However, there’s a flaw.  Out of our roughly a half million business starts a year, fewer than half last 5 years.  Survival drops to 10% at the ten-year mark.  And only a few that do endure ever come close to reaching their potentials.

It’s not because these businesses aren’t good ideas.  Or because their owners are lazy.  Or because of bad luck.  The disappointment for us all tracks back to two pervasive shortcomings.

One is to a lack of higher level business perspective among entrepreneurs.  Ask any lower or mid-tier business owner one question, “how do you run a business” and the response will be a blank stare.  It’s a question never asked, because no one expects an answer.  With Newtonian precision, we study the sub-parts, like production, sales, systems, branding, quality.  But scarce is the owner with the ability to combine all those parts into a perspective that allows him or her to drive a lower or mid-tier business to its ultimate possibilities for job creation and contribution to economic growth.  That kind of thinking accrues most reliably to those who have served at the helm of several businesses before.

The second shortcoming is capital.  The kind of capital that is willing to make the risky  bets that turn yet-to-be great business into a powerhouses.  Conservatism has always been the bylaw in commercial lending, but never more so than today.  Simple lines of credit remain difficult.  And debt from traditional lenders for heroic, yet speculative expansions?  Forget it!

So, where can these two these silver bullets be found? They’re in the world of private equity.

There, funds are assembled with the explicit intention to make high risk investments that transform businesses stuck at one stage of development or declining into something better.  A lot better.  Through the applications of capital and higher level business perspectives, hidden business potential can be unlocked.

But it’s a risky game that doesn’t always work.  When it doesn’t,  it can be a tragedy for everyone involved, employees and investors.  But when it does work, over time, the cumulative additions to jobs and economic growth far outweigh the cumulative losses.   Particularly if one accepts the premise many of the failures were well along the way toward disappointing ends well before the intervention of private equity.  At least someone was willing to take the risk.

So, why the current attack on private equity?  Why not recognize Romney and others like him as the kinds of spark plugs we need for a new economy?

Private equity offsets job losses created by business failures

By investing to unlock unrealized potentials, private equity cannot guarantee jobs for employees, anymore than they can guarantee returns for their investors.  Often the risks to the jobs assumed are not the acquirer’s fault, but rather reside with shortfalls in prior owners’ business acumen and capital.  Otherwise the companies wouldn’t be sold.  New owners, however, must be strongly incentivized do the best they can for new employees.  And they are.  By the need to return their investors’ money with a multiplier, and to generate returns for themselves.  That’s how they stay in business.   By creating far more jobs than they lose, out of a pool of otherwise unlikely and marginal prospects for survival.

The safety net for jobs unable to be saved is the responsibility of government.  A government that does what’s reasonable to help people in need.  And it does.  By extending unemployment benefits through periods of economic challenge.  But sadly, the best intentions of private equity and government will never guarantee joyful outcomes for all.  There will always be individual tragedy as a focal point for anyone who wants to make an argument against the benefit to the whole.

Private equity is a driver toward a new economic base

Our economic system is based on rewarding those most who contribute most to the overall good.  The prospects for returns must to be high, as they always have been, to encourage the best and brightest to take on the high risks of private equity-type investing.  Though we haven’t always called it private equity, the terms of the equation have always been the same.  Those who create big results get paid a lot, because the benefits are big for us all, even taking into account the failures along the way.

The argument is flawed for attacking private equity

Therefore, today, it makes no sense to frame the contribution of private equity in a “one strike and you’re out” mentality.  Instead, we need to look at the overall contribution versus the costs.  Where the arithmetic is greatly positive — companies and jobs built versus lost — the public and the government ought to accolade private equity as heroes, not villains, in moving us all toward our new economy.

Dick Cross is a serial CEO, a resident of Concord, Massachusetts and the author of Just Run It! Running an extraordinary business is easier than you think, for release by Bibliomotion Press, April 2012.

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Yet there is something important that business owners can extract from the disturbance he’s created in the NFL.  Something that may be difficult to translate at the surface, but is applicable to business leaders and managers all the same.

So, how is Tim Tebow most different from what we’d expect?

1. Mechanics: Awkward throwing motion
2. Consistency: Cycles between great and and terrible moments in games
3. Commitment: Football is not the center of his life
4. Drive: Winning is not everything, it is being his best
5. High Profile: Humble
6. Obsessive: Emotionally centered

Because of all this, he’s the talk the news, and not just sports news.  The proclaimed boy leader of a group of grizzled veterans whose toughness you’d be hard pressed to match off the gridiron, he inspires a confidence in those around him that defies our conventional logic.  Criticisms, even after the dismal post-season loss to the Patriots, don’t stick.

How would you like to be the Tim Tebow in your business?  If the answer isn’t yes , stop reading now.

But for those of you still with me, here’s what it’s all about.  It’s a way of thinking about one’s self, more of a code of conscience, that’s been around for a very long time.  But a code that our highest visibility sports icons of the past 40 years not only have left behind, but also seem to have purposely buried through excessive behaviors. What the fervor around the “oddness” of Tebow says is that the traits of the old code are still fundamentally sound — in sports and in business.  They’ve just been overshadowed in our cultures — business and non-business  alike — for a while.

To explain it best, I’m going to borrow from a list penned by a Scotsman, Professor Henry Drummond of the University of Edinburgh, for a lecture entitled “The Greatest Thing in the World” that he delivered to a remote outpost in Africa in 1883.  In it he outlined exactly what mystifies us about Tim Tebow.  A code that’s available to us all, simply as a matter of will.  Good, old fashioned will.

Professor Drummond’s list included:

1. Patience:  Unlike most of us in our roles as leaders of businesses, Tebow sees his life as a logical progression of unfolding, which brings him opportunities he works to understand and to capture, but in a time frame that makes sense to him — not someone else.
2. Kindness:  He’s continually conscious about making others — his family, his friends, his teammates, his fans and the kids whose lives he invests in through his foundation — feel better.
3. Generosity: Here we’re talking about generosity of spirit more than gifting people with material objects.  We’re yet to seen him deride a teammate, an opponent or talk behind a back.  Vociferously encourage, yes, but denigrate, no.
4. Courtesy:  This is like kindness, above, but in tiny applications.  “Thank you.” “Please”.  “Yes, you’re probably right.  I hadn’t thought about it that way.”  All of these  come from an unconscious caring about how others feel in your presence, and about how you can contribute to moments of happiness when they’re with you.
5. Humility:  Seeing yourself second.  Giving the victories to others.  Never seeking the center of attention.  And when it does catch up with you, being gracious and coming across as being just as happy if it hadn’t.
6. Unselfishness: Angling everything you do toward the benefit of others.  And knowing that if you carry this attitude, everything you need for yourself will come your way.
7. Good Humor:  Even after in bitter dejection, passing it along with a smile and an “I’ll try to do better next time.”  Rejecting fear, shame discord, feelings of want and subjection.
8. Guilelessness: No suspicion for the intentions of suspicious people.  We’ve never seen Tebow criticize, even someone who considers him their worst rival or threat.
9. Sincerity:  Finally, Tim Tebow has a way of wrapping up all the other attributes into a package of unquestionable authenticity.

So, how does all of this relate to your job as someone running a company, a division, a group or a team?

Simply write down these nine attributes on a card.  Read it every morning.  Put it on your desk so you can see it during the day.  Then take 5 minutes after closing up shop to think about your day with your card in hand.

Subtly, it will begin to make a difference in how you feel and act.  But the first and most glowing recognitions are likely to come from others you touch.

Just like they do for Tim Tebow.

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