Actually great post Mick. People in the USA are great supporters of this behaviour. I met a guy in a coffee shop who has into his 8th venture and none of them had really made it. At the end of the day success is a measure of skill, luck and timing.

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What a great post! I’ve always told people I mentor that they should pursue their goals and embrace failing. I’ve never met a successful entrepreneur that didn’t fail a few times. Failure should be embraced as a learning opportunity – how can you learn if not by your mistakes. Your first failure is always a shock – but supporting people to help them try again is the way to go. Long live those with enough courage to live their ambitions!

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Tobi Kornwasser Reply:
June 10th, 2009 at 12:32 am

Hi Fay,

You say you mentor people, can you tell me about that as I am always looking for good mentors – we’ve been in business for over 20 years, reinvented ourselves four timesm moved with the times, and currently moving forward again, IT software distribution and services.

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Very true story Mick and it permeats all industries throughout Australia. I think its more to do with Australia’s supposed ‘egalitarian’ self-perspective, as convict settlers, we as a nation don’t like people thinking that they are ‘better’ than the rest (We all stick together), particularly when our culture (or lack off) has a few chips on its shoulders. But you are very right in that it is time to move past it ‘glue’. Its not going to happen over night, particularly when most people going into or are in business are afraid to use the ‘entrepreneur’ for fear they may be called a Bondy or Skassy.

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[...] I’d post a link to my colleague Mick Liubinskas’ excellent piece in this week’s Anthill Online.  It’s called “Me, ‘Tall Poppy’? Thanks!” and it’s about [...]

Mick,

My experience is that as far as, on paper, crossing the t’s and dotting the o’s of entrepreneurship, Australia is tops and really looks very good on paper.

Where the snags hit however is in the mentalities and the mindsets which oftentimes wreak havoc on execution. The sum total of it being the staggering foreign debt we have, whereas by rights, given the level of innovations coming out of Australians’ minds, think tanks, University labs, portfolio companies, incubator parks, etc. it should be the opposite: the world should owe us rather than the other way around.

I had written a bit of a (wroth) 30 thousand word cultural analysis of Australia after I had to up and leave again – this time with my family and 2 year old daughter in June last year. I left because Australia was turning me into a pauper despite all I objectively could contribute to exporting Australia-born IP given my overseas experience. I really should turn it into a book, but no one outside Australia is interested in reading about this – and, should I add, no one in Australia either.

I trace our business attitudes to cultural memes that were born and which hardened during the formative convict time – attitudes which maybe served us well then (being miserly, for instance – a condition of survival in a hardscrabble land with a largely barren soil, but a lethal trait in a modern economy – Australian businessmen tend to be the most anal rententive I have come across anywhere. And that certainly applies to my own family and forebears (I go way back, 6 generations – Vernon Seymour Ransford of past cricket fame was my father’s father’s brother). And there’s much more – all of it supporting my thesis that our self defeating business attitudes stem from long established, deep-rooted cultural traits, and won’t be easily changed unless there is some kind of revolution of the mind in Australia …. I have met so many seemingly normal and respectable business folks in Australia paying full lip service to the canons of successful business – and then reverting right back into cretinous negotiating positions when the time came to put their monies and attitudes where their mouths were.

So the issue is – can we change our self defeating attitudes ? My conclusion is, it will be extremely difficult. In the meantime, the world, and in particular the US, are blithely eating our lunch every day.

I don’t see much prospect for change. Australia, in addition to its specific challenges, has in addition become a land where people tend to reflexively look to the government to solve their problems, instead of being self-starters, and which has adopted an extremely socialistic , in the old Swedish or French senses, mindset.

What a profound pity.

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Sorry about the “dotting the o’s ” – been using a foreign keyboard …..

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