One of the Entrepreneurs featured in my upcoming book, The Entrepreneur’s Ethic, is Henry Ford. There are seven parts of The Entrepreneur’s Ethic. Ford’s work exemplifies Ethic 2: Solve Hard Problems. This is the priority setting-orientation of entrepreneurship. It tackles the profound question of “what should I work on?”
This week’s podcast is an historic case study from early in Henry Ford’s journey. While set at a time more than one hundred years ago, it deals with an issue very relevant to today, the tension between entrepreneurial talent and risk capital. What proportion of rewards for entrepreneurial success are owed to entrepreneurs and what proportion to investors? Ford and investors in his early businesses struggled with this in a manner no different from entrepreneurs and investors today.