What MLK can teach entrepreneurs
Civil rights leader offers much inspiration.
Entrepreneurs get inspiration from many different places and lots of different people.
For some, inspiration comes from witnessing a business colleague create a small business out of thin air. For others, it comes from seeing great entrepreneurs build great businesses – Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos for instance.
Me? Sure, the sources above inspire me just as they do others. But for real inspiration I find myself gravitating to leaders in other fields: People like Buckminster Fuller, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King.
No, these are not entrepreneurs, not by a long shot, but what I find so admirable is that each of these men identified a problem, came up with a unique, creative solution, took a chance, defied convention and made a difference.
If that doesn’t describe the entrepreneur’s journey, I don’t know what does.
And so, especially this week as we honor the work and words of the great Dr. Martin Luther King, I think it is altogether fitting and proper that we take a moment to recognize what he has to teach us, all of us, entrepreneurs included. Taking a risk pays off: One of the incredible things about Dr. King is that the movement he led was based on non-violence, a political strategy that requires its participants to not match an eye for an eye (as is so popular these days) but instead, to show that violence and unjust conditions can be met, and bested, by the better nature of our beings; by peaceful non-cooperation.
Dr. King took this out of the playbook of Mahatma Gandhi, a diminutive man in a loincloth who was able to lead India to independence and defeat the greatest, most mighty empire in the world at that time without nary a shot being fired. Incredible, that.
Dr. King sought, and did, the same thing. Fighting hate with love, bullets with sit-ins, immoral laws with moral arrests, the movement created by Dr. King teaches us that unconventional methods can yield unconventionally great rewards. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts: Getting the Voting Rights Act passed and altogether otherwise fostering equality and an end to segregation not only took great courage, it required a great team.
From King to his “lieutenants” (like Rep. John Lewis) to Robert Kennedy and LBJ and on to millions of non-violent marchers, it was this united team headed in the same direction that changed history.
As an entrepreneur, while your mission and reach is necessarily smaller, your task is not dissimilar. Changing your little part of the world will also require that you have a vision and assemble a team committed to helping you achieve your dream. You gotta have faith: Dr. King once said, “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” Faith is leading a march from Selma to Montgomery, getting bloodied and beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and coming back two weeks later to finish the march. (Aside from “faith”, other words that come to mind are “leadership,” “bravery,” and “commitment.”)
For us today, faith can mean many things, but in the entrepreneurial context, King’s quote captures the essence of entrepreneurial risk taking.
No, you are not Dr. Martin Luther King, nor am I. But one aspect of his genius was that he empowered the rest of us to believe that we can make a difference. And so we can and should emulate the great man. We, too, can lead. We can stand up to injustice. We can make a difference. Today’s tip: We all know the famous line from Dr. King’s I Have a Dream speech, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!”
Every year on MLK day, my kids and I watch that whole speech. It is so much more than a memorable line. Only 17 minutes long, it is powerful and amazing.
Steve Strauss, @Steve Strauss on Twitter, is a lawyer specializing in small business and entrepreneurship who has been writing for usatoday.com for 20 years. The views and opinions expressed in this column are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of USA TODAY.
“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”
Martin Luther King Jr.