Dream - from Monocle, issue 28, vol 2 Nov 09

Read the article on the plane to Hong Kong, and after that I repeatedly read it every day.

It is a preface for the Monocle, the small business guide -

Every age has its dream of happiness and in our time, there is no more powerful or widespread desire than to start up our own business. What does this tell us about ourselves? For a start, that it isn't enough for us to make money. We need to do so in ways that make us feel connected: to products, to customers and to our colleagues.

The modern gigantic corporation undoubtedly offers humanity the most efficient means of generating capital but it has managed to brutally cut us off from people and things. We can no longer see what we have made or whom we have touched; We frequently can't stand back afer a lifetime and say, ' I did that' or I changed him or her'.

A business of one's own premises to end the alientaion. Entrepreneurial fantasies appear to be all about making more money - but in fact, as sober statisticians tell us, they are fraught with dangers. But that shouldn't put us off. Far from it, because the dream of entrepreneruship is, at heart, about an attempt to recover imaginative control over one's work. Ask people what business they might like to start and they will often speak about a desire to bgin a small restaurant or the pefect stationery shop, a little school or therapist's practice. They will cite examples of businesses where you can see the difference you are making to lives of others, where you know your customers and can have a realistic chance of making them happy. Though the idea of esrving people is often seen as demeaning, it is obviously one of the great pleasure of life (just ask kids, who like nothing better than to play at serving adults.)

Starting your own business is risky, but the recent economic turmoil suggests that we should recalibrate our notions of safety. The working world used to be divided into safte but boring jobs, and exciting but risky ones. Of late, many of the supposedly safe professions have been decimated - which should help us let go of illusions of safety (in any case - all of us are only a few rogue cancer cells away from the end at the best of times)

A world enterepreneurial start-ups wouldn't necessarily be a richer one economically. But it would be rich in a more interesting way. It would mean an increase in what we all love about owner-managed enterprises: the feeling that those who work in them genuinely care, that they are in control of their destinies, that they are able to exercise their curiosity and dthat they are enjoying serving us. I suspect that I'm not the only writer or reader at Monocle itching to plug some of the gaps of our customer society with a business of my own.

(Alain de Botton, at Monocle nov 09 issue 28, vol 2 - 'Time for a change' in small business guide)