Who is the Good Entrepreneur?
An Exploration within the
Catholic Social Tradition
ABSTRACT. Entrepreneurship is a critical need in
society, and an entrepreneur’s life can be a life won-
derfully lived. However, most of the literature
examining entrepreneurship takes an overly narrow
financial viewpoint when examining entrepreneurship
and entrepreneurial success. Our paper surveys the
current entrepreneurial literature on what constitutes
successful entrepreneurship. We then engage key
conceptual ideas within the Catholic social tradition
to analyze what we see as an undeveloped notion of
success. We then move to construct a richer notion
of success through the framework of virtue.
Jeffrey R. Cornwall is chair of the Department of
Entrepreneurship and holds the Sandra Schulze Chair
in Entrepreneurship. He received a doctorate in man-
agement and organization and an MBA in finance from
the University of Kentucky. During the late 1980s,
Cornwall co-founded Atlantic Behavioral Health
Systems, and after nine years of rapid growth, he nego-
tiated the sale of most of his business interests. Cornwall
returned to academia and has co-authored two books,
Organizational Entrepreneurship and The Entre-
preneurial Educator.
Michael J. Naughton is a full professor and teaches in the
theology and Catholic studies departments. He is the
director of the John A. Ryan Institute for Catholic Social
Thought of the Center for Catholic Studies, which
examines Catholic social thought in relation to business,
Catholic education and urban issues. Naughton received
a Ph.D. in Theology and Society from Marquette
University and an MBA from St. Thomas, St. Paul-
Minnesota. His most recent books are Managing as if
Faith Mattered: Christian Social Principles in
the Modern Organization (co-author Helen Alford
O.P.) and Rethinking the Purpose of Business:
Interdisciplinary Essays from the Catholic Social
Tradition both of which are published by the University
of Notre Dame Press.
Journal of Business Ethics 44: 61–75, 2003.
© 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
Jeffrey R. Cornwall
Michael J. Naughton
KEY WORDS: Catholic social thought, economism,
entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, subjective dimension
of work, success, virtue
Introduction
Recent statistics show the dramatic increase in
the impact that entrepreneurship has on
economic growth (Timmons, 1999), which has
certainly contributed to the focus on entrepre-
neurship of late. For example, the change in
employment as a percentage of the total work-
force in the United States employed by the
Fortune 500 companies has dropped from 20%
in 1980 to about 7% in the late 1990s. During
that same time, new businesses represented 77%
of new jobs created, while the Fortune 500
actually lost over 5 million jobs. In the mid-
twentieth century about 200,000 new businesses
were started each year in the United States. That
number is now estimated to be about 3.5 million
new businesses each year. Clearly there has been
a fundamental transformation to an economy that
is rooted in, and fueled by, entrepreneurial devel-
opment.
Yet despite these impressive contributions,
deeply embedded within entrepreneurship, as a
practice and a body of literature, are unexamined
first principles. We believe that this failure to
understand entrepreneurship within a moral
context is a problem not only for society, but also
for entrepreneurs, whose growth is stunted by
this lack of understanding. The first among these
unexamined first principles is how entrepre-
neurial success is defined. The vast majority of
studies narrowly define entrepreneurial success in
terms of financial performance.
62 Jeffrey R. Cornwall and Michael J. Naughton
A commonly accepted description of entre-
preneurship is a process of identifying, evaluating,
seizing an opportunity and bringing together the
resources necessary for success. It is the actions
and behaviors of entrepreneurs, rather than any
characteristics of them, that have dominated the
study of entrepreneurship. That is, entrepre-
neurship is defined in terms of what people do,
rather than describing a set of traits that entre-
preneurs share in common. Entrepreneurship can
be seen as the process of taking on calculated,
well-planned business risks in the pursuit of
opportunity in the market. Since this definition
of entrepreneurship focuses on the process of
building a business, much of the research is at the
enterprise level of analysis. However, it is impos-
sible to remove the entrepreneur from entrepre-
neurship. Without it, you simply have an empty
vessel. Examination of entrepreneurship should
include the personal and interior side experi-
enced by the entrepreneur, beginning with the
very first impulse, the spirited emotions and the
courage that prompt an individual to start a
business venture.
Yet, a review of recent studies on entrepre-
neurial ventures reveals that much of the litera-
ture focuses on the actions and behaviors as it
relates to financial growth as the measure of
success. The most common measures of growth
are concerned with revenue growth or growth
in market share (Frombrun and Wally, 1989;
Tsai, MacMillan and Low, 1991; Brush and
Vanderwerf, 1992; Hoy et al., 1992; Brown,
1996; Schwartz et al., 1997; Wisnieske and
Dowling, 1997; Ensley and Amason, 1999; Stoica
and Schindehutte, 1999). However, revenue
growth is not the only measure of financial per-
formance. Other studies operationalized success
as growth in profits (Chandler, 1996; Bamford
et al., 1996; Ireland and Hitt, 1997; Ensley and
Griden, 1998). Chrisman et al. (1998) measured
success in terms of survival of the business, the
ultimate measure of financial performance. Most
of these studies used measures that are common
in assessing publicly held stocks traded in equity
markets, even though most of the ventures being
studied were privately held. Public equity
markets view business ownership only in terms
of a financial investment and therefore it can be
understood why financial performance is the
main focus for assessing success. But should it
be assumed that privately held businesses owned
by entrepreneurs should be assessed using these
same measures? Is this all that is important to an
entrepreneur?
A few studies use measures of success that may
have specific relevance for many entrepreneurs
on a personal basis, rather than focusing only on
objective financial measures at the enterprise level
of analysis. For example, Levie (1997) defined
growth in terms of growth in total employment.
The number of employees is a common measure
used by entrepreneurs when asked to assess the
progress of their business ventures. Two studies
used “cash taken out of the business,” Cooper
et al. (1996) and Franquesa and Cooper (1996).
To the entrepreneur, cash flow is considered the
life-blood of the business, so the ability for the
entrepreneur to take cash out through bonuses or
dividends is an important measure of success from
the entrepreneur’s perspective. Franquesa and
Cooper (1996) also assessed the entrepreneurs’
general satisfaction with running their businesses.
Certainly the importance of entrepreneurs
being financially successful, whether defined by
externally imposed measures or those important
to the entrepreneur, is self-evident: it is founda-
tional to the economic survival of a business
venture. However, Cooper (1995) stated that the
problem of much of the entrepreneurship liter-
ature is that studies measure performance vari-
ables that are easiest to gather information about,
rather than those that are important and mean-
ingful. This then raises the question: Important
to whom? There is virtually no effort in the
literature to ask entrepreneurs what success
means to them. Is it creating jobs, creating wealth,
creating and marketing a useful product or
service, distributing wealth, or something even
more deeply personal and principled? And there
is no attempt to examine what entrepreneurial
success means taken from a moral perspective, let
alone a spiritual or religious perspective. That is,
what is a good entrepreneur?
A few papers addressed measures of entrepre-
neurial success from a broader stakeholder per-
spective. Cornwall (1998) suggested the
importance of examining an entrepreneur’s con-
 Who is the Good Entrepreneur?
tribution to economic and community develop-
ment. Sapienza and Grimm (1997) assessed
customer and employee satisfaction to measure
success. It should not be assumed that the lack
of scholarly focus on more personal measures of
entrepreneurial success reveals a lack of concern
on the entrepreneur’s part on these issues. It will,
however, require a fundamental change in the
perspective taken by scholars.
The reduction of entrepreneurial success to
financial measurements in the literature is a
serious problem in the economic world. Pope
John Paul II (1992) names this problem
economism. It is a term that describes the assump-
tions found within the way some people think
about work as well as actually work, namely, he
writes in the Encyclical Letter Laborem exercens
(1981) #13 “that of considering human labor
solely according to its economic purpose.”1 At
the heart of this economism is an instrumental
logic that reduces human work to simply a
“factor of production” to be used to maximize
financial performance and growth. Entrepre-
neurship, it is assumed, is simply instrumental to
the material goals of the entrepreneur. From this
logic, there is a reversal in the primacy of the
person “over the capital instrument, the primacy
of the person over things.”
Examining entrepreneurial success as a first
principle requires a moral analysis of the good
entrepreneur that goes well beyond a simple eval-
uation of financial performance. It entails that
entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial research take
seriously this critique of economism, as well as
the neglect of two dimensions of work that are
methodologically neglected in the study of entre-
preneurship, namely the subjective dimension of
work and the role of virtue.
Subjective dimension of the work of the
entrepreneur
When an entrepreneur works, he is conscious of
achieving objectives or goals, often described in
terms of productivity, efficiency, profitability,
quality, and so forth (Melé, 2001). The language
of objectives points to the ability to affect and
change objects outside or beyond the entrepreneur
63
himself. This so-called objective work “refers to
the activity of dominating and transforming the
earth through technology and other methods of
production” (Pinckaers, 1995, p. 85). Most
entrepreneurial education and literature is all
about how to change things: discern opportuni-
ties in markets niches, build business through a
relationship with customers and suppliers,
manage the day-to-day cash flow, attract a con-
sistent flow of cash to fuel growth, develop a
team of employees with complementary skills and
talents, and learn to effectively create systems as
the business grows. It is in the objective changes
that one begins to see the significance of
humanity’s dominion over creation. People have
the rational capacity to see and anticipate oppor-
tunities and to change the world.
Yet, the work of an entrepreneur, or any
worker, is not only achieving objectives, since the
activity of work does not only terminate in
objects. The entrepreneur changes not only the
world, but she also changes herself. As a self-
reflexive activity, work reflects right back into the
person. When she works, as well as when any
of us work, she not only makes a choice about
what she works on, that is, the objective dimen-
sion of work, but she also simultaneously makes
a choice about herself, that is, through her labor,
she can partially realize herself (Gregg, 1999).
The subjective dimension of work points us to
the reality that we are changing through our
work. This change in the person does not come
all at once, but gradually. It is often impercep-
tible in individual acts, but eventually one begins
to see a pattern of activity, habits, which leave
deeper and deeper impressions forming what we
often call the character of the person.
actor WORKER
activity WORK
changes SUBJECTIVE OBJECTIVE
The dynamic between the subjective and
objective dimensions of work tells us much about
how we relate with the world and the world with
us. Our work has the capacity to develop us
64 Jeffrey R. Cornwall and Michael J. Naughton
precisely because it has the capacity to develop
the world. The self and world are jointly artic-
ulated in the act of labor (Murphy, 1994). Or to
put it another way, because work is other-trans-
forming, it is self-transforming.
Yet, the subjective dimension of work is not
easily discernible when we are used to seeing
only the objective dimension of work. At first
sight, the work done in organizations can look
as if it involves people merely busy with objects.
But on reflection, as Lonergan (1988, p. 223)
explains, “it appears that deeds, decisions, dis-
coveries affect the subject more deeply than they
affect the objects with which they are concerned.
They accumulate as dispositions and habits of the
subject; they determine him; they make him
what he is and what he is to be.”
This subjective dimension of work is on one
hand a descriptive concept, which tells us that
to understand the phenomena of work we not
only have to understand the objective dynamics
of work, but also the subjective. But the subjec-
tive dimension of work should lead us to moral
claims as well precisely because it helps under-
stand the phenomenon of work. It should
persuade us that human work should not be
reduced to simply financial or product goals –
however important those goals are – because the
subjective changes affect human character. The
failure to recognize the subjective dimension of
work deprives us of understanding the dynamic
relationship between action and human devel-
opment. As John Ruskin is supposed to have
stated, “The highest reward for man’s toil is not
what he gets from it, but what he becomes by
it.”
Alasdair MacIntyre is helpful in understanding
how this works. He explains that the internal aim
to such productive crafts such as farming, fishing,
architecture, construction, and so forth, “when
they are in good order, is never only to catch
fish, or to produce beef or milk, or to build
houses. [objective dimension] It is to do so in a
manner consonant with the excellences of the
craft, so that not only is there a good product,
but the craftsperson is perfected through and in
her or his activity . . . It is from this that the
sense of a craft’s dignity derives” [subjective
dimension] (1984, p. 284). Of course the fish-
erman who fails to catch fish is no longer a fish-
erman; rather he is broke. But, his work is never
fully or essentially explained by the fish caught.
In other words, to explain the phenomenon of
the fisherman by his product of fish is to remain
on the surface of what is actually happening.
This connection between one’s work and one’s
identity can be found in the history of names.
During the Middle Ages as well as other earlier
historical periods, the products created were
closely identified with the people who made
them. Names such as Baker, Smith, Miller,
Cook, Mason, Carpenter, Hunter, and Farmer
attest to the close identity between what one
made and who one was. Even today when people
ask, “What do you do?” answers come back,
“I’m a teacher,” “I’m a plumber,” “I’m an
accountant.” There is of course the dangerous
conflation between what one does, doing, and
who one is, being, but to deny the connection
between the two is to make human work
insignificant in the moral life.
The entrepreneurial literature’s focus on finan-
cial success methodologically ignores the signif-
icance of the subjective dimension; there is a
certain agnosticism toward the entrepreneur. In
other words, the growth of the entrepreneur as
a person through the process of entrepreneurship,
that is, the subjective dimension of entrepre-
neurship, is simply a non-issue. As we stated
above, the entrepreneur has been taken out of
entrepreneurship.
The reasons for this methodological agnosti-
cism are multiple, but we believe that what lies
behind much of it is the social scientific desire
to quantitatively measure phenomena, and that
the subjective dimension of work is difficult to
measure. Consequently, the literature ignores one
of the most enduring questions for the entre-
preneur: “What kind of entrepreneur should I
become?”
The recognition of the subjective dimension
of work is not meant to alleviate the technical
difficulties and financial pressures of the objec-
tive dimension of work. Discussions over the
appropriate measure of financial success should
continue, but what is missing in such discussions
is the personal, social and spiritual dimensions
of the person’s formation in the entrepreneurial
 Who is the Good Entrepreneur?
process, which for many entrepreneurs was pre-
cisely the reason why they became entrepreneurs.
The critical challenge for entrepreneurs as well
as scholars in entrepreneurship is to begin to
integrate the subjective and objective dimensions
of work. If entrepreneurs were to create organi-
zations without due regard to the objective
dimensions of work, chaos would reign as a
prelude to bankruptcy. But in a similar way, if
they were to create organizations without
recognizing the subjective dimension of work,
chaos of a different order would reign, namely,
the moral and spiritual stagnation of persons. It
is in light of this challenge of integration that the
Catholic social tradition proposes the role of
virtue as a critical framework to integrate the
subjective and objective dimensions of entrepre-
neurial work.
Alasdair MacIntyre explains, however, that the
concept of virtue “always requires for its appli-
cation the acceptance for some prior account of
certain features of social and moral life in terms
of which it has to be defined and explained”
(1984, p. 186). The paradigms of virtue adopted
by historic communities and cultures persist in
a kind of ideal biography, sometimes called a
“narrative” account. The Western tradition, for
example, accommodates paradigms of virtue
exhibited as “the life” of the Homeric warrior-
hero, as “the life” of the politically active citizen
in a Greek polis, and as “the life” of a Christian
saint. That is, in order to talk about the virtues
of the entrepreneur, we need first to have a
concept of how we characterize the entrepre-
neur.
Here of course we do not have one monolithic
notion of the entrepreneur. Both in theory and
practice, entrepreneurs conceive of themselves in
very different ways. In the rest of this paper we
describe three accounts of the entrepreneur, with
particular focus of what these accounts mean for
a concept of virtue. As we mentioned above, the
literature focuses on actions and behaviors and not
on the character of the entrepreneur; yet,
however implicit, action and behaviors always
assume a character type that serves as the basis
for why one should chose such actions. Our
point here in developing these three characters
is not to pigeon-hole entrepreneurs, but rather
65
to explore what it would be like if we took the
character question seriously, which is at the heart
of a virtue approach.
Three different entrepreneurial characters
and the role of virtue
The technically competent entrepreneur: the illusion
of technique
In the entrepreneurial literature, the relationship
between virtue and entrepreneurship has already
been forged, of sorts. For example, one will hear
the phrase “entrepreneurial virtues.” The virtues
of industriousness, ingenuity, efficiency, risk
assessment, tenacity, self-discipline, improvisation,
frugality, and so forth are mentioned as
those qualities that mark a true entrepreneur
(Timmons, 1999). These entrepreneurial virtues
are often proposed within the context where
these habits are absent, particularly in large
corporations. Timmons (1999, p. 28) explains
that the industrial giants of IBM, Kodak,
International Paper, GM, and U.S. Steel, “tended
to reward people who accumulated the largest
assets, budgets, number of plants, products, and
head count, rather than rewarding those who
created or found new business opportunities,
took calculated risks and occasionally made
mistakes, and did so with bootstrap resources.”
According to Timmons, these companies suffered
from the vices or bad habits of managers and
executives who created organizations that were
overly bureaucratic, satisfied with the status quo,
unable to read the signs of the times, risk
aversive, dependent too much on past practices,
and so forth.
These overly bureaucratic corporations have
lost the skills and techniques necessary to
function well in a dynamic market economy. This
is why entrepreneurs are so important to a finan-
cially healthy economy. What often initially
motivates these entrepreneurs is a technical
improvement of a product and service, that is,
they want to make something better. Their traits
of industriousness, ingenuity, frugality, etc., guide
them in the process of adopting courses of action
to allocate necessary resources so as to capitalize
66 Jeffrey R. Cornwall and Michael J. Naughton
on opportunities in the marketplace in a way that
is profitable. Unlike some managers of some large
bureaucratic corporations, the entrepreneur more
effectively works out all possible means for
achieving narrowly – that is, precisely defined –
financial and productive objectives.
Within this more technically minded under-
standing of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs treat
human beings and “human factors” – their own
skills, the loyalty of customers, the efficiency of
suppliers, no less than the labor of employees –
as “organizational resources.” Entrepreneurship
becomes a discipline of thinking as if “good”
could only mean “good for earnings” or “good
for production,” so as to achieve the most exact
and detailed view of how earnings or production
can be increased by all possible means, i.e., maxi-
mally. So-called pure financial or production
goals in entrepreneurial logic do not allow wider
knowledge of relationships among various goods
to interfere with and complicate the exercise; this
deliberate withdrawal from “thinking in the
round” is the essence of technique or techne
(Alford and Naughton, 2001).
As a technique, entrepreneurial thinking has
advanced tremendously in recent years, as the
volumes of materials indicate, and such progress,
we argue, is of critical importance to the disci-
pline of entrepreneurship. We do not believe that
the surveys we summarized concerning how
entrepreneurship measures success are unimpor-
tant. They tell us much about the objective
dimension of work, namely, the procedures
necessary to produce determined results. Without
such skills the economy would stagnate, leaving
more people unemployed and in poverty.
Unfortunately, this ascendance in technique in
entrepreneurship, of the objective dimension of
work, has not been integrated with reflection on
the human realities of the social nature of the
person, community of work, and the social
dimension of property, all of which would help
us understand more profoundly the subjective
dimension of work and the moral virtues of
entrepreneurship.
This is why the direction of entrepreneurial
studies mentioned in the first part of this paper
are so problematic, not so much because they
measure success in terms of profit, market share
and survival, but because as a discipline that is
all they measure success by. Successful companies
therefore are those companies which perfect the
techniques of maximizing profitability, reducing
costs, improving efficiencies, enhancing quality,
increasing market share and getting products to
market faster. The problem here is that the end
of entrepreneurship is reduced wholly to a
technical/financial order. So what we have found
in entrepreneurial literature (as well as the
thinking of some entrepreneurs) is an unarticu-
lated, but nonetheless committed, technical
finality, which as we described above can be
called economism. The technical finality is
manifested concretely in entrepreneurial com-
panies by the absence of any conversation on the
moral purpose of the firm, the spiritual meaning
of work, a just distribution of a company’s
returns, and so forth. This lack of moral con-
versation on the meaning of work lures entre-
preneurs into a mechanistic optimism of what
technical knowledge and practices can do for
their organization (see Pinckaers, 1995 and John
Paul II, Sollicitudo rei socialis, 1987, #27).
What has not been fully recognized in the
entrepreneurial field is the limit of the technical
character of entrepreneurship, namely that the
techniques are themselves goods only as the instru-
ment of prudent concern for the comprehensive
human good, the good “in the round.” This
technical notion of entrepreneurship leaves the
entrepreneur not on some amoral landscape, but
on a moral wasteland, leaving her little resources
to deal with the struggles of work/family tension,
developing authentic communities of work, just
wealth distribution, hyper-competitiveness, and
so forth. Actually, the so-called entrepreneurial
virtues of diligence, industriousness and so forth
mentioned above simply exacerbate the problems
by intensifying the workload.
Here we can imagine the entrepreneur who
has liberated himself from the large bureaucratic
corporation and has solved, at least temporarily,
the technical problems that confront him, but
now is “afflicted with a loss of meaning that its
own technical thinking left it unable even to
grasp” (Barrett, 1978, p. xix). The reason for this
existential angst lies in reducing work only to
techne and in ignoring the virtue of practical
 Who is the Good Entrepreneur?
wisdom, which is attaining good ends with
appropriate and effective means. Todd Whitmore
explains that “Classical philosophy has a term for
the person who spends so much time learning
techne [technique] that he has no time for
learning phronesis or ‘practical wisdom’ [virtue]:
idiot.”2 When we moderns think of idiot, we
envision the clueless person who can’t get
anything done, that is, we often think of the
technically incompetent. Rather, in Classical
philosophy, idiotes translates as “private person,”
someone who is clueless to the moral and social
knowledge that he acts only on the technical
level with his own limited interest in mind.
Our point here is not to degenerate into
name-calling nor underestimate the importance
of techne, which is critical to moral life, but to
note how far we have gone with our language
and our values. We live in a highly technical
society that can easily seduce us into an “illusion
of technique” where reality is reduced to the
precision and clarity of technical practices of
particular economic, financial and entrepreneurial
disciplines. More specifically, the illusion for the
entrepreneur lies, often unknowingly, in the
distinct separation of the subjective and objective
dimensions of work in evaluating the problem
at hand. The root problem, and it is the problem
we have been continually returning to, is that
techniques do not tell us enough about the
“good” entrepreneur, namely, the subject.
Technique qualifies a person partially, since it is
only concerned about making things. When we
say, “This person is productive,” we are saying
more about what she can do than about the
deeper dimensions of her character. A moral
virtue, however, such as justice, is habitual human
action ordered to a good end that renders the
acting person good, i.e., completes or fulfills the
person as a person. It tells us about the good of
being an excellent entrepreneur not just being a
technically effective one. The virtues of justice
and prudence thus qualifies a person compre-
hensively. When we say, “This person is just,” we
are saying something about the whole person
(Pinckaers, 1995, p. 84).
An example of the technically competent
entrepreneur can be seen in an individual who
came to visit one of the authors. He was a gifted
67
computer specialist. He came for assistance in
getting his cash flow and financing under control.
He had identified a market niche for a computer
application he had been developing with his
previous employer. The employer was not
interested in the idea, so the entrepreneur gained
permission to take the idea and start his own
company to develop and market the product. He
had methodically refined the concept and done
a remarkable job in making the program opera-
tional and ready for market. He reported that he
was on the verge of breaking through into the
market, but was “dealing with some financial
distress.” If he could raise a little more money
he would be able to make the business profitable.
When asked how bad his financial condition was,
he matter-of-factly stated that he had funded his
start-up primarily through his life savings (i.e.,
cashed his retirement accounts) and through a
second mortgage on his home. He had gotten
“a little behind” on his loan repayment and lost
his house. This frustrated his wife, who took
their children and left him. And, oh yes, he was
about to have his car repossessed. But he only
needed to raise another $50 000 and he could
deliver his product to several customers. He did
raise the funds, and he did become financially
successful. However, at what cost? He never
understood that by pursuing the “entrepreneurial
virtues” of technical competence, which he
mastered with much practice and learning, he left
a trail of damage to his family, friends, creditors,
and many others.
So if we really want to go beyond the “tech-
nically competent entrepreneur,” the illusion that
entrepreneurship is somehow only a technical,
amoral, neutral, “objective,” activity, we must
envision what the best of entrepreneurial tech-
niques would look like if integrated with the best
of human morality. But before we attempt this,
we must look at another kind of entrepreneur.
The entrepreneur on steroids: disordered ends/desires
The absence of any discussion beyond technical
competence, or economically useful ends, creates
the conditions to glorify the wealth creating
capacity of entrepreneurs for their own personal
68 Jeffrey R. Cornwall and Michael J. Naughton
and private benefit. In other words, entrepre-
neurship, when it is unanchored from a morally
good end, does not content itself with mere
techniques and skill, but rather produces what we
call “the entrepreneur on steroids.” The athlete
on steroids is driven by the desire to win, which
causes him to risk his health. The entrepreneur
on our metaphoric steroids is driven by a passion
for more stuff, what the Greeks call pleonexia, an
“insatiability for more,” which risks his moral
character.
For example, the entrepreneurial virtues
described by authors such as Timmons lead to an
adoration of entrepreneurs in high growth, high
potential industries such as the “dot.com’s” of
the 1990s. Certainly the dot.com entrepreneurs
exhibited ingenuity, risk assessment, tenacity,
self-discipline, and improvisation as they enlarged
their businesses. And many realized personally
financial success. But their aspirations were
merely to create a vehicle to offer a public
offering (IPO) for their businesses that would
generate wild speculation on the possibility that
these businesses might someday create real
revenues or become profitable. Based on this
speculation, these entrepreneurs created vast sums
of wealth out of thin air. Once their fortunes
were made, some of the dot.com entrepreneurs
were able to take their wealth and virtually
vanish. But are these entrepreneurs really suc-
cessful? Are their so-called entrepreneurial virtues
truly virtuous?
Take for another example one of the only
businesses to consistently earn profits on the
internet: pornography. In an article in The New
York Times Magazine, Rich (2001) describes porn
entrepreneurs not as “gold-chained creeps” but
rather as people who saw a tremendous oppor-
tunity to make a significant amount of money.
Many of the people he describes are college
graduates, some with business degrees and
training, but all realize that satisfying customer
wants makes them a lot of money. With
extremely low failure rates and large profit
margins, these entrepreneurs see pornography as
a good bet to succeed financially.
When success in entrepreneurship is measured
using traditional financial measures as taken from
the entrepreneurship literature, pornography
companies must be called successful. They earn
vast profits and create huge amounts of wealth
for these entrepreneurs. Many of these entrepre-
neurs clearly exhibit the so-called entrepreneurial
virtues identified by authors such as Timmons
(1999). But are these entrepreneurs really suc-
cessful? Are their so-called entrepreneurial virtues
truly virtuous? If one only views entrepreneurial
success in terms of wealth and income, the
answer to all of these questions is sadly, “yes.”
If we are dissatisfied with this answer, then we
must ask the following question: “Why are the
entrepreneurial habits of industriousness, tenacity,
efficiency, risk assessment, and frugality not
virtues within the pornography industry, or
certain dot.com companies? Or more positively,
what can make these so-called entrepreneurial
virtues of industriousness, ingenuity, risk taking,
tenacity, and so forth “moral” virtues, that is,
qualities that make us good as well as successful?3
To answer these questions we need to focus
our discussion again on the subjective dimen-
sion of work. Entrepreneurship, although filled
with toil, is a good thing for people. Its role in
creating wealth, jobs and new products and
services, that is, the objective dimension of work,
serves as a key to a dynamic economy. Simply
look at economies without an entrepreneurial
class of workers and one sees the static effects of
economy on society.
Yet, what in entrepreneurship makes the entre-
preneur good? John Paul II (1981) explains that
without consideration of the subjective dimen-
sion of work, “it is impossible to understand the
meaning of the virtue of industriousness, and
more particularly it is impossible to understand
why industriousness should be a virtue” (Laborem
exercens, #9). Standing within the virtue tradi-
tion of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, he states
that industriousness, as well as ingenuity,
creativity, frugality, and so forth, can only be
virtues if they “make us more human,” and they
can only make us more human if we are helping
other people become more developed. John Paul
argues this point on the basis of the phenomena
of our activity, which we have described in terms
of the subjective and objective dimensions of
work. We perfect ourselves to the extent that we
create conditions for other people to develop. We
 Who is the Good Entrepreneur?
cannot develop ourselves without developing
others.
This is why John Paul states:
All this pleads in favor of the moral obligation to
link industriousness [as well as other so-called
entrepreneurial habits] as a virtue with the social
order of work, which will enable man to become,
in work, ‘more of a human being’ and not be
degraded by it, not only because of the wearing
out of his physical strength (which, at least up to
a certain point, is inevitable), but especially
through damage to the dignity and subjectivity that
are proper to him (Laborem exercens, #9, emphases
added).
The key term here is the “social order of
work.” When our goal in work disengages from
the social order in which it is done, a certain
corruption occurs in the entrepreneur himself.
When our goal is simply to win a league cham-
pionship, we are prone to lose our sportsman-
ship; when our goal is merely to raise an
audience’s laughter, we can slip into vulgarity;
and when our goal is solely to maximize wealth,
we are inclined to instrumentalize people to
achieve that end. If the goals of winning, enter-
taining, and selling are not to corrupt those who
pursue them, they must be embedded in much
larger purposes which invite a comprehensive,
moral evaluation of the means they employ. Such
purposes include the service of others and the
promotion of the good of all, the common good.
Here we come to a rather startling conclusion
if we take the insight of the subjective dimension
of work: the perpetrators of injustice are more
oppressed than the exploited. The well-dressed
entrepreneurs found in the New York Times article
on porn entrepreneurs are more degraded than
the women and men they use (Gaudium et spes,
#27 in Flannery, 1988).
But here we need to go further in our evalu-
ation. The pornography industry is in one sense
an easy one to critique. But what about those
companies where the wealth is hoarded by the
few, where children and spouses are neglected for
sake of ever greater revenues, where enough is
never enough, where deception becomes a
standard business practice, or where dangerous
products are distributed because someone else
69
will if we don’t? And while children, spouses,
employees and customers of entrepreneurs suffer
from such work, the most tragic figure is the
entrepreneur himself, precisely because he is
often the most responsible for the situation and
thus is most affected subjectively by the situation.
What is remarkable about these “entrepreneurs
on steroids” is that their hunger for growth and
wealth seems to be insatiable. There is never
enough. When they finally get the car they’ve
dreamed of, they then pursue a yacht. Once they
get the yacht, they want the private plane that all
the other “successful” entrepreneurs now own.
Once their net worth is $1 billion, they strive
to reach $2 billion. And so it goes.
The bottom line of our argument is that the
use of so-called entrepreneurial virtues as
articulated by Timmons and others fails to link
the qualities of the entrepreneur to any social
order. Without the link of the social order of
work, habits of industriousness, ingenuity, effi-
ciency, and so forth lose their potential to
develop the whole person.
The good entrepreneur: the social order of work
John Paul II points out that virtue “is something
whereby man becomes good as man” (Laborem
exercens, #9). If the practice of virtue makes
people more human, then work, practiced as
virtue, can make entrepreneurs more human.
The reason for this bold claim is that a virtue is,
as MacIntyre writes, “a quality the exercise of
which leads to the achievement of the human
telos” (1984, p. 184). Virtues are internal quali-
ties or powers that we develop both through our
own efforts and God’s grace to achieve what is
morally good. So the critical question before us
is: “What are the excellent qualities that makes
a good entrepreneur, and not a just successful
one, i.e., profitable?” What is in “the social order
of work” that makes people good?
To address these questions, we turn to what
originally drives a person to become an entre-
preneur. While there are many reasons for this,
an entrepreneur often moves to start his company
because he feels constricted to act in a corpo-
rate setting. He feels constrained, feels limited.
70 Jeffrey R. Cornwall and Michael J. Naughton
He knows that he cannot do or be what he has
the potential to do and become. That is, many
entrepreneurs leave corporate settings because it
stifles their subjective growth. In other words, it
is precisely this notion of the subjective dimen-
sion of work that describes why entrepreneurs
are entrepreneurs.
Let us take a concrete example. When Dale
Merrick, Bob Wahlstedt and Lee Johnson started
Reell Precision Manufacturing (RPM), they
started the company with four complementary
aims:
• to earn a living
• to grow personally and professionally
• to be able to put family first
• to integrate their faith and work
These aims were not easily attainable at their
former place of employment (a large, Midwestern
manufacturing firm). While they had different
reasons for leaving, their experiences converged
on two realities that were becoming increasingly
undeniable: (1) pressures of organizational objec-
tives created conditions that prevented them from
being proud of their work as engineers; (2) suc-
cessful executives at this company too often paid
the price of family estrangement for career
advancement. Deborah Savage, in a case study on
RPM, explains that Bob Wahlstedt could see that
the higher one got in the company hierarchy, the
less time one had for the things that mattered
most. He had already heard about the troubles
executives were having with unhappy spouses and
rebellious children. This was not a future he
envisioned for himself. He had enjoyed an
especially good relationship with his own father
and knew that this had been important
throughout his life. He dreamed of having a
similar relationship with sons and daughters of
his own. But that wasn’t the only thing missing.
In all of the intense effort to get the job done,
to do the impossible to meet the demands of the
company’s customers, Bob felt himself to be
disappearing. He was becoming a “company
employee” and losing his sense of identity in the
process (Savage, 1998).
These three men sought work that was
fulfilling in the fullest sense of the word. They
also wanted to extend this type of work to
their employees. If the three of them desired
security, growth and integration, wouldn’t other
employees want the same? Thus they began to
build an organization that would fulfill all the
aims.
While their story is unique in some respects,
the beginning of RPM reflects a similar story of
other entrepreneurial firms. Realizing that their
work is not helping them to grow, entrepreneurs
act to change their situation. In so doing they are
able to offer others an opportunity to partici-
pate in more meaningful work as well.
It is this last point that bears emphasis, par-
ticularly in relationship to our topic of virtue and
the social order of work. The entrepreneur’s
experience of subjectivity should help her
connect to the subjectivity of the experience of
her workers. Actually, her growth as a person is
dependent upon the growth of her relationships
with her colleagues at work.
Pope Pius XII (1957), in a talk to the
International Congress of Catholic Association
of Small and Medium Sized Business, explained
that the entrepreneur and manager “anticipates,
arranges, directs, and takes responsibility for the
consequences of his decisions. His natural gifts
. . . find employment in his directing function
and become the main means by which his per-
sonality and creative urge are satisfied. Can he
[then] deny to his subordinates that which he values
so much for himself?” And if he does deny it to
others, he also denies it to himself, since if his
work does not create conditions for others to
develop, he paradoxically stunts his own devel-
opment.
The founders of Reell were technically
competent entrepreneurs, but they refused to be
informed by a technical finality. Their work was
informed by a moral finality, which has three
dimensions of what John Paul II means by “the
social order of work.” The first relates to the
social nature of the person and the order of
desires. What is at the core of virtue for the
entrepreneur or for anyone at work is the desire
to be in right relationship with others. Oswald
von Nell-Breuning, a major figure in the
Catholic social tradition, explains that only the
entrepreneur who “gives first thought to service
and second thought to gain” practices virtue
 Who is the Good Entrepreneur?
(1936, p. 115). The founders of Reell left their
large manufacturing company because they
wanted better work, that is, work that developed
the whole person.
The second dimension, related to the first, is
the entrepreneur’s role in fostering a “commu-
nity of work.” The founders of Reell began to
create conditions within their organization that
fostered the growth of their employees. By
designing better jobs through training and skill
development, promoting a culture of participa-
tion and ownership, committing to livable wages,
having a no layoff policy, developing family
friendly policies, and so forth, the leadership at
Reell created the conditions for a community of
work to take place. While these activities do not
guarantee in themselves a community of work,
they create the conditions in an organization for
all employees to see a common life together, a
life of interdependence. They can see themselves
as a community of work and not merely as an
enclave of interests. While never perfect, and
always in need of revision, Reell’s fruits of a work
community is manifested in an extremely low
turnover rate among employees, a high number
of applicants for each job opening despite the
tight labor market, a spirit of sacrifice when
economic hard times occur, and so forth.
The third dimension focuses on the ownership
of the firm and the social nature of property.
How do the three founding members of Reell
view the capital ownership of Reell? The
entrepreneur on steroids we described above
views his company as a vehicle that enables him
to “cash out.” It has no social dimension. When
the founding members of Reell began to think
through the ownership transition of their own
company, they refused to sell their company on
the public market, even though it would produce
the greatest amount of wealth for them person-
ally. They refused because they understood their
company as more than just a “financial asset” for
their personal gain. They saw too many examples
where companies like theirs were merged into
other larger entities, usually publicly traded com-
panies, which would change dramatically the
culture of the company often to the great
disappointment of their founders and employees
(Wahlstedt and Naughton, 2000).
71
As compared to the public corporation, entre-
preneurs have a unique ability to define success
not only in terms of the narrow financially
dictated measures of success, but in terms of
morality and the subjective dimension of their
entrepreneurial activity. But if the entrepreneur
takes her business public, she no longer has
complete control over what her success is
measured by, as she now becomes an instrument
of the new ownership of the business.
Conclusion: the components of authentic
entrepreneurial success
In light of our discussion, how can we speak
meaningfully about entrepreneurial success?
According to what we have said above, we
conclude that the proper ordering of three
distinct kinds of goods are necessary for the
entrepreneur to define her activity as virtuous
which serves as the basis of authentic success: (1)
the good of being technically competent, (2) the
good of the individual (subjective dimension of
work) and (3) the good of community (social
order of work).
(1) The Good of Being Technically Competent:
As we have noted above, the entrepreneurial
practice is of a process of identifying, evaluating,
seizing an opportunity and bringing together
the resources necessary for success. The entre-
preneur needs the basic business skills of
accounting, marketing, finance, etc. to make
things. But she also needs what we have called
entrepreneurial or instrumental habits of indus-
triousness, diligence, ingenuity, frugality, and
so forth, qualities without which the entrepre-
neurial process limps and eventually atrophies.
Entrepreneurship has become a more recognized
practice and discipline in the last twenty years
(Drucker, 1986). The reason for this is the
increasing articulation of this entrepreneurial
practice, that is, what leads to failure, what are
the necessary components of the practice, what
are the best practices. Most university-based
entrepreneurship programs report dramatic results
from training entrepreneurs in these best prac-
tices. While the historically reported failure rate
of business start-ups is around eighty percent,
72 Jeffrey R. Cornwall and Michael J. Naughton
most universities are reporting success rates of
about eighty percent for entrepreneurs trained in
the technique of managing business start-up and
growth.
No entrepreneur whose technical competence
is in serious question can, or should, expect to
be credited in matters involving moral leadership,
since such competence serves as a basis to virtue.
Technical competence, upon which everyone’s
welfare hangs, is one – though only one – of an
entrepreneur’s moral obligations, and serves as a
necessary dimension to moral virtue. While we
have focused on the subjective dimension of
work within this paper, the entrepreneur as a
producer must create things well, which is always
a technical matter, as that is the quality of the
work done, the objective dimension of work.
This focus on what is made relies on techniques
of production, finance and other business
disciplines.
(2) The Good of the Person and the Subjective
Dimension of Work: The good of the entrepre-
neurial practice cannot be understood without
the good of the entrepreneur. In a talk to
business people and workers in Barcelona in
1982, John Paul II explains that the marrow of
the Christian social doctrine on work is centered
on the person: “one does not achieve a correct
concept of work except in strict dependence on
the right concept of man” (Kennedy et al., 1994,
p. 95). If entrepreneurship is to be correctly
understood, it must take seriously a correct
notion of the entrepreneur, whom she ought to
be. This is a question that cannot be easily
reduced to quantitative measurements, which is
one reason why entrepreneurial literature has
avoided the research. It is also a question that will
generate a significant debate. Yet, it is a question
every entrepreneur must ask and want to ask.
Any understanding of any discipline that brackets
the human subject from the significance of their
action is simply not attending to the reality at
hand.
(3) The Good of the Community and the Social
Order of Work: John Paul II has described the
common good for the entrepreneur as creating
organizational conditions that foster human
development. The entrepreneur has the noble
task of creating a community of work where the
nature of the work provides a life of shared goods
that are not only economic but also social in
nature. This of course is no easy task, but virtue
is not for the simple-minded.
These three goods and their proper ordering
serve as a rich seedbed on which to measure
entrepreneurial success. They serve as a vision on
which to broaden a company’s measure of success
(Kaplan and Norton, 1996). Such measurements
will include revenue growth, market share, profit
margins, shareholder wealth, dividend returns as
well as total employment, employee turnover
rates, and so forth. These measurements indicate
the health of what we call foundational goods,
those goods that directly support the economic
viability of the firm. They have the importance
of necessities, and they condition everything else
the firm undertakes. But the measure of success
will include engaging the more difficult to
measure attributes such as the subjective dimen-
sion of work, the social order of work and, most
difficult of all, virtue. These attributes represent
what we call the excellent goods of an organiza-
tion, those internal qualities, which develop
within and between human persons and com-
munities such as friendship, personal cultivation,
and moral self-possession. These goods in the
workplace are often described in terms of virtues
such as justice, prudence, courage, solidarity and
patience, that is, internal qualities that foster the
growth of people and contribute to a commu-
nity of persons. It is the excellent goods that
mark the “humanity” of an organization (Alford
and Naughton, 2002).
These excellent goods cannot be reduced to
an equation or formula; rather, they entail qual-
itative judgments that will be debatable and less
scientific. Yet, it is these attributes that define
most clearly and profoundly the nature of the
entrepreneurial spirit. Since our need for
foundational goods is all too urgent, concern for
gaining them can sometimes crowd out our
concern for the excellent goods. Yet, if the
entrepreneur fails to evaluate his activity in light
of this multifaceted notion of success, he distorts
his own self-understanding as well as his under-
standing of the organization he has helped to
start.
Scholars in the entrepreneurial field need to
 Who is the Good Entrepreneur?
engage more seriously in a comprehensive notion
of success by recognizing the wide variety of
goods necessary for a successful organization. If
they fail to do this, the discipline of entrepre-
neurship risks attending, discussing and pub-
lishing only the easiest of measures, which we
describe as foundational goods. Thus the old
adage that what gets measured gets managed and
what doesn’t get measured gets ignored, creates
an environment where entrepreneurs identify
themselves as those who are technically compe-
tent or those on steroids. This is extremely
dangerous for the field of entrepreneurship.
Those of us in the field need to further develop
creative instruments which help entrepreneurs to
assess how well they are achieving what we have
called excellent goods in organizations and to
design practices and policies which move
organizations closer to achieving those goods.
Notes
1
Economism is not some grand philosophical
system, although it has deep philosophical roots in
what is commonly referred to as materialism. For the
entrepreneur as well as for entrepreneurial scholars,
this materialism is more practical than theoretical, “a
materialism judged capable of satisfying man’s needs,
not so much on the grounds of premises derived from
materialist theory, as on the grounds of a particular
way of evaluating things, and so on the grounds of a
certain hierarchy of goods based on the greater imme-
diate attractiveness of what is material” ( John Paul
II, Laborem exercens, #13).
2
Todd David Whitmore, “Teaching and Living
Practical Reasoning: The Role of Catholic Social
Thought in a Catholic University Curriculum,”
unpublished. Todd Whitmore explains that “[n]ot
explicitly subsuming techne under phronesis results in
a hidden value system that still impacts society. Two
frequently occurring elements to this value system
involve, first, what I call the ‘Oppenheimer
syndrome,’ that is, the willingness to bracket norma-
tive questions under the rubric that the motivation is
simply the pursuit of ‘pure science.’ The second is
what I call the technological imperative, that is, the
claim that if something can be developed, then it
ought to be. In a reversal of the philosophical dictum
that ‘ought implies can’ . . . the technological
imperative reads ‘can implies ought.’”
73
3
Our problem in answering these questions in part
stems from our history, particularly as Americans. We
have been influenced by Benjamin Franklin’s utili-
tarian notion of virtue, which seems to be the basis
on which the entrepreneurial literature grounds its
notion of virtue. Franklin centers the discussion on
the means for effective living not the ends for which
we live for. As long as one is effective one is good.
The goal is effectiveness, the means are goodness,
character, virtue. The problem with this is what
happens when deception, unfairness, duplicity, etc.
are ways to effectiveness? If effectiveness or utility is
the end, then goodness is instrumentalized. Franklin
was not interested in character for its own sake but
for appearances. You don’t fool around with another’s
wife not because of the sacrament of marriage, but
because your life will be wretched afterwards. That
is, you will not be effective in your life. Max Weber
contrasts Franklin’s Americanist view of virtue with
a Christian German view: “Nevertheless, all of
Franklin’s moral admonishments are applied in a
utilitarian fashion: Honesty is useful because it leads
to the availability of credit. Punctuality, industry, and
frugality are also useful, and are therefore virtues. It
would follow from this that, for example, the appear-
ance of honesty, wherever it accomplishes the same
end, would suffice. Moreover, in Franklin’s eyes an
unnecessary surplus of this virtue must be seen as
unproductive wastefulness. Indeed, whoever reads in
his autobiography the story of his ‘conversion’ to
these virtues, or the complete discussions on the use-
fulness of a strict preservation of the appearance of
modesty and the intentional minimizing of one’s own
accomplishments in order to attain a general approval,
will necessarily come to the conclusion that all
virtues, according to Franklin, become virtues only
to the extent that they are useful to the individual.
The surrogate of virtue-namely, its appearance only-
is fully adequate wherever the same purpose is
achieved. Indeed, this inseparability of motive and
appearance is the inescapable consequence of all strict
utilitarianism. The common German tendency to
perceive the American virtues as ‘hypocrisy’ appears
here confirmed without a doubt” (Max Weber, The
Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism [Los
Angeles, California: Roxbury Publishing Company,
2002], pp. 16–17). Or as Alasdair MacIntyre puts it
“The road to success in Philadelphia and the road to
heaven may not coincide after all” (1984, p. 198).
74 Jeffrey R. Cornwall and Michael J. Naughton
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Jeffrey R. Cornwall
University of St. Thomas,
2115 Summit Avenue – Mail #MCN6004,
St. Paul, MN 55105,
U.S.A.
E-mail: jrcornwall@stthomas.edu
Michael J. Naughton
University of St. Thomas.
2115 Summit Avenue – Mail #55S.
St. Paul, MN 55105,
U.S.A.
E-mail: mjnaughton@stthomas.edu