Irreverent
As a professional speaker, I spend an inordinate amount of time at conferences, conventions, and business meetings. In-variably, that means lines—lines to get your badge, lines to check in at the hotel, lines to get your rubber chicken. But the worst line of all is the one for the taxi, especially when every attendee is trying to go to the same place at the same time. Taxi queues at hotels, airports, and convention centers can be a nightmare.
When I am speaking at an event where the majority of the attendees aren’t entrepreneurs, people line up like well-behaved grade scholars. They hate standing in line as much as any-body, but they assume that someone must have a system and that eventually they’ll get a cab. When the meeting is dominated by entrepreneurs, however, everything changes.
To entrepreneurs, rules, systems, and policies are simply suggestions. It’s not that they think they are above the rules. They really don’t. But they honestly assume that if there is a line, something is seriously wrong and thank goodness they are there to fix it for everybody. When there is only one or two entrepreneurs, that attitude can be quite helpful. When there are 300, its mayhem. I recently attended an event in Las Vegas. When the dinner hour arrived, no fewer than 50 well-intentioned business owners were actively engaged in various attempts to completely redesign the for-hire transportation system of Las Vegas. It wasn’t impatience or hunger that activated their problem-solving juices. It was simply the fact that they saw something that didn’t work very well and honestly thought they had a better solution, given the 10 or 15 minutes they had studied the situation.
