The Yale cohort that my research investigates is changing the nature of what we have traditionally thought of as a “job” or career path for educational elites. Unlike other generations of the middle-class dispossessed who relied on an employer to their detriment, the Yale cohort is using entrepreneurship in a proactive way to avoid the downsizing and outsourcing phenomena that some of their Baby Boomer parents have gone through, as well as give themselves the opportunity to define what meaningful work is on their own terms. Researchers have demonstrated that white-collar workers are increasingly vulnerable to many of the same economic trends, such as off-shoring of jobs and automation, which have eliminated blue-collar jobs during the past half-century. Offshoring is merely a way station to the automation of routine tasks, assert MIT professors Erik Bryjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in The Second Machine Age.
“Software is eating the world,” says Marc Andreessen, characterizing the major economic trend impacting business today. Andreessen, a general partner in the venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz, goes on to say:
More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.
Strategies to combat these multi-decade trends are discussed in the literature about 21st century knowledge workers. In her book A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment, anthropologist Carrie Lane, characterizes the strategy her informants use to participate in the economy as “career management.” It is a type of free agency, whereby the individual employee focuses on building his “brand” because he is a “company of one.” In his book The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career, Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, refers to this career strategy as the “start-up of you.” Hoffman theorized that Millennials are becoming the entrepreneurs of their own lives. Lane believes that the ethos of career management is embedded in the economic philosophy of neoliberalism.
The cohort at Yale that is adopting the wide toolbox approach, appears to be aware of the kind of ideas that Lane and Hoffman are espousing; they know, for instance, that they want to avoid Wall Street firms where they would have to adopt a defensive strategy inside a company similar to Lane’s “a company of one” or Hoffman’s the startup of you.” This point is highlighted in an article in the New York Times, “A Mad Scramble for Young Bankers.” The article focuses of the frenzy by private equity firms to make offers of employment to recent college graduates who work at investment banks as analysts in a two year program. These offers of employment are typically made 6 – 12 months after the analysts start working at the investment banks, or 12 – 18 months before their employment at the investment bank ends. These analysts are acting in their own best interest in securing a future position while currently working at investment banks. The unstable environment of the investment banking industry fosters the defensive strategy discussed in the New York Times article.
Through the wide toolbox approach to skills development my Yale cohort are acknowledging that entrepreneurship is an alternative career strategy. They are also acting as free agents, but they are executing their career management strategy by opting out of the Wall Street route. Instead they are positioning themselves to build the environment that they work in, and to define the types of problems that they work on.
Student-oriented infrastructure for entrepreneurship is indispensable to instill the importance of becoming an entrepreneur, and not just an innovator or inventor. Through entrepreneurship pedagogy and venture creation, students learn how to build something that people want, how to implement their ideas, how to assess the value of their contribution to a venture, and most importantly, how to maintain control of their intellectual capital and their intellectual property.