Succeeding in Your Business by Cliff Ennico

I don't often have the opportunity to meet and get to know kids, teenagers and young adults on a one-to-one basis. But a couple of recent events have given me reason to think we should all be just a little concerned about where the next generation of entrepreneurs in the United States will be coming from.

Observation No. 1: Each year at Halloween, the number of trick-or-treaters at our house declines substantially. We can tell by the number of candy bars we have left over at the end of the evening, all of which have to be consumed by my wife and me (well, mostly me). Five years ago, we went through 126 candy bars. This year, we went through 36, even though there are more and more families with school-age children living in our neighborhood.

The kids that do show up at our door on Halloween are almost always accompanied by their parents, who usually maintain a discreet (but visible) presence in the street but who occasionally come to the door with their kids and, on one memorable occasion, asked us exactly what kinds of candy we were giving out. Many of the kids who didn't show up were attending a "trick-or-treat on safety street" event sponsored by our local Chamber of Commerce, where kids trick-or-treated at local stores with a cop every 30 feet.

Observation No. 2: I recently judged a business plan competition at one of our state colleges. The entrepreneurship professor who hosted the event told me the number of students signing up for his classes decline every year, and fully half of the kids who did fail to sign up for the business plan competition. What is more, hardly any of the kids submitted plans for technology oriented businesses — most were for local service or retail businesses, in several cases businesses their families already operated.

Observation No. 3: The son of a dear friend of mine, a bright young man who graduated at the top of his class from a prestigious college, passed up on the opportunity to join a successful well-known technology company in favor of a desk audit job with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Among other reasons, he explained that government jobs in general were considered more safe and secure among his peers, and offered more long-term growth potential, than jobs in corporate America.

Observation No. 4: Several of my neighbors asked me to write letters of recommendation for their children who were applying to college. Virtually all of them were looking at colleges close to home (within a 200-mile radius, or one day's drive) — not a single one had sent applications to college in other parts of the country, and two kids told me they were planning to live at home while they attended college.

Observation No. 5: A high school student of my acquaintance, a nationally ranked video-game champion, refuses to fly to any of his regional competitions because he is afraid the plan will crash.

Instead, his father accompanies him on bus rides that often take two days or more each way.

Now, taken in isolation, these events probably don't mean much. And I am not saying we shouldn't be protective of children's safety, or that kids shouldn't be concerned about saving their parents money in a difficult economy.

But when viewed together, especially in the span of only a few weeks, these random observations make me a little nervous about the future of the entrepreneurial spirit in America. If these events are in any way representative of teenagers and young adults nationwide, we are in big trouble, folks. These kids are not risk-takers. There is hardly any spirit of adventure in them. They value safety and security above all things. And a growing number of them hate business and everything it represents.

If we're looking to place blame for this, we can point fingers in lots of directions:

"Helicopter parents" who are so concerned that their kids have perfect lives that they smother and control their every move, denying them the chance to breathe free (in many cases, denying them the pleasures and risks they themselves enjoyed when they were young);

Events like 9/11 and the War on Terror that impressed on them at an impressionable age that the world was a scary place to be feared more than embraced (although, let's be real, were these events truly any scarier than the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War or President Kennedy's assassination — events that left their indelible marks on the Baby Boomers?);

Highly publicized scandals such as Enron and Bernie Madoff, and last year's widespread Wall Street collapse, that reinforce an image of business people as crooks, frauds and incompetents (an image reinforced time and again by Hollywood movies and television shows that demonize businesses and business people).

And widespread and never-ending corporate layoffs that in many cases have hit these kids' families directly.

Put all of those influences together, and it's hardly surprising that risk-taking of any kind has a bad name with today's youth, that many of them see business as an evil thing to be tolerated at best and regulated to death to protect innocent people, and that a frightening number of them want the government (the ultimate parent) to run the economy ... and their lives.

If entrepreneurship, free enterprise and the risk-taking spirit are to flourish in America, it must begin in the home. Children's fears need to be mollified and put into perspective, not needlessly magnified, if they are to take the personal risks that make new businesses, industries and technologies possible.

I saw a segment on the TV news last night about a mother who — shock and horror! — insists that her fourth-grade daughter walk the three blocks from her home to the school bus drop-off point. In the hands of such parents lies the future of entrepreneurship in America.

Cliff Ennico (crennico@gmail.com) is a syndicated columnist, author and former host of the PBS television series "Money Hunt." This column is no substitute for legal, tax or financial advice, which can be furnished only by a qualified professional licensed in your state. To find out more about Cliff Ennico and other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit our Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2009 CLIFFORD R. ENNICO.

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