Promise of Entrepreneur

Abstract This article is written in the style of a

‘‘bildungsroman,’’ a fictional autobiographical ‘‘coming

of age story’’ about the author’s experiences of his

beginning to recognize the: great diversity of entrepreneurs,

many types of startup firms, multiple ways

entrepreneurs go about starting firms, and innumerable

situations in which entrepreneurial activity takes

place. In this remembrance of things past, the author

realizes: the phenomenological underpinnings of his

understanding of entrepreneurship, his belief in the

primacy of facts as the arbiter of theory, that his theory

predisposed him to look only for certain kinds of facts

and ignore others which then makes theory paradoxically

the arbiter of the facts found, and, finally, that

knowledge is hard won and wisdom elusive.

Keywords Narrative
Poetic
Process

Organization
Weick

JEL Classifications M13
B31
L26

‘‘Nothing is more uncertain, more contradictory, more

unsatisfactory than the evidence of facts’’—William Godwin

1 Introduction

Karl (Vesper) had money from his N.S.F. (National

Science Foundation) grant that would give me the

year to ‘‘not have to teach.’’ I could put all of my time

into the dissertation.

I had actually worked on that same N.S.F. grant

the summer before I began the Ph.D. program at the

University of Washington in 1978. I had quit my job

at Hertz Rent-a-Car that spring, right after spending

2 weeks as a management ‘‘strike breaker’’ in

Detroit. Being the junior accounting manager in the

Hertz Rent-a-Car ‘‘SeaTac’’ (Seattle Tacoma International

Airport) back office, it was my luck to be

sent off, along with other managers from around the

country, to take jobs that the union employees at

Hertz Detroit had left as they struck for higher wages.

Within a week of the strike, when the Detroit workers

realized that all of the managers that Hertz had flown

to Detroit to take their positions were doing their jobs

better and that customers were...