I had the pleasure of meeting Howard Bloom recently to talk about Essent Consulting.   He is a visionary, scientist, PR genius, gifted writer, as well as a champion of one of my favorite topics – finding and using your passion as fuel to succeed.  His latest book recently came out last week, but I took some time to review his ‘The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism’, from 2009.

In ‘The Genius of the Beast’, Bloom lays out the evolutionary cycles of ‘boom and bust’ that are present not only in the cosmos and biological life-forms, but also underlie our society and our economic systems.   He has intriguing ideas as to capitalism as a whole, and the entrepreneur’s role within it, framed in his ideas of a boom and bust evolution.   This evolution is not a purely cyclical nature but rather: “The modern western cycle of soar and crash has been a wheel that’s rolled forward – a wheel of creation.  A wheel of expansion, exploration, pruning, and new form generation.”   The idea propelling Essent Consulting is consistent with this model:  as an entrepreneur, we must constantly be expanding, exploring, pruning, and generating our companies into a new form.

During a ‘boom’ swing, it is time for exploration, searching, indulging.  Eventually, the pendulum swings back and we ‘crash’.  These crashes, or busts, are typically misunderstood to have some cause, whether it’s some villain, a mistake in policy, or an over-enthusiasm for some new technology.  But if they are part of the natural course of things, and Howard goes a long way to convincing you – Crashes are a time to prune away what doesn’t work, to consolidate our power, rally around what does work, and build structures to be able to handle the next ‘crash’.   Those that have the resources to ride through a bust, or find opportunities to repurpose themselves, have the ‘evolutionary’ advantage.

Bloom refers often to repurposing – what happens to those elements of a system (bees in a hive, or people in a society) during times of bust.   We have 3 choices if we don’t come out on top: be absorbed by an existing organization, scrimp and save and try to make it through, or die.

An entrepreneur ‘following their passion’ is going to be at greater risk during a bust if they cannot quickly repurpose themselves.  During a boom period, the trick is finding a way to align your passion with the economy and using all the tools to make a successful business.  During a bust period, when the economy is in upheaval, the entrepreneur faces another layer of stress and uncertainty:  he or she must now step back and monitor the movement of the system (the economy) to glean information on what new opportunities and obstacles might crop up.  If busts truly are a time of consolidation, how can you shift gears to take advantage of the swing of the pendulum?

Right now we are possibly coming out of a bust and moving into a boom, yet, the shape of that boom is going to lie squarely in the hands of those who’ve repurposed themselves the best over the past 4 years.  One example is the huge success of micro-funding and crowd-funding sites. The owners of these ventures have monitored the path of consolidation during the stressful recession:  if no money is available from the bank, than the only choice is to bootstrap, consolidate, and run to family and friends for funding.   These sites have done 2 things: they’ve assisted the economy, and they’ve assisted entrepreneurs.  Hopefully, they’ve done it wisely and (financially) successfully enough to monitor the coming boom to leverage their initial success into the next iteration.

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Essent Consulting helps entrepreneurs uncover their passion and use it as a tool to inform their business growth.   It is common for entrepreneurs to become easily frustrated by the current capitalistic notions of ‘nothing matters but the bottom line growth’ and a focus on exit strategy.   Entrepreneurs start up with a passion and quickly lose sight of it, if they mishandle financial and operational stressors.   The company’s bottom line can quickly become a task-master rather than an impetus to grow in the ‘right’ direction.  As such, entrepreneurs are constantly at risk of becoming enslaved to the business, rather than leading the business.

Multi-national corporations are an example of the ultimate manifestation of ‘business for business’s sake’.  Effectively, they have become artificial intelligences: super-organisms that we created, that have taken on a life of their own, which were ‘innocently’ constructed with the goal of making more, and more money, regardless of social or ethical considerations.   People often want to hang an MNC for its lack of ethics or horrendous business practices, yet, they are just ‘being’ the monster that we built them to be.  Though on a smaller level, entrepreneurs quickly experience the same negative pressures.  The goal of the company becomes the goal of the current capitalistic system, their backers and VC’s, rather than the goal of the flame that sparked the company and its mission.

There are a few ideas out there that battle this: First, as an example, Bo Burlingham’s ‘Small Giants’ idea – of companies refocusing on being great, not big.  The second is the BCorp, which is a new type of corporation that squarely puts a social benefit element as a key cornerstone of the company.  As it stands now, without either sentiment, or the sentiment of Essent, there is NO pathway for a company to remain a beacon of the entrepreneur’s original or evolving mission.  Ever-increasing profit takes over and squashes such a mission or at best, wrings it dry.

We want to help entrepreneurs take back their passion; wield it, to use it as a touchstone.  How?  As operational strategists, we reexamine opportunities and repurpose the entrepreneurial drive to be propelled by passion rather than fear.   We bring entrepreneurs back to their passion.  This leads to a retooling of their company: When faced with new opportunities, a company can require a complete overhaul of strategy and new goals that better suit the organization’s core strength: their vision; or, an influx of new opportunities may chart a completely new evolution for the company.

Entrepreneurial companies have a unique essence at their core.  That essence can – and should – develop over time as the company grows.  There will be opportunities that drive a company further from its essence, overwhelm it, or kill it completely.  But for those entrepreneurs who pour their life and soul into their company, the opportunity to develop and grow is a chance to do greater and more influential work, and transform not only yourself and your stakeholders, but the world in which you live.  Essent is the pathway to this hand-in-hand transformation.