Carl Jung had said that "In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order."
Do entrepreneurs thrive on chaos? Do they create chaos? Is chaos healthy? How much chaos works positively? When does it get dysfunctional? How do you define chaos? Can chaos be calibrated? How does the entrepreneurial manager handle it vis-a-vis the entrepreneur? How are their approaches towards chaos different? Are they different in the first place or are there more similarities? Does chaos create stress, which is ultimately not healthy? Have chaotic environments produced innovation? What kind of companies and at what stage of a company’s lifecycle does chaos create value and add to the enterprise? Can chaos be institutionalized? If yes, how? Is there a Chaotic Theory of Entrepreneurship? What actually creates and constitutes chaos?
I am sure by raising so many questions I have already made your mind chaotic. Let me tell you that neither do I have the answers to all the above questions nor am I pretending to have them in future. My job as a columnist is to raise the right questions and you will probably find the answers as we go along the chaotic route of learning by your own mistakes. Isn't that what makes you an entrepreneur?
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| Anurag Batra |
Every person wants excitement in his or her life. At the same time, given today’s rat race, one also wants peace and tranquility. It’s really an oxymoronic life as far as an entrepreneur is considered.
An entrepreneur wants to create systems, especially when the enterprise has grown to a certain level, so that he can minimize the chaos and bring orderliness and a certain amount of steadiness and system-oriented approach to a growing enterprise. So creating chaos would be in some way being detrimental to his or her own goals.
Chaos is something that I define as when things happen when not planned, there are no expectations of the event happening and it happens, where people are part of that chaotic event and there is a flux and things are all mixed up. Clear answers and solutions are difficult to come by. It is a fusion that creates something special. Normal is anyway boring.
Let me take the example from the telecom sector. All telecom companies and their executives and entrepreneurs struggle to increase average revenue per user (ARPU) as well as deal with increased competition and decreased margins. For this they have to probably resort to an engineered chaos to create and stumble upon the next big breakthrough yet simple idea. So am I talking of a stimulated game of chaos at a training session? No, I am talking of chaos in regular day-to-day work. It can manifest itself in both positive and negative ways. It is akin to the samudra manthan that the devs and suras did in the olden days. Chaos is in some ways churning of ideas and people.
Let me now take the industry that I come from—media and internet. Again, we don’t need to try hard to be chaotic. We are inherently and intrinsically chaotic.
Does that work for us? I do not know. Maybe it does to an extent.
Someone wise had said many years ago "Chaos is the score on which reality is written."
Entrepreneurs are always trying to dream and create reality from their dreams, and chaos is what makes this connection and bridge between dreams and reality. I hope it does this harmoniously for you.
Anurag Batra is real life, first-generation entrepreneur who is Much Below Average (MBA) from the prestigious Management Development Institute, MDI. When he is not busy writing such columns, he can be reached at anuragbatrayo@gmail.com.
Anurag is the founder and editor-in-chief of exchange4media group which includes exchange4media.com.
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