The business plan as a ’sub-genre of contemporary fiction’
Alain de Botton’s books are a delightful, life-affirming read in part because they seem to tell you what you already knew, or at least suspected you did. While his latest work, on the Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, does just that, it’s strongest when examining those few people who have decided to rejected the rat race in favour of striking out on their own.
De Botton gently deconstructs work from the perspective of the individual steps in getting a piece of tuna from the Maldives to Sainsbury’s in Bristol or a few volts of juice from Dungenness to East London. Along the way we get some brief interviews with people whose lives’ work becomes ever more specialised in one aspect of the supply chain. So far, so alienated, so Marx. De Botton also riffs on the concept of the protestant work ethic, arguing that the emerging bourgeoisie of the 18th century was responsible for introducing the notion that work can create happiness. Concurrently, they also came up with idea that marriage and sexual fulfilment could go hand-in-hand. These concepts are a conscious rejection of the ruling classes’ ‘immorality’ that held that only hobbies and extra-marital affairs could lead to joy. However, given the evidence in modern western societies at least, the ancien regime may have been onto something.
In the book’s most compelling chapter, on entrepreneurship, de Botton also takes the opportunity to rehearse arguments familiar from his previous work on Status Anxiety. He illustrates that the largely 20th century idea of meritocracy is bound to result in legions of people feeling like abject failures when confronted with the undeniable economic facts of their meagre achievement (especially while jealously eyeing their neighbours’ shiny new motors, trophy wives and privately educated offspring).
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the harsh glare of the entrepreneurial arena. Business failure rates are sky high (up to 50% in the first two years, according to The Times) and investment notoriously hard to come by (his brief conversation with a venture capitalist tells you all you ever need to know about your chances of getting any cash out of one). To investigate what drives people to take the risk, de Botton attends a business start-up fair packed with the kind of people who have invented walk-on-water shoes and a way of compacting crisps into a snack bar (so they can be eaten with one hand and stored more efficiently in kitchen cupboards). He correctly diagnoses that these ‘entrepreneurs’ have signally failed to understand how people (customers) make decisions about how to cross rivers or when, how and why to eat snack foods. In short, their product idea came first… the rationale second. The supply of a solution came before the identification of a need.
In the book’s most arresting passage, de Botton diagnoses the condition thus:
These individuals were writing their stories in a subgenre of contemporary fiction, the business plan, and populating them with characters endowed with deeply implausible personalities, an oversight which would eventually be punished not by a scathing review by some bright young person from the London Review of Books but by a lack of custom and a prompt foreclosure.
Harsh, but probably true. Is this meritocracy in action ?
