Business: Entrepreneurs are the new black. All over the world governments and the policy-making establishment seek them out, encourage them, celebrate their achievements, and lavish them with praise.
There's even a radio advertising campaign at present in which a mellifluous voice positively drools over them. In spite of all this attention they are sometimes portrayed as a narky little shower of self-obsessed whingers, always banging on about the banks not understanding them and governments smothering them with red tape. Now Tim Waterstone (of the hugely successful bookshop chain) has written a book which purports to take a "personal and impassioned look at the entrepreneurial mind-set".
The result is interesting, if slightly flawed. The author cheerfully accepts that people who start businesses are often self-obsessed and suggests that this is a necessary pre-condition. He offers some sound advice for would-be entrepreneurs, the most important of which is the need to be equally obsessed with the minutiae of the nature of the business. If money is the only driving force, the chances of success are slim - the true entrepreneur must be driven by a burning desire to do something better than anyone else is currently doing it and to have a clear strategy for achieving this.
On a practical level, Waterstone strongly recommends that anyone starting a business must not only retain personal control over the finances but should have a clear grasp of the cash-flow position. All the other recommendations could be lumped together under the general heading of avoiding too many outside advisers and keeping well clear of fashionable management fads. He believes market research inhibits creativity and intuition, the wellsprings of entrepreneurial success. He doesn't have a great deal of time for accountants: "the profession's procedures and priorities seem sometimes to have more in common with the pedantic, oblique mysteries of the Japanese tea ceremony than the crucial imperatives of keeping a company on the road".
On a more practical level he despises the banal clichés and gobbledegook - eg, "low-hanging fruit" - which are used to disguise incompetence in the business world and he correctly dismisses the vast majority of mission statements as meaningless gibberish.
Waterstone's dislike of big business management practices doesn't stop at current fads: he believes big businesses are on the road to perdition and that small businesses are about to inherit the earth. This is all heady stuff, enough to turn an entrepreneur's head, but although he underestimates the strength and stability of the world's big corporations he is probably correct in the sense that they are not as stable or secure as they were 10 years ago. He argues that two key resources which were previously the preserve of big business are now available to anyone: international funding and information. The most practical effect of official recognition of the entrepreneur is that there are now some forms of tax relief in place in most countries to encourage investment in small businesses and the internet has ensured that information of every kind from all over the world is now only a click away. But the real strength of the entrepreneur is a messianic belief in being able to do things better, in bringing a vision to fulfilment. Waterstone believes that big businesses have lost the ability to invent, to be creative and trust their intuition. They are "over-managed and under-led", controlled by people who lack the pride and overbearing ambition that characterised their founders.
Towards the end of the book Waterstone's rant against the inequities of big business takes a more radical turn as he launches into a full-blooded attack on the way capitalism has developed. His main gripe is that the ownership of businesses has become coarsened and weakened because the legal owners of public companies, the shareholders, are punters rather than owners in the true sense, and real power is in the hands of executive directors who whose immediate self- interest and inflated pay packets lead to an excessively short-term outlook. The depth of his feelings on the subject are revealed when he likens the shareholders claims to "ownership" to a gambler's claim to ownership of a horse just because they have placed a bet on it. Unfortunately, depth of feeling is no substitute for depth of analysis and the author's views are not backed up by any sustained arguments, nor are any alternatives proposed.
There's an advertisement for The Irish Times at the moment which features a banner saying "Replace Capitalism with Something Nicer" and asking for suggestions. Waterstone wants to do just this, but he doesn't offer any suggestions. However, he does pass a test that most authors fail. He does exactly what it says in the blurb, providing a "personal and impassioned look at the entrepreneurial mindset" - and given the importance of the subject, that's a valuable service.
• John Fanning is chairman of McConnells Advertising. His book, The Importance of Being Branded: An Irish Perspective, will be published by Liffey Press in April
• Swimming Against the Stream: Creating Your Business and Making Your Life By Tim Waterstone Macmillan, 215pp. £16.99