Contrary to popular opinion, Entrepreneurs are easily the worst at building successful businesses.

Entrepreneur – Wikipedia: “willing to accept a high level of personal, professional or financial risk to pursue opportunity. …in possession of an enterprise or venture.”

There are three basic business owner profiles:

1. The Market Focused owner (the Entrepreneur falls in this category)
2. The Systems Focused owner
3. The Product Focused owner

Market Focused owners are just that – focused on what the market wants. They poke around and find holes in the way customers are being served and create companies to fill that need. They’re usually not passionate about any particular product or service, and sometimes know little about the one they’ve just decided to stake their future on. They’re dreamers, visionaries, spontaneous, flexible, willing to take big risks, and understand that speed of execution is vital in starting and growing a business. Entrepreneurs are Market Focused owners.

They’re also more often than not terrible business people. Too often the entrepreneur is lifted up as the holy grail of how to be successful in business, and other business owners are taught to emulate them.

It’s not a good idea.

Market Focused owners need more outside help, are the worst at taking instruction, exhibit the most over-confidence, do the worst due diligence, and fail way more often than either of the other two owner profiles. When they succeed, they succeed big, usually by sheer luck and number of attempts. But just like the gambler, you only hear about that one big win. You never hear of the many losses that, in balance, make the entrepreneur the worst risk to bet your money on. Entrepreneurs are the business world’s big gamblers.

The Wikipedia definition is good – note that it doesn’t mention someone who is a great craftperson or artisan, or highly knowledgeable at making a product or delivering a service. Entrepreneurs are quite often not experts at all at what they’re hawking. They’re great at seeing the hole in the market, but their best bet is to hire someone else to patch the hole.

The carnage they leave behind can be appalling. At their worst, the entrepreneur is a dreamer who causes people to lose their entire life savings on future possibilities and well oiled get rich quick schemes that the entrepreneur is truly convinced is a “sure thing”.

At their best, a heavily Market Focused business owner understands how handicapped they are by their affinity for risk, their unwillingness to really master their craft, their desire to spread their companies too thin and do everything the market wants. The self-aware entrepreneur sees the clutter in their mind and on their desk, and their inability to finish an idea because they already have a newer and better one.

And this awareness leads them to put aside their inherent over-confidence and get help. When they finally get the Systems Focused and Product Focused owner profiles involved and get out of the way (entrepreneurs are classic control freaks), the possibility of success goes up big time.

Michael Gerber (E-Myth) and others correctly identified that most businesses are not started by entrepreneurs. But they then proceed to lift up the entrepreneur as the model for how the other profiles should do it. Good luck with that.

The Market Focused owner may have the most serious issues in building a business, but all three profiles are broken. There’s a fourth profile they all need to become that almost no one starts with – it’s call Business Owner, which is a healthy mix of the best from all three of the other profiles. But more on that at another time.

The purpose of this rant? To free up the overwhelming number of people who own businesses who think the holy grail is to emulate the entrepreneur. Trust me, it’s not something to be pursued. You’ll want to add some of their great strengths, but don’t drink the kool-aid and dive in wholesale in becoming one. It’s just not good for the economy (or for your pocket book, your spouse, your kids, your health…).

FYI – the next two weeks I won’t need to be nearly so hard on the other two profiles (Systems Focused and Product Focused) because they’re rarely so over-confident as the Market Focused owner. Fortunately very few business owners are actually Market Focused entrepreneurs. Be thankful if you’re not one of them, and if you are, get help focusing on Systems and Production so you can become a true Business Owner.

In 1821, the Eyjafjallajokull volcano managed to erupt for more than a year. While transport chiefs rush to find solutions (and test planes) to cope with the cloud of ash drifting across much of northern Europe, the PSFK Team and European friends spent a little time imagining what the impact on business, people and culture would be if Europe became plane free for a whole year.

Here are some of our initial thoughts. Add to them with your thoughts in the comments section.

1. Economy: Just-In-Time becomes Out-Of-Stuff

The hyper-efficient systems that have been built to make Europe tick, work, eat and play would collapse. Governments will have to look at directing local resources to ensure that their populations remain fed and relatively productive.

Stan Stalnaker (Hub Culture): “Most infrastructure is too large and fixed so the result would be paralysis across the board – especially in banking, professional services, manufacturing and tourism. No Fedex, no UPS, no short term freight, and in the cities: food shortages, because a lot of food now sold through major supermarkets, and much high quality restaurant food is flown in daily.”

Diane Verde Nieto (Clownfish): “To date alone the airlines are losing around 130m daily from commercial flights. The cargo industry is worth 2.9 billion in Britain and they are losing around 6.5million a day. (datamonitor) The repercussion of the economic impact will be pretty severe in a global level in many fronts that just the airline business. The lost revenues for business whose production has been on hold, as they might require spare parts or other critical goods can be disastrous.

Gerd Leonhard (Futurist): This would, of course, be quite a disaster as far as economic consequences go, as almost all business transactions are very much tied to meetings of some sort or the other. Europe is definitely not ready for making business work without a substantial amount of air-travel.

2. Food: Shortage before a seasonal and canned diet

Now they can’t rely on planes to fly in many of the fresh foods in Europe, everyone will raid their supermarkets and buy everything off the shelves to stockpile (like they did in the oil crisis) – grocers will need to reconsider their logistics to get local farms (that have managed to stay in existence) to supply local stores. Grocery chains will also look to importing on boats canned food that remains preserved. National diets will revert 50 years.

Stan Stalnaker (Hub Culture): “European agriculture is so highly protected it has remained a force against development, allowing for many small plots and a high amount of generally local food production.”

Uwe Lübbermann (Premium Cola): “Customers throughout the EU would experience a mysterious shortage of pineapple, litchi and mango especially during winter – but, due to less pollution by less planes cruising the sky, european-grown food could make a renaissance.”

3. Green: A better environment for a while

An absence of planes combined with local sourcing may reduce the CO2 in the short-term but people and businesses will be forced to find other ways to survive and that will mean greater car and power-station use.

Stan Stalnaker (Hub Culture): “The eventual move to localization would likely have a net positive carbon effect but it would almost certainly be driven by a large fall in consumption.. In the midterm, I would see localized living on a budget of choice.”

Diane Verde Nieto (Clownfish): “From an environmental perspective, the CO2 emissions has been reduced temporarily, however, it is unsustainable to think about economic prosperity without the airline industry as there is no infrastructure in place to sustain today’s globalized economy.”

4. Transport: A focus on rail and a return to the sea

Europe already has an extensive rail network but its historical development and age doesn’t necessarily make it the natural alternative transport system to aviation. Governments would quickly need to invest in infrastructure to support increased volume. Meanwhile, the ferry businesses currently bringing home stranded Europeans will flourish as they will offer the main way for international travel.

Gerd Leonhard (Futurist): “Trains would, of course, receive a huge amount of government aid to quickly expand their schedules and routes (but probably just end up occurring even worse delays than we already have, today)… if there was a location in Southern Italy or Spain that could still serve as a hub for cross-continental air travel, it would be very likely that 10s of 1000s of people would take the train there to then fly to global destinations. ”

Uwe Lübbermann (Premium Cola): “The Danish, the Swedes and the Norwegians would adapt and become major hubs for sea transport.

5. Travel: An appreciation of the great outdoors, eventually

Tourism would change radically. Britons and Germans will try at first to drive to Spain to take their annual vacation but the gridlock this will cause will result in a behavioral change which will lead to many Europeans spending time appreciating the (less sun-soaked) nature much of which can be reached by rail or ferry.

Stan Stalnaker (Hub Culture): “Major hub revenue events ranging from the Cannes Film Festival, Freize Art Fair, World Travel Mart to Frankfurt Book Fair, the summer tourism season will all be in ashes.”

6. Work: Connected

Confined to our cities, employees will take to the screens to work with the rest of Europe and the world. Business systems and more informal social networks like Facebook will keep business connected in real-time. Behaviors will emerge that mimic the lost habits found in a face to face meeting.

Stan Stalnaker (Hub Culture): “Virtualization would be a middling response for the business community: 3D initiatives like IBM and Avaya’s web.alive, Cisco Telepresence, and other virtual meeting initiatives would help to bridge gaps, and this would certainly be accelerated at lightning speed – not just for the benefit of Europe but for trade links to Asia and North America. Europe already has strong broadband capabilities and a mobile fabric – the next few months would certainly see a rush to virtualized tools at large for the business community.”

Gerd Leonhard (Futurist): “Telepresence, tele-conferencing, virtual meetings and video-conferencing would explode even quicker, as everyone would look for other ways to meet (well, in a way, this is already happening, anyway – Telepresence is a very potent business opportunity)… Many companies may plan for a drastic increase in social media activities, and people would resort to a lot more pro-active self-publishing efforts – the logic being that if you can’t go there you may as well leave your virtual footprints.”

7. Business: Business trips rather than quick visits

Unable to jet in and then jet out, business travelers would maximize their time in a city. Networked hotels with will be sought after and collaborative workspaces for out-of-town visitors will become popular.

8. Africa & The Middle East as business hubs

European businesses will meet their global counterparts in nearby parts of the world where planes can still travel. Cities in northern Africa and the Middle East will become key hubs.

Gerd Leonhard (Futurist): Assuming that some flying would still be feasible, some locations in North Africa and the Middle East may emerge as the new places to meet (Doha, AbuDhabi?). I would also predict that if there was a location in Southern Italy or Spain that could still serve as a hub for cross-continental air travel, it would be very likely that 10s of 1000s of people would take the train there to then fly to global destinations. Maybe Barcelona or so..?

As we said, these are some of our initial thoughts. Add to them with your thoughts in the comments section. And for further contemplation, some of you might be interested in Alain De Botton’s futuristic essay he just wrote about a “World Without Planes“.