the same as old corner shops. And not all entrepreneurial companies are either new or small. Google is constantly innovating despite being, in Silicon Valley terms, something of a long-beard.
This narrower definition of entrepreneurship has an impressive intellectual pedigree going right back to Schumpeter. Peter Drucker, a distinguished management guru, defined the entrepreneur as somebody who “upsets and disorganises”. “Entrepreneurs innovate,” he said. “Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship.” William Baumol, one of the leading economists in this field, describes the entrepreneur as “the bold and imaginative deviator from established business patterns and practices”. Howard Stevenson, the man who did more than anybody else to champion the study of entrepreneurship at the Harvard Business School, defined entrepreneurship as “the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control”. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, arguably the world’s leading think-tank on entrepreneurship, makes a fundamental distinction between “replicative” and “innovative” entrepreneurship.
Five myths
Innovative entrepreneurs are not only more interesting than the replicative sort, they also carry more economic weight because they generate many more jobs. A small number of innovative start-ups account for a disproportionately large number of new jobs. But entrepreneurs can be found anywhere, not just in small businesses. There are plenty of misconceptions about entrepreneurship, five of which are particularly persistent. The first is that entrepreneurs are “orphans and outcasts”, to borrow the phrase of George Gilder, an American intellectual: lonely Atlases battling a hostile world or anti-social geeks inventing world-changing gizmos in their garrets. In fact, entrepreneurship, like all business, is a social activity. Entrepreneurs may be more independent than the usual suits who merely follow the rules, but they almost always need business partners and social networks to succeed.
The history of high-tech start-ups reads like a roll-call of business partnerships: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (Apple), Bill Gates and Paul Allen (Microsoft), Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google), Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes (Facebook). Ben and Jerry’s was formed when two childhood friends, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, got together to start an ice-cream business (they wanted to go into the bagel business but could not raise the cash). Richard Branson (Virgin) relied heavily on his cousin, Simon Draper, as well as other partners. Ramana Nanda, of Harvard Business School (HBS), and Jesper Sorensen, of Stanford Business School, have demonstrated that rates of entrepreneurship are significantly higher in organisations where a large number of employees are former entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurship also flourishes in clusters. A third of American venture capital flows into two places, Silicon Valley and Boston, and two-thirds into just six places, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego and Austin as well as the Valley and Boston. This is partly because entrepreneurship in such places is a way of life—coffee houses in Silicon Valley are full of young people loudly talking about their business plans—and partly because the infrastructure is already in place, which radically reduces the cost of starting a business.
The second myth is that most entrepreneurs are just out of short trousers. Some of today’s most celebrated figures were indeed astonishingly young when they got going: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell all dropped out of college to start their businesses, and the founders of Google and Facebook were still students when they launched theirs. Ben Casnocha started his first company when he was 12, was named entrepreneur of the year by Inc magazine at 17 and published a guide to running start-ups at 19.
But not all successful entrepreneurs are kids. Harland Sanders started franchising Kentucky Fried Chicken when he was 65. Gary Burrell was 52 when he left Allied Signal to help start Garmin, a GPS giant. Herb Kelleher was 40 when he founded Southwest Airlines, a business that pioneered no-frills discount flying in America. The Kauffman Foundation examined 652 American-born bosses of technology companies set up in 1995-2005 and found that the average boss was 39 when he or she started. The number of founders over 50 was twice as large as that under 25.
The third myth is that entrepreneurship is driven mainly by venture capital. This certainly matters in capital-intensive industries such as high-tech and biotechnology; it can also help start-ups to grow very rapidly. And venture capitalists provide entrepreneurs with advice, contacts and management skills as well as money.
But most venture capital goes into just a narrow sliver of business: computer hardware and software, semiconductors, telecommunications and biotechnology. Venture capitalists fund only a small fraction of start-ups. The money for the vast majority comes from personal debt or from the “three fs”—friends, fools and families. Google is often quoted as a triumph of the venture-capital industry, but Messrs Brin and Page founded the company without any money at all and launched it with about $1m raised from friends and connections.
Monitor, a management consultancy that has recently conducted an extensive survey of entrepreneurs, emphasises the importance of “angel” investors, who operate somewhere in the middle ground between venture capitalists and family and friends. They usually have some personal connection with their chosen entrepreneur and are more likely than venture capitalists to invest in a business when it is little more than a budding idea.
The fourth myth is that to succeed, entrepreneurs must produce some world-changing new product. Sir Ronald Cohen, the founder of Apax Partners, one of Europe’s most successful venture-capital companies, points out that some of the most successful entrepreneurs concentrate on processes rather than products. Richard Branson made flying less tedious by providing his customers with entertainment. Fred Smith built a billion-dollar business by improving the delivery of packages. Oprah Winfrey has become America’s richest self-made woman through successful brand management.
The fifth myth is that entrepreneurship cannot flourish in big companies. Many entrepreneurs are sworn enemies of large corporations, and many policymakers measure entrepreneurship by the number of small-business start-ups. This makes some sense. Start-ups are often more innovative than established companies because their incentives are sharper: they need to break into the market, and owner-entrepreneurs can do much better than even the most innovative company man.
Big can be beautiful too
But many big companies work hard to keep their people on their entrepreneurial toes. Johnson & Johnson operates like a holding company that provides financial muscle and marketing skills to internal entrepreneurs. Jack Welch tried to transform General Electric from a Goliath into a collection of entrepreneurial Davids. Jorma Ollila transformed Nokia, a long-established Finnish firm, from a maker of rubber boots and cables into a mobile-phone giant; his successor as boss of the company, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, is now talking about turning it into an internet company. Such men belong firmly in the pantheon of entrepreneurs.
Just as importantly, big firms often provide start-ups with their bread and butter. In many industries, especially pharmaceuticals and telecoms, the giants contract out innovation to smaller companies. Procter & Gamble tries to get half of its innovations from outside its own labs. Microsoft works closely with a network of 750,000 small companies around the world. Some 3,500 companies have grown up in Nokia’s shadow.
But how is the new enthusiasm for entrepreneurship standing up to the worldwide economic downturn? Entrepreneurs are being presented with huge practical problems. Customers are harder to find. Suppliers are becoming less accommodating. Capital is harder to raise. In America venture-capital investment in the fourth quarter of 2008 was down to $5.4 billion, 33% lower than a year earlier. Risk, the lifeblood of the entrepreneurial economy, is becoming something to be avoided.
Misfortune and fortune
The downturn is also confronting supporters of entrepreneurial capitalism with some awkward questions. Why have so many once-celebrated entrepreneurs turned out to be crooks? And why has the free-wheeling culture of Wall Street produced such disastrous results?
For many the change in public mood is equally worrying. Back in 2002, in the wake of the scandal over Enron, a dubious energy-trading company, Congress made life more difficult for start-ups with the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation on corporate governance. Now it is busy propping up failed companies such as General Motors and throwing huge sums of money at the public sector. Newt Gingrich, a Republican former speaker of America’s House of Representatives, worries that potential entrepreneurs may now be asking themselves: “Why not get a nice, safe government job instead?”
Yet the threat to entrepreneurship, both practical and ideological, can be exaggerated. The downturn has advantages as well as drawbacks. Talented staff are easier to find and office space is cheaper to rent. Harder times will eliminate the also-rans and, in the long run, could make it easier for the survivors to grow. As Schumpeter pointed out, downturns can act as a “good cold shower for the economic system”, releasing capital and labour from dying sectors and allowing newcomers to recombine in imaginative new ways.
Schumpeter also said that all established businesses are “standing on ground that is crumbling beneath their feet”. Today the ground is far less solid than it was in his day, so the opportunities for entrepreneurs are correspondingly more numerous. The information age is making it ever easier for ordinary people to start businesses and harder for incumbents to defend their territory. Back in 1960 the composition of the Fortune 500 was so stable that it took 20 years for a third of the constitutent companies to change. Now it takes only four years.
There are many reasons for this. First, the information revolution has helped to unbundle existing companies. In 1937 Ronald Coase argued, in his path-breaking article on “The Nature of the Firm”, that companies make economic sense when the bureaucratic cost of performing transactions under one roof is less than the cost of doing the same thing through the market. Second, economic growth is being driven by industries such as computing and telecommunications where innovation is particularly important. Third, advanced economies are characterised by a shift from manufacturing to services. Service firms are usually smaller than manufacturing firms and there are fewer barriers to entry.
Microsoft, Genentech, Gap and The Limited were all founded during recessions. Hewlett-Packard, Geophysical Service (now Texas Instruments), United Technologies, Polaroid and Revlon started in the Depression. Opinion polls suggest that entrepreneurs see a good as well as a bad side to the recession. In a survey carried out in eight emerging markets last November for Endeavor, a pressure group, 85% of the entrepreneurs questioned said they had already felt the impact of the crisis and 88% thought that worse was yet to come. But they also predicted, on average, that their businesses would grow by 31% and their workforces by 12% this year. Half of them thought they would be able to hire better people and 39% said there would be less competition.

adammaksimUID: 2675466

entrepreneur
entreperneurship
entreperneurialism

mob vt. 成群围住

frenzy n.狂乱

strike it rich  露富

doing good as well as doing well  应该是来自一句谚语: doing well by doing good

creative destruction : this term is used to describe the process of transformation that accompanies radical innovation.[1] In Schumpeter's vision of capitalism, innovative entry by entrepreneurs was the force that sustained long-term economic growth, even as it destroyed the value of established companies that enjoyed some degree of monopoly power.

Keynesian economics: a macroeconomic theory based on the ideas of 20th-century British economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynesian economics argues that private sector decisions sometimes lead to inefficient macroeconomic outcomes and therefore advocates active policy responses by the public sector, including monetary policy actions by the central bank and fiscal policy actions by the government to stabilize output over the business cycle. 主张宏观调控~   

work hand in glove 密切合作

roam 漫步，漫游

evangelist n.传道者

pressure group an organization that seeks to influence political decisions

spread the gospel

corner shop 小店

pedigree = lineage 血统

Atlas  被罚承受天地之重的巨人

geek n. 怪人

gizmo=gadget

suit n.a business executive

roll-call 点名

bagel 甜甜圈~~

radically  adv.激进地

short trousers  小孩儿穿的裤？

franchise v.授予特许经销权

no-frills discount   no frills is a term used to describe any service or product for which the non-essential features have been removed to keep the price low. The use of the term "frills" refers to a style of fabric decoration.
keep sb. on their toes

Jack Welch tried to transform General Electric from a Goliath into a collection of entreperneurial Davids
用了一个大卫与歌利亚的典故

Such men belong firmly in the pantheon of entrepreneurs.
pantheon 万神殿 很喜欢这句


Procter & Gamble tries to get half of its innovations from outside its own labs.
Microsoft works closely with a network of 750,000 small companies around the world.
Some 3,500 companies have grown up in Nokia’s shadow.
这三句说的差不多一个意思，但是说法不同

public sector ：sometimes referred to as the state sector is a part of the state that deals with either the production, delivery and allocation of goods and services by and for the government or its citizens, whether national, regional or local/municipal.

also-rans （竞赛、竞选等的）失败者

path-breaking  开创性的

companies make economic sense when the bureaucratic cost of performing transactions under one roof is less than the cost of doing the same thing through the market.
这句话解释了为什么要有公司这种东西


Opinion polls suggest that entrepreneurs see a good as well as a bad side to the recession.

comments:

This special report tells us a story about the global heroes-entrepreneurs and their entrepreneurship under a background of economic recession. As is argued in the report, the entrepreneurial trend has dominated the main stage of the new century, led by those adventurous entrepreneurs and nurtured by political leaders, pressure groups, universities and venture capitalists. As to me, the best definition for entrepreneurship may come to Stevenson’s “the pursuit of opportunities beyond the resources you currently control” despite the possible risk. And this gives out some clues about why is America the greatest producer of entrepreneurs in world. Believing in their America Dream, Americans tend to have much confidence in their future and seek their goals overlooking the risk. Although this confidence also contributes to the economic crisis, it’s truly the origin of many wealth miracles once propelling America’s economy growth. Now in a time of recession, it’s time for us to summon our heroes with entrepreneurship and spread their gospel. The future can pay us back only when we believe in it.

都说了不是又八UID: 2728357

哦哦～占座先哈。

splendidsunUID: 2723757

占座~~

dingyi0311UID: 2627919

Back in 2002, in the wake of the scandal over Enron, a dubious energy-trading company, Congress made life more difficult for start-ups with the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation on corporate governance
The downturn is also confronting supporters of entrepreneurial capitalism with some awkward questions. Why have so many once-celebrated entrepreneurs turned out to be crooks? And why has the free-wheeling culture of Wall Street produced such disastrous results?
Start-ups are often more innovative than established companies because their incentives are sharper: they need to break into the market, and owner-entrepreneurs can do much better than even the most innovative company man.
Big can be beautiful too


Franchising连锁经营
Entrepreneurship 企业家精神，创新精神
Gizmo小发明
Boot鞋子
Garret阁楼
Defining 最典型的
chapter.分会
working hand in glove with与。。。。狼狈为奸
strike it rich 碰运气
ideological stripe思想流派
transplant 移民
networking 网络化，相互帮助mentoring education


My comment
This article speak highly of the entrepreneurship, and the author optimistically predict that entrepreneurship enjoys renaissance despite current downturn of world economy. Also, the character of entrepreneurship was described by using the word “five myth”. After having read this article， I find many of the examples and argument can be used in our issues that relate to politic and business。
1.
the example of Steven jobs and Steven Wozniak in apple, Bill Gate and Paul Allen of Microsoft,Sergay brin and Larry Page of Google, and Mark zuckerberg, dusting Moskovitz and chris Hughes of facebook mark zukerberg, dusting moskovitz and chris hughes can be used to illustrate that people can make fortune through cooperation.
2.

procter&gamble try to get half of its innovations from outside its own labs. Microsoft works closely with a network 75000 small company around world. Some 3500 companies have grown up in Nokia’s shadow. This example can also be used to demonstrate the importance of cooperation. Cooperations between companies can save money and make use of the advantages of other companies. Even gaint as companies like Microsoft and Nokia, there are some area they are not good at, shifting task they can not do well to the companies that are good can reduce the cost in edevelop these disadvantages
3.
some economists regard the recession a chance to release capitals and labors from dying secters and allowing newcomers to recombine in imaginative ways, while others pessimistically predict that the economic of America can never restore to the level before the recession and some even worry about the future of capitalism. Since those people are all in the recession, the situation they positioned in is the same. Obviously, the difference in opinion comes from people’s different character.

qisaimanUID: 2703629

mob 围攻？
forge 锻造
intervene 干涉
evangelist 传道士
satire 讽刺
venture capitalist 风投
creative destruction
In contrast, Joseph Schumpeter advocated recession as creative destruction-a cleansing process to weed out the weak and create room for new businesses.
与此相反，主张衰退约瑟夫熊彼特创造性破坏作为一个清洗过程剔除弱者和创造空间新的业务

gospel 福音

bright-eyed 热情的
transplant 移民
anchor 依靠
start-ups 新办企业
pedigree 血统 谱系
deviator 偏差 脱轨
replicative and innovative
budding 萌芽的 初露头角的，
disastrous result
prop up
incumbents 现任者


---summary---

despite the turndown , the entrepreneurship is blooming all over the world.
then after a review from 1940s to recent time , the report comes to the first argument that entrepreneurial idea has gone mainstream, followed by a more confident conclusion, that is, reconsideration to the entrepreneurship is needed, instead of the "creative destruction " predicted in 1940s, a creative creation is the fact in almost all instances .
to support above views , a company created by Indian transplants in Silicon Valley is brought up. next the paper defines the word 'entrepreneurship' with a special feature : not the size but the innovation. meanwhile, innovation is interpreted by citing several famous person's remarks .
to get a better understanding, the five myths are described and then rebut using corresponding reasons and examples.

the first is entrepreneur is a social activity;
second is not all successful are kids;
third is venture capitalist only fund a small fraction of the start-ups;
fourth is
the process overweight the products ;
fifth is ent can flourish in big companies ;

facing the difficulty of finding customer, raising capital and etc, many suspect that ent is in danger. another awkward question is that why such disastrous results stems from the culture of wall-street .Also the author worries that the over-active bailout of the government helps to someone indulge in the safe government job, hence leading to more uncertainty.

through a nice argument , the paper shows us that there can be many advantages in spite of drawbacks , including cheaper rent , easily-find staff and less rivals.
in one words , more opportunities is presented too. besides, why there fewer barriers to entry is discussed.

----puzzle----
companies make economic sense when the bureaucratic cost of performing transactions under one roof is less than the cost of doing the same thing through the market.
--------comments ----
this is really a beautiful paper, though with one flaw I found and many new words I encountered.
the flaw is the awkward question about wall-street culture is not answered hereinafter , at least directly. but there are more convincing argument : such as the interpretation of the fifth myths, the connection between big giant and small companies is explained thoroughly ; the comments on advantages and drawbacks is smart likewise.

ps: download the "nature of the firm ", this report and it both deserve reading twice at least.

fancywwUID: 2583671

企业家和创业是这个时代永恒的主题之一。
草草精选的文章，就好好读吧。第一次尝试整篇文章细细过一遍，前面几段有些批注来自网上某blog。
估计一两天也搞不定，先to be continued吧

IN DECEMBER last year, three weeks after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai and in the midst of  the worst global recession since the 1930s, 1,700 bright-eyed Indians gathered in a hotel in Bangalore for a conference on entrepreneurship. They mobbed(=crowd) business heroes such as Azim Premji, who transformed Wipro from a vegetable-oil company into a software giant, and Nandan Nilekani, one of the founders of Infosys, another software giant. They also engaged in a frenzy of networking. The conference was so popular that the organisers had to
to erect a huge tent to take the overflow. The aspiring entrepreneurs did not just want to strike it rich（暴富）;they wanted to play their part in forging a new India. Speaker after speaker praised entrepreneurship as a powerful force for doing good as well as doing well.

◆doing good as well as doing well：做好事并将其做好。
◆To forge a new India:  比喻性动词

Back in 1942 Joseph Schumpeter gave warning that the bureaucratisation of capitalism was killing the spirit of entrepreneurship. Instead of risking the turmoil of “creative destruction”, Keynesian economists, working hand in glove (密切合作） with big business and big government, claimed to be able to provide orderly prosperity. But perspectives have changed in the intervening decades, and Schumpeter’s entrepreneurs are once again roaming the globe.

Since the Reagan-thatcher revolution of the 1980s, governments of almost every ideological stripe have embraced entrepreneurship. The European Union, the United Nations and the World Bank have also become evangelists. Indeed, the trend is now so well established that it has become the object of satire. Listen to me,says the leading character in one of the best novels of 2008, Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger”, and “you will know everything there is to know about how entrepreneurship is born, nurtured, and developed  
in this, the glorious 21st century of man.”
◆evangelist 意为布道者、传福音者。在这里引申作比喻义，是支持者。但这种支持者不是一般的支持者，他们充满了虔诚和热情。
◆Indeed, the trend is now so well established that it has become the object of satire（讽刺）.说明一件事情有影响力，不一定非得用形容词。这句话是一个很好的启示，我们写作时可以试着在少用形容词的情况下增强句子的表达效果。

This special report will argue that the entrepreneurial idea has gone mainstream, supported by political leaders on the left as well as on the right, championed by powerful pressure groups, reinforced by a growing infrastructure of universities and venture capitalists and embodied by wildly popular business heroes such as Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson and India' software kings. (整齐的结构)the report will also contend that entrepreneurialism needs to be rethought: in almost all instances it involves not creative destruction but creative creation.

The world's greatest producer of entrepreneurs continues to be America. The lights may have gone out on Wall Street, but Silicon Valley continues to burn bright.(借代修辞) High-flyers from around the world still flock to America's universities and clamour to work for Google and Microsoft. And many of them then return home and spread the gospel. （用词形象感很一致）

The company that arranged the oversubscribed conference in Bangalore, The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), is an example of America’s pervasive influence abroad. TiE was founded in Silicon Valley in 1992 by a group of Indian transplants who wanted to promote entrepreneurship through mentoring, networking and education. Today the network has 12,000 members and operates in 53 cities in 12 countries, but it continues to be anchored in the Valley. Two of the leading lights at the meeting, Gururaj Deshpande and Suren Dutia, live, respectively, in Massachusetts and California. The star speaker, Wipro’s Mr Premji, was educated at Stanford; one of the most popular gurus, Raj Jaswa, is the president of TiE’s Silicon Valley chapter.

◆leading lights这个词组不仅运用了头韵修辞，而且烘托出了会场的那种气氛。一石双鸟，值得学习。
◆guru原意为印度教的精神领袖，现多用意指某一领域的专家，相当于expert。同义词还有pundit，源自梵文。由此可窥见英文的包容性。我个人推测英语的命运和它的包容性密不可分。
（题外话，raj让我想到了tbbh中的印度人rajesh）

The globalisation of entrepreneurship is raising the competitive stakes for everyone, particularly in the rich world. Entrepreneurs can now come from almost anywhere, including once-closed economies such as India and China. And many of them can reach global markets from the day they open their doors, thanks to the falling cost of communications.

For most people the term “entrepreneur” simply means anybody who starts a business, be it a corner shop or a high-tech start up. This special report will use the word in a narrower sense to mean somebody who offers an innovative solution to a (frequently unrecognised) problem. The defining characteristic of entrepreneurship, then, is not the size of the company but the act of innovation.

◆use the word in a narrower sense，“狭义上讲”。可以说是议论文写作必备表达。

A disproportionate number of entrepreneurial companies are, indeed, small start-ups. The best way to break into a business is to offer new products or processes. But by no means all（not all） start-ups are innovative: most new corner shops do much the same as old corner shops. And not all entrepreneurial companies are either new or small. Google is constantly innovating despite being, in Silicon Valley terms, something of a long-beard.
◆A disproportionate number of ：在这里其实就是很多的意思。多究竟有多少？disproportionate一词说明了多得不成比例，表达效果明显强于a large number of等。
◆break into ：顺利参与，成功打入

This narrower definition of entrepreneurship has an impressive intellectual pedigree(渊源) going right back to Schumpeter. 【Peter Drucker, a distinguished management guru, defined the entrepreneur as somebody who “upsets and disorganises”. “Entrepreneurs innovate,” he said. “Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship.” William Baumol, one of the leading economists in this field, describes the entrepreneur as “the bold and imaginative deviator from established business patterns and practices”. Howard Stevenson, the man who did more than anybody else to champion the study of entrepreneurship at the Harvard Business School, defined entrepreneurship as “the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control”. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, arguably the world’s leading think-tank on entrepreneurship, makes a fundamental distinction between “replicative” and “innovative” entrepreneurship.】论证素材

Five myths
Innovative entrepreneurs are not only more interesting than the replicative sort, they also carry more economic weight because they generate many more jobs. A small number of innovative start-ups account for a disproportionately large number of new jobs. But entrepreneurs can be found anywhere, not just in small businesses. There are plenty of misconceptions about entrepreneurship, five of which are particularly persistent. The first is that entrepreneurs are “orphans and outcasts（弃儿）”, to borrow the phrase of George Gilder, an American intellectual: lonely Atlases battling a hostile world or anti-social geeks inventing world-changing gizmos（小玩意） in their garrets（阁楼）. In fact, entrepreneurship, like all business, is a social activity. Entrepreneurs may be more independent than the usual suits who merely follow the rules, but they almost always need business partners and social networks to succeed.

The history of high-tech start-ups reads like a roll-call of business partnerships: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (Apple), Bill Gates and Paul Allen (Microsoft), Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google), Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes (Facebook). Ben and Jerry’s was formed when two childhood friends, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, got together to start an ice-cream business (they wanted to go into the bagel business but could not raise the cash). Richard Branson (Virgin) relied heavily on his cousin, Simon Draper, as well as other partners. Ramana Nanda, of Harvard Business School (HBS), and Jesper Sorensen, of Stanford Business School, have demonstrated that rates of entrepreneurship are significantly higher in organisations where a large number of employees are former entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship also flourishes in clusters. A third of American venture capital flows into two places, Silicon Valley and Boston, and two-thirds into just six places, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego and Austin as well as the Valley and Boston. This is partly because entrepreneurship in such places is a way of life—coffee houses in Silicon Valley are full of young people loudly talking about their business plans—and partly because the infrastructure is already in place, which radically reduces the cost of starting a business.

The second myth is that most entrepreneurs are just out of short trousers. Some of today’s most celebrated figures were indeed astonishingly young when they got going: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell all dropped out of college to start their businesses, and the founders of Google and Facebook were still students when they launched theirs. Ben Casnocha started his first company when he was 12, was named entrepreneur of the year by Inc magazine at 17 and published a guide to running start-ups at 19.

But not all successful entrepreneurs are kids. Harland Sanders started franchising Kentucky Fried Chicken when he was 65. Gary Burrell was 52 when he left Allied Signal to help start Garmin, a GPS giant. Herb Kelleher was 40 when he founded Southwest Airlines, a business that pioneered no-frills discount flying in America. The Kauffman Foundation examined 652 American-born bosses of technology companies set up in 1995-2005 and found that the average boss was 39 when he or she started. The number of founders over 50 was twice as large as that under 25.

The third myth is that entrepreneurship is driven mainly by venture capital. This certainly matters in capital-intensive industries such as high-tech and biotechnology; it can also help start-ups to grow very rapidly. And venture capitalists provide entrepreneurs with advice, contacts and management skills as well as money.

But most venture capital goes into just a narrow sliver of business: computer hardware and software, semiconductors, telecommunications and biotechnology. Venture capitalists fund only a small fraction of start-ups. The money for the vast majority comes from personal debt or from the “three fs”—friends, fools and families. Google is often quoted as a triumph of the venture-capital industry, but Messrs Brin and Page founded the company without any money at all and launched it with about $1m raised from friends and connections.

Monitor, a management consultancy that has recently conducted an extensive survey of entrepreneurs, emphasises the importance of “angel” investors, who operate somewhere in the middle ground between venture capitalists and family and friends. They usually have some personal connection with their chosen entrepreneur and are more likely than venture capitalists to invest in a business when it is little more than a budding idea.

The fourth myth is that to succeed, entrepreneurs must produce some world-changing new product. Sir Ronald Cohen, the founder of Apax Partners, one of Europe’s most successful venture-capital companies, points out that some of the most successful entrepreneurs concentrate on processes rather than products. Richard Branson made flying less tedious by providing his customers with entertainment. Fred Smith built a billion-dollar business by improving the delivery of packages. Oprah Winfrey has become America’s richest self-made woman through successful brand management.

The fifth myth is that entrepreneurship cannot flourish in big companies. Many entrepreneurs are sworn enemies of large corporations, and many policymakers measure entrepreneurship by the number of small-business start-ups. This makes some sense. Start-ups are often more innovative than established companies because their incentives are sharper: they need to break into the market, and owner-entrepreneurs can do much better than even the most innovative company man.

Big can be beautiful too
But many big companies work hard to keep their people on their entrepreneurial toes. Johnson & Johnson operates like a holding company that provides financial muscle and marketing skills to internal entrepreneurs. Jack Welch tried to transform General Electric from a Goliath into a collection of entrepreneurial Davids. Jorma Ollila transformed Nokia, a long-established Finnish firm, from a maker of rubber boots and cables into a mobile-phone giant; his successor as boss of the company, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, is now talking about turning it into an internet company. Such men belong firmly in the pantheon of entrepreneurs.

Just as importantly, big firms often provide start-ups with their bread and butter. In many industries, especially pharmaceuticals and telecoms, the giants contract out innovation to smaller companies. Procter & Gamble tries to get half of its innovations from outside its own labs. Microsoft works closely with a network of 750,000 small companies around the world. Some 3,500 companies have grown up in Nokia’s shadow.

But how is the new enthusiasm for entrepreneurship standing up to the worldwide economic downturn? Entrepreneurs are being presented with huge practical problems. Customers are harder to find. Suppliers are becoming less accommodating. Capital is harder to raise. In America venture-capital investment in the fourth quarter of 2008 was down to $5.4 billion, 33% lower than a year earlier. Risk, the lifeblood of the entrepreneurial economy, is becoming something to be avoided.

Misfortune and fortune
The downturn is also confronting supporters of entrepreneurial capitalism with some awkward questions. Why have so many once-celebrated entrepreneurs turned out to be crooks? And why has the free-wheeling culture of Wall Street produced such disastrous results?
For many the change in public mood is equally worrying. Back in 2002, in the wake of the scandal over Enron, a dubious energy-trading company, Congress made life more difficult for start-ups with the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation on corporate governance. Now it is busy propping up failed companies such as General Motors and throwing huge sums of money at the public sector. Newt Gingrich, a Republican former speaker of America’s House of Representatives, worries that potential entrepreneurs may now be asking themselves: “Why not get a nice, safe government job instead?”

Yet the threat to entrepreneurship, both practical and ideological, can be exaggerated. The downturn has advantages as well as drawbacks. Talented staff are easier to find and office space is cheaper to rent. Harder times will eliminate the also-rans and, in the long run, could make it easier for the survivors to grow. As Schumpeter pointed out, downturns can act as a “good cold shower for the economic system”, releasing capital and labour from dying sectors and allowing newcomers to recombine in imaginative new ways.

Schumpeter also said that all established businesses are “standing on ground that is crumbling beneath their feet”. Today the ground is far less solid than it was in his day, so the opportunities for entrepreneurs are correspondingly more numerous. The information age is making it ever easier for ordinary people to start businesses and harder for incumbents to defend their territory. Back in 1960 the composition of the Fortune 500 was so stable that it took 20 years for a third of the constitutent companies to change. Now it takes only four years.

There are many reasons for this. First, the information revolution has helped to unbundle existing companies. In 1937 Ronald Coase argued, in his path-breaking article on “The Nature of the Firm”, that companies make economic sense when the bureaucratic cost of performing transactions under one roof is less than the cost of doing the same thing through the market. Second, economic growth is being driven by industries such as computing and telecommunications where innovation is particularly important. Third, advanced economies are characterised by a shift from manufacturing to services. Service firms are usually smaller than manufacturing firms and there are fewer barriers to entry.

Microsoft, Genentech, Gap and The Limited were all founded during recessions. Hewlett-Packard, Geophysical Service (now Texas Instruments), United Technologies, Polaroid and Revlon started in the Depression. Opinion polls suggest that entrepreneurs see a good as well as a bad side to the recession. In a survey carried out in eight emerging markets last November for Endeavor, a pressure group, 85% of the entrepreneurs questioned said they had already felt the impact of the crisis and 88% thought that worse was yet to come. But they also predicted, on average, that their businesses would grow by 31% and their workforces by 12% this year. Half of them thought they would be able to hire better people and 39% said there would be less competition.

rodgoodUID: 2619326

Useful words and expressions:


mob汇集


strike it rich 一夜暴富


frenzy疯狂，狂热


forge锻造，伪造


bureaucratisation官僚主义


satire讽刺，讥讽


gospel准则，信条


oversubscribed过多预定


anchor锚，停泊


stake赌注，奖金，木桩


by no means绝不，绝没有


guru领袖，专家


outcasts被遗弃（的）


roll-call点名


bagel面包圈


budding萌芽的 idea

tedious冗长的，乏味的


sworn被咒骂的 swear发誓，咒骂


holding company控股公司


crooks恶棍


dubious怀疑的，有问题的，靠不住的


unbundle解开，拆散


account for对……负有责任


High-flyers报复极高的人，有野心的人

in the midst of入…之中，在…的中途

standing up to勇敢地抵抗
think-tank智囊团

also-rans落选之马，败者，落选者

doing good as well as doing well 前者是有用处，有好处，后者是做得好


working hand in glove with big business and big government 与密切合作

in the intervening decades 在这几十年间


Reagan-Thatcher revolution撒切尔-里根革命


governments of almost every ideological stripe 这个比喻用得好啊

The lights may have gone out on Wall Street, but Silicon Valley continues to burn bright. High-flyers from around the world still flock to America’s universities and clamour吵闹，喧哗 to work for Google and Microsoft.这个比喻相当生动~~

This narrower definition of entrepreneurship has an impressive intellectual pedigree家谱，血统 going right back to Schumpeter.


Most entrepreneurs are just out of short trousers. 年轻人


pioneered no-frills discount flying

keep their people on their entrepreneurial toes 使有警觉

Such men belong firmly in the pantheon of entrepreneurs.

Provide start-ups with their bread and butter

The giants contract out innovation to smaller companies


My comments:

Despite the report focuses on prediction that the recent recession is more likely an opportunity rather than a block for entrepreneurs to start a new career, my concern is the characteristics an entrepreneur needs, most importantly, the act of innovation.

We can easily find something essential to be a successful entrepreneur from examples in the report. Firstly, entrepreneurship is a social activity which needs partnership and teamwork or social network. Secondly, investigation results showed that the number of founders over 50 was twice as much as that below 25, showing that abundant of life and career experience is necessary to get a start. Thirdly, starting from a start-up may provide a good opportunity to take advantage of market-breaking momentum. Thus, without shield from an established one, you can enjoy a broader space of development. Finally, possessing a sharp vision is of great importance. As the report says, the recession may be a fortune for entrepreneurs. But how well one makes use of it determines what he can get from it.

windandrain2004UID: 2597690

占楼

jinziqiUID: 2387034

Good words
downturn 经济衰退=recession
renaissance 复兴
mob 聚集
frenzy 狂乱
capitalism 资本主义
turmoil 混乱
intervene 干扰
roam 漫步
evangelist 布道者
satire 讽刺作品
venture 商业
gospel 绝对真理
oversubscribed 供不应求的
guru 教师
stake 赌注
disproportionate 不成比例的
think-tank 智囊团
by no means一点也不
flourish 繁荣昌盛
pharmaceutical 药物的
crook 骗子
dubious 可疑的
incumbent 在职者
advantages as well as drawbacks

Good sentences
The aspiring entrepreneurs did not just want to strike it rich; they wanted to play their part in forging a new India. Speaker after speaker praised entrepreneurship as a powerful force for doing good as well as doing well.

But perspectives have changed in the intervening干扰 decades, and Schumpeter’s entrepreneurs are once again roaming漫步 the globe.

Indeed,the trend is now so well established that it has become the object of satire讽刺作品.

This special report will argue that the entrepreneurial idea has gone mainstream, supported by political leaders on the left as well as on the right, championed by powerful pressure groups, reinforced by a growing infrastructure of universities and
venture商业 capitalists and embodied by wildly popular business heroes such as Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson and India’s software kings. 好长的一个句子啊…

The report will also contend竞争 that entrepreneurialism needs to be rethought: in almost all instances it involves not creative destruction but creative creation.

The world’s greatest producer of entrepreneurs continues to be America. The lights may have gone out on Wall Street, but Silicon Valley continues to burn bright.
High-flyers from around the world still flock to America’s universities and clamour to work for Google and Microsoft.
这段写的真好啊

Just as importantly, big firms often provide start-ups with their bread and butter.   

Today the ground is far less solid than it was in his day, so the opportunities for entrepreneurs are correspondingly more numerous.

Companies make economic sense when the bureaucratic cost of performing transactions under one roof is less than the cost of doing the same thing through the market.

For most people the term “entrepreneur” simply means anybody who starts a business, be it a corner shop or a high-tech start up. 后半句什么意思?
原来是说..原型应该是 anybody who starts a business, whether it be a corner shop or a high-tech start up.
whether it be... or..  虚拟语气，让步。

The second myth is that most entrepreneurs are just out of short trousers. 这个…不明白是啥意思..?
形容他们年轻。

感谢hugesea!

My comment

It is the looongest passage I have ever read... It talked about entrepreneurship during a special time which called renaissance. Entrepreneurship was defined as the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control. Even if there are a number of entrepreneurs are just out of short trousers when they success, the average boss was 39 when he or she started. Looking at Steven Jobs, what a tortuous way has he walked so that he could achieve the gate of succeed. You may say that he is a crook, but how about Bill Gates? Haven't he ever cheated? Actually, they are the same, and it is because that Bill Gates is clever and he deceived Jobs that he is richer than Jobs. To sum, to become an entrepreneur is not easy, which needs a sophisticated personality and an intelligent brain to devise strategy in the command tent.

hugeseaUID: 190158

For most people the term “entrepreneur” simply means anybody who starts a business, be it a corner shop or a high-tech start up. 后半句什么意思?
The second myth is that most entrepreneurs are just out of short trousers. 这个…不明白是啥意思..?
jinziqi 发表于 2009-12-28 19:54

be it a corner shop or a high-tech start up.  这个是一个省略结构，原形为：whether it be a corner shop or a high-tech start up. 意思是：“不管（无论）是街角的小商店还是高科技公司” whethe it be...or....是虚拟语气，表让步。

The second myth is that most enterpreneurs are just out of short trousers.
从上下文看，我觉得这句应该这样翻译：(关于创业者的）第二个迷思是大部分的创业者都是年轻人。

不知道我的理解对还是不对，大家讨论吧

tequilawineUID: 2702008

zhanyixia

plukaUID: 2721764

Despite the downturn, entrepreneurs are enjoying a renaissance the world over, says Adrian Wooldridge.
They mobbed business heroes such as Azim Premji.（If you say that someone is being mobbed by a crowd of people, you mean that the people are trying to talk to them or get near them in an enthusiastic or threatening way.）
They also engaged in a frenzy of networking.  
The aspiring entrepreneurs did not just want to strike it rich; they wanted to play their part in forging a new India. 

...Keynesian economists, working hand in glove with big business and big government...(If you work hand in glove with someone, you work very closely with them.)
But perspectives have changed in the intervening decades, and Schumpeter’s entrepreneurs are once again roaming the globe.

====================好句太多，不摘了，直接记录======================
Since the Reagan-Thatcher revolution of the 1980s, governments of almost every ideological stripe have embraced entrepreneurship. The European Union, the United Nations and the World Bank have also become evangelists（福音传道者）. Indeed, the trend is now so well established that it has become the object of satire. Listen to me, says the leading character in one of the best novels of 2008, Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger”, and “you will know everything there is to know about how entrepreneurship is born, nurtured, and developed in this, the glorious 21st century of man.”
This special report will argue that the entrepreneurial idea has gone mainstream, supported by political leaders on the left as well as on the right, championed by powerful pressure groups, reinforced by a growing infrastructure of universities and venture capitalists and embodied by wildly popular business heroes such as Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson and India’s software kings. The report will also contend that entrepreneurialism needs to be rethought: in almost all instances it involves not creative destruction but creative creation.
The world’s greatest producer of entrepreneurs continues to be America. The lights may have gone out on Wall Street, but Silicon Valley continues to burn bright. High-flyers from around the world still flock to America’s universities and clamour to work for Google and Microsoft. And many of them then return home and spread the gospel.
The company that arranged the oversubscribed（过多订购的） conference in Bangalore, The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), is an example of America’s pervasive influence abroad. TiE was founded in Silicon Valley in 1992 by a group of Indian transplants who wanted to promote entrepreneurship through mentoring, networking and education. Today the network has 12,000 members and operates in 53 cities in 12 countries, but it continues to be anchored in the Valley. Two of the leading lights at the meeting, Gururaj Deshpande and Suren Dutia, live, respectively, in Massachusetts and California. The star speaker, Wipro’s Mr Premji, was educated at Stanford; one of the most popular gurus（古鲁，领袖）, Raj Jaswa, is the president of TiE’s Silicon Valley chapter.
The globalisation of entrepreneurship is raising the competitive stakes for everyone, particularly in the rich world. Entrepreneurs can now come from almost anywhere, including once-closed economies such as India and China. And many of them can reach global markets from the day they open their doors, thanks to the falling cost of communications.
For most people the term “entrepreneur” simply means anybody who starts a business, be it a corner shop or a high-tech start up. This special report will use the word in a narrower sense to mean somebody who offers an innovative solution to a (frequently unrecognised) problem. The defining characteristic of entrepreneurship, then, is not the size of the company but the act of innovation. 
A disproportionate（不成比例的） number of entrepreneurial companies are, indeed, small start-ups. The best way to break into a business is to offer new products or processes. But by no means all start-ups are innovative: most new corner shops do much the same as old corner shops. And not all entrepreneurial companies are either new or small. Google is constantly innovating despite being, in Silicon Valley terms, something of a long-beard.（这表达太可爱了） 
This narrower definition of entrepreneurship has an impressive intellectual pedigree（血统，家谱）going right back to Schumpeter. Peter Drucker, a distinguished management guru, defined the entrepreneur as somebody who “upsets and disorganises”. “Entrepreneurs innovate,” he said. “Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship.” William Baumol, one of the leading economists in this field, describes the entrepreneur as “the bold and imaginative deviator from established business patterns and practices”. Howard Stevenson, the man who did more than anybody else to champion the study of entrepreneurship at the Harvard Business School, defined entrepreneurship as “the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control”. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, arguably the world’s leading think-tank on entrepreneurship, makes a fundamental distinction between “replicative” and “innovative” entrepreneurship.

Five myths
Innovative entrepreneurs are not only more interesting than the replicative sort, they also carry more economic weight because they generate many more jobs. A small number of innovative start-ups account for a disproportionately large number of new jobs. But entrepreneurs can be found anywhere, not just in small businesses. There are plenty of misconceptions about entrepreneurship, five of which are particularly persistent. The first is that entrepreneurs are “orphans and outcasts”, to borrow the phrase of George Gilder, an American intellectual: lonely Atlases battling a hostile world or anti-social geeks（做低级滑稽表演的人） inventing world-changing gizmos（小发明） in their garrets（顶楼）. In fact, entrepreneurship, like all business, is a social activity. Entrepreneurs may be more independent than the usual suits who merely follow the rules, but they almost always need business partners and social networks to succeed.
The history of high-tech start-ups reads like a roll-call（点名） of business partnerships: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (Apple), Bill Gates and Paul Allen (Microsoft), Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google), Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes (Facebook). Ben and Jerry’s was formed when two childhood friends, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, got together to start an ice-cream business (they wanted to go into the bagel（百吉饼（先蒸后烤的发面圈）） business but could not raise the cash). Richard Branson (Virgin) relied heavily on his cousin, Simon Draper, as well as other partners. Ramana Nanda, of Harvard Business School (HBS), and Jesper Sorensen, of Stanford Business School, have demonstrated that rates of entrepreneurship are significantly higher in organisations where a large number of employees are former entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurship also flourishes in clusters. A third of American venture capital flows into two places, Silicon Valley and Boston, and two-thirds into just six places, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego and Austin as well as the Valley and Boston. This is partly because entrepreneurship in such places is a way of life—coffee houses in Silicon Valley are full of young people loudly talking about their business plans—and partly because the infrastructure is already in place, which radically reduces the cost of starting a business. 
The second myth is that most entrepreneurs are just out of short trousers.（很年轻？） Some of today’s most celebrated figures were indeed astonishingly young when they got going: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell all dropped out of college to start their businesses, and the founders of Google and Facebook were still students when they launched theirs. Ben Casnocha started his first company when he was 12, was named entrepreneur of the year by Inc magazine at 17 and published a guide to running start-ups at 19. 
But not all successful entrepreneurs are kids. Harland Sanders started franchising Kentucky Fried Chicken when he was 65. Gary Burrell was 52 when he left Allied Signal to help start Garmin, a GPS giant. Herb Kelleher was 40 when he founded Southwest Airlines, a business that pioneered no-frills（不提供非必要服务的） discount flying in America. The Kauffman Foundation examined 652 American-born bosses of technology companies set up in 1995-2005 and found that the average boss was 39 when he or she started. The number of founders over 50 was twice as large as that under 25. 
The third myth is that entrepreneurship is driven mainly by venture capital. This certainly matters in capital-intensive industries such as high-tech and biotechnology; it can also help start-ups to grow very rapidly. And venture capitalists provide entrepreneurs with advice, contacts and management skills as well as money. 
But most venture capital goes into just a narrow sliver of business: computer hardware and software, semiconductors, telecommunications and biotechnology. Venture capitalists fund only a small fraction of start-ups. The money for the vast majority comes from personal debt or from the “three fs”—friends, fools and families. Google is often quoted as a triumph of the venture-capital industry, but Messrs Brin and Page founded the company without any money at all and launched it with about $1m raised from friends and connections.（人脉通达可用connected）
Monitor, a management consultancy that has recently conducted an extensive survey of entrepreneurs, emphasises the importance of “angel” investors, who operate somewhere in the middle ground between venture capitalists and family and friends. They usually have some personal connection with their chosen entrepreneur and are more likely than venture capitalists to invest in a business when it is little more than a budding idea.
The fourth myth is that to succeed, entrepreneurs must produce some world-changing new product. Sir Ronald Cohen, the founder of Apax Partners, one of Europe’s most successful venture-capital companies, points out that some of the most successful entrepreneurs concentrate on processes rather than products. Richard Branson made flying less tedious by providing his customers with entertainment. Fred Smith built a billion-dollar business by improving the delivery of packages. Oprah Winfrey has become America’s richest self-made woman through successful brand management.
The fifth myth is that entrepreneurship cannot flourish in big companies. Many entrepreneurs are sworn enemies of large corporations, and many policymakers measure entrepreneurship by the number of small-business start-ups. This makes some sense. Start-ups are often more innovative than established companies because their incentives are sharper: they need to break into the market, and owner-entrepreneurs can do much better than even the most innovative company man.
Big can be beautiful too
But many big companies work hard to keep their people on their entrepreneurial toes. Johnson & Johnson operates like a holding company that provides financial muscle and marketing skills to internal entrepreneurs. Jack Welch tried to transform General Electric from a Goliath（歌利亚） into a collection of entrepreneurial Davids. Jorma Ollila transformed Nokia, a long-established Finnish firm, from a maker of rubber boots and cables into a mobile-phone giant; his successor as boss of the company, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, is now talking about turning it into an internet company. Such men belong firmly in the pantheon（万神殿、伟人祠） of entrepreneurs.
Just as importantly, big firms often provide start-ups with their bread and butter. In many industries, especially pharmaceuticals and telecoms, the giants contract out innovation to smaller companies. Procter & Gamble tries to get half of its innovations from outside its own labs. Microsoft works closely with a network of 750,000 small companies around the world. Some 3,500 companies have grown up in Nokia’s shadow. 
But how is the new enthusiasm for entrepreneurship standing up to the worldwide economic downturn? Entrepreneurs are being presented with huge practical problems. Customers are harder to find. Suppliers are becoming less accommodating. Capital is harder to raise. In America venture-capital investment in the fourth quarter of 2008 was down to $5.4 billion, 33% lower than a year earlier. Risk, the lifeblood of the entrepreneurial economy, is becoming something to be avoided. 
Misfortune and fortune
The downturn is also confronting supporters of entrepreneurial capitalism with some awkward questions. Why have so many once-celebrated entrepreneurs turned out to be crooks? And why has the free-wheeling culture of Wall Street produced such disastrous results? 
For many the change in public mood is equally worrying. Back in 2002, in the wake of the scandal over Enron, a dubious energy-trading company, Congress made life more difficult for start-ups with the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation on corporate governance. Now it is busy propping up（撑起） failed companies such as General Motors and throwing huge sums of money at the public sector. Newt Gingrich, a Republican former speaker of America’s House of Representatives, worries that potential entrepreneurs may now be asking themselves: “Why not get a nice, safe government job instead?”
Yet the threat to entrepreneurship, both practical and ideological, can be exaggerated. The downturn has advantages as well as drawbacks. Talented staff are easier to find and office space is cheaper to rent. Harder times will eliminate the also-rans（落选之马败者落选者） and, in the long run, could make it easier for the survivors to grow. As Schumpeter pointed out, downturns can act as a “good cold shower for the economic system”, releasing capital and labour from dying sectors and allowing newcomers to recombine in imaginative new ways. 
Schumpeter also said that all established businesses are “standing on ground that is crumbling beneath their feet”. Today the ground is far less solid than it was in his day, so the opportunities for entrepreneurs are correspondingly more numerous. The information age is making it ever easier for ordinary people to start businesses and harder for incumbents to defend their territory. Back in 1960 the composition of the Fortune 500 was so stable that it took 20 years for a third of the constitutent companies to change. Now it takes only four years. 
There are many reasons for this. First, the information revolution has helped to unbundle（分类交易分类定价） existing companies. In 1937 Ronald Coase argued, in his path-breaking（开创性的） article on “The Nature of the Firm”, that companies make economic sense when the bureaucratic cost of performing transactions under one roof is less than the cost of doing the same thing through the market. Second, economic growth is being driven by industries such as computing and telecommunications where innovation is particularly important. Third, advanced economies are characterised by a shift from manufacturing to services. Service firms are usually smaller than manufacturing firms and there are fewer barriers to entry.
Microsoft, Genentech, Gap and The Limited were all founded during recessions. Hewlett-Packard, Geophysical Service (now Texas Instruments), United Technologies, Polaroid and Revlon started in the Depression. Opinion polls suggest that entrepreneurs see a good as well as a bad side to the recession. In a survey carried out in eight emerging markets last November for Endeavor, a pressure group, 85% of the entrepreneurs questioned said they had already felt the impact of the crisis and 88% thought that worse was yet to come. But they also predicted, on average, that their businesses would grow by 31% and their workforces by 12% this year. Half of them thought they would be able to hire better people and 39% said there would be less competition.
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COMMENT
For me, this article is thought-provoking. Representing the current craze for entrepreneurship, it elicited my first thought that this planet is now ruled by commercialism. Everything goes with a little price tag. Every man has one, too. Our capability and value is judged and realized largely, if not all, by cash(or cheque, stock, option, power, whatever you thought, be it can transfered into cash). Whether this trend is inspiring or devastating has gone through numerous debates(and I don't won't to add one here), yet the truth is: comfortable or not, you have to live with it. In the movie Wall Street,Gorden Gekko said,"Greed is good." These words, it seems, suits this roaring world best.

I'd like to say more, yet something pulls me stop right at the last sentence...anyway, no more interesting to write down except my compliments on the vivid language, clear structure and discerning contents. Excellent one! Learn sth about entrepreneurs now and about beautiful and precise wording as well.

plukaUID: 2721764

The second myth is that most enterpreneurs are just out of short trousers.
从上下文看，我觉得这句应该这样翻译：(关于创业者的）第二个迷思是大部分的创业者都是年轻人。
hugesea 发表于 2009-12-28 20:14

应该是这个意思吧。短短的裤子，是暗示是小孩子穿的么= =||| 查到wear the trousers指做决定，不知是否有关联。

domudomuUID: 2670967

全篇都是好句，重点注意，而且分析层次和例子都相当的好，不亏是草木的压箱货
COMMENT
It took me a long long time to read this wonderful artical, and my comment is just the admire and learning.
This must be another 6 score issue in GRE AW test, and the vivid language, clear structure and diversiform sentences all attracs me so much. Not only learning something about company and commercial that I was not familiar with, but also enjoy the accurate sentences.
让我以后来补吧