Anita Roddick’s advice for entrepreneurs - an insight for church planters?

In an interview with CNN, Anita Roddick, founder of “The Body Shop”, discusses the issue of training for entrepreneurs. Among other things Anita has some very direct and frank advice for the budding entrepreneur:

Don’t go to business school. You don’t find … you don’t … learn to know that business or be taught that business is financial science, it’s not. It’s having an idea and seeing how you differ from the competition and shouting those differences from the rooftops.

There is a crisis of learning in the west – I call it a “reverse learning gap”. This “gap” is the distance between the knowledge accumulated within the confines of an academic institution, and the real life application of that knowledge in the real world. In the west it is a “reverse” learning gap because application of the knowledge (Skill and experience) is lagging light years behind the knowledge acquired. Nowhere is this disjoint highlighted more than in the worlds of business, and church ministry.

 

In this country, you can become a business school lecturer, without ever having run a business. You can teach management, without ever having had a company under your command. You can go to seminary and become a “Pastor” or “Minister of religion” without ever having pastored a church. Something is wrong.

 

When we separate learning from experience we end up with a disconnect between knowledge, empowerment, strategic decision, action, and consequence. These are supposed to flow in an natural rhythm. The most important factor in this is that there needs to be proper consequences for action taken , vetting all decisions and pruning all “flab” from the quality of decisions taken from knowledge gained. This is the classical apprenticeship model of learning – all under the guidance of an experienced “master”.

In the spirit of Anita Roddick, I am tempted to echo to every budding church planter: “Don’t go to seminary!” [Plant a church instead]

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