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PARTISAN REVIEW
oysters under steam, the new entrepreneur must operate in a world in
which all the pearls have already been grabbed up and are carefully
guarded.
The only manner by which the new entrepreneur can express
his initiative is by servicing the powers that
be,
in the hope of getting
his cut. And he serves them by "fixing things," between one big busi–
ness and another, between big business and government, and between
business as a whole and the public. He gets ahead because men in
power do not expect that things can be'done legitimately, because these
m~n
know fear, because their spheres of operation are broader than
their capacities to observe, and because they are personally not very
bright.
As
a competitor, the new entrepreneur is an agent of. the bureau–
cracies he serves, and what he competes for is the good will and favor
of those who run the business system. His chance exists because there
are several of these bureaucracies, private and public, having com–
plicated entanglements with one another and with the public. Unlike
the little white collar man, he does not often stay within any one cor–
porate bureaucracy; his path zig-zags within and between bureau–
cracies, and he has made a well-worn path between big business and
the regulatory agencies of the federal government.
He is a live wire, full of American know-how, and if he does not
invest capital, his success is all the greater measure of his inherent
worth, for this means that he is genuinely creative. Like the more
heroic businessmen of old, he manages to get something for very little
or nothing.
The new entrepreneur is very much at home in the "business ser–
vices," in which bracket fall the commercial researcher and the public
relations man, the advertising agencies, the labor relations expert, and
the mass communication and entertainment industries. For the bright,
young, educated man, these fields offer limitless opportunities, if he
only has the initiative and the know-how, and if only the anxieties of
the bureaucratic chieftains hold up.
The power of the old captain of industry rested, it is said, upon
his engineering ability and upon his financial sharp dealing. The
power of the present-day chieftain rests upon his control of the
wealth piled up by the old captain and increased by a rational system
of guaranteed tributes. The power of the new entrepreneur rests upon
his personality and upon his skill in using it to manipulate the anxi–
eties of the chieftain.
Now the concentration of power has modified the character and
