British entrepreneurs often admire the American spirit of dauntless optimism, so effectively tapped into by President Obama’s campaign slogan ‘Yes, we can’.
British entrepreneurs often admire the American spirit of dauntless optimism, so effectively tapped into by President Obama’s campaign slogan ‘Yes, we can’.
The ability to focus on goals rather than obstacles has helped US companies dominate the globe – along with more concrete advantages such as a large, homogenous market. It’s also led to an industry of self-help books encouraging people to accentuate the positive and ignore the negative.
While irrepressible optimism is preferable to suicidal gloom, it has its dangers. In her recent book, Smile or Die, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that the American unwillingness to dwell on ‘negative’ aspects of life contributed to the fact that those who saw the dangers of excessive sub-prime mortgage lending were ignored until it was too late.
In May 2008, this website published an interview with the US-educated entrepreneur Christina Domecq, who was talking about her dreams for her voicemail-to-text company Spinvox. Though impressed by her vision and determination, as were the venture capital investors who put £100 million into Spinvox, we noted the ‘gung-ho, can-do spirit about Spinvox which is almost excessively American’. Sections of the office and boardrooms were named after mountains. Domecq told us, ‘There is an absolute passion and conviction from myself and [co-founder Daniel Doulton] about what we’re doing’.
But whispers began last year that the company’s voice-to-text service had more to do with big call centres of people transcribing messages than cutting-edge technology. People who had used the service started to point out that mistakes had been made in transcriptions that could only be due to human error.
The company’s slick PR machine took too long to respond, and when it did, it did so too copiously, suggesting the accusations had really hit home. Once something of a media darling, Spinvox fell from favour and was recently sold for less than the sum investors had put into the company.
The media criticism of Spinvox may have been mean-spirited and only partially justified. But it was enough to puncture the bubble of optimism that had built up around the business.
Of course, many of the world’s greatest companies could never have been built without unreasonable optimism. Nor should Spinvox’s failure be seen as the end of the world for Domecq, a smooth operator who has had her share of success in the past and whose star may well rise again.
But it does remind us that when it comes to entrepreneurship, self-belief is not everything. Ignore sceptical voices in your business, laugh at obstacles and allow yourself to believe that the world can be shaped by your will, and you’re on the way to becoming a megalomaniac.
