Libertarian's Corner: The Entrepreneurial Employee

Joseph S. Fulda

Joseph S. Fulda is a free-lance writer living in New York City.

Conservative and classical liberal treatises often wax eloquent on the value of work, but in these tomes it is rare for the worker to be given his due, as the employer is seen as the benefactor and the employee the benefacted, the employer the entrepreneur, the employee mere labor: humble, obedient workers grateful for their livelihood to the all-knowing boss are praised in the scribbling in these tomes. The real world is more dynamic than this silly caricature.

In any free market, both sides are benefactor or the bargain does not go through; in all market systems knowledge is dispersed and does not rest solely with the employer or the employee. The employee, in particular, brings to the table his knowledge of himself-exactly what he can do (and how those limits might be extended), and by extension what he can do for his employer and his employer's business. The employer may or may not know more about his line of work depending on the quality and quantity of experience of the employee. At higher levels, it is not unheard of for a potential employee to suggest his employment to a potential employer along with a sketch of the ways he might be of service. Out of such entrepreneurial proposals are many executives born. But even lower down, where employers typically place the advertisements and do the search, the employee rarely accepts the job exactly as it was offered but suggests ways, in the interview and in his first few months on the job, in which the job might be meaningfully molded around what he has to offer, how, in short, the employer might maximize this new resource whose provisioning he has taken on. It is on the accepted counteroffers of such entrepreneurial employees that most successful businesses thrive.

Sure you say, I have in mind creative types in all lines of work, researchers designing new product ideas and lines, developers designing new products, managers arranging an array of resources, and other high-level people. Not true. Even the pizza man partakes of the entrepreneurial spirit. Responding to an advertisement for someone to cut and bake pizza pies, our hero may point out that he knows how to prepare three or four delicious specialities sometimes found in pizza shops but not in this one. The boss, interested in profit rather than blind obedience, takes a chance and hires the man who now spends perhaps one quarter of his time not cutting and baking pizza pies but doing something else of his own suggestion. If the company succeeds and profits increase, who should be grateful to whom? (Both, of course, should be grateful to and for each other.) And if the company founders who will get the ax right away?

Who is the real entrepreneur, in this picture, the man with the capital-the pizza oven-or the man with the skills, the human capital. And who is taking the real risk here, the man who offers to do something different at the risk of his livelihood, or the store owner who can always go "straight pizza" again if it doesn't work out and will probably suffer little long-term loss? My vote is that it is the employee who is the entrepreneur, who bears the risk, who has the vision. (The boss gets credit for listening; a boss who won't listen to innovative ideas is yesterday's entrepreneur and seriously risks being on tomorrow's bankruptcy court docket.) And if you don't see those qualities in even the meanest of workers in the smallest of shops, perhaps, just perhaps, you aren't looking hard enough!