Entrepreneurship and innovation in the Netherlands

A recent OESO survey shows the Dutch at the bottom of the list when it comes to entrepreneurship. Two thirds of our population does not want to work for themselves, but wants to work for somebody else. Only ten percent of our listed companies are younger than 40 years, while in the US the number is eighty percent. Another survey shows that people in the Netherlands do not take pride in their work anymore. They only work to be able to pay for having fun outside office hours, for full time employees an average 6.7 hours! It is not surprising we are also at the bottom of the list when it comes to innovation.

I am pretty annoyed with the way the Dutch look at innovation. Innovation is about efficiency and therefore doing things better. We are very good at this! As stated before, it is also about doing better things. The latter is something the Dutch do not seem to grasp anymore. We are still cutting costs (through efficiency of our processes) and only looking at short term financial impact. Margins are only up temporarily because revenues are not increasing. We are slowly but surely destroying the capital we have built through entrepreneurship in the preceding centuries. Since it’s a silent crisis and not a plane crashing, we do not seem to mind or care.

This slow degradation of capital (human, creative, social and financial) is happening in most of our larger companies, our educational system, in our health care, and in our governmental institutions. We do not seem to realize that the still raining Taylor dogma of compartmentalizing our work through defining every process detail in the name of efficiency stifles innovation and the leadership needed to innovate. People are just performing routine jobs, haven’t gotten a clue to what is happening two steps down the road (or up) and consequently don’t care anymore about what happens outside their immediate (very limited) sphere of influence. As soon as you try to step outside the confines of your job description, somebody will immediately cut of your head. Where is the pride in what we do?

We are ruled by fear, the fear of making mistakes, the fear of losing our job, the fear of immigrants, et cetera, et cetera. We pride ourselves in not making mistakes, we pity people who lose their job, we pamper immigrants (or used to) and deny them the opportunity to make something out of their own lives. Once you run a company that doesn’t make it, it’s the end of your career. You did not learn something, you failed! Once you take a risk in a big company and it doesn’t work out, it’s the end of your career, you failed. The only ones floating to the top of our society are the ones who do not make mistakes. Guess how many decisions they made involving any risk whatsoever. I’ll give you the answer, it is probably none!

Excuse me for ranting, but this is why I started this blog. Collaborate and innovate, look at new possibilities and at possibilities in a new way. Follow your passion and work together with people who share that passion and create. Learn from your mistakes and from each other. That is how the Dutch became the first Hegemony this world knew, before the English and before the US. We showed courage, worked together with people from all creeds and shared the risks amongst each other. Let's start exploring again!