Dr David Cliff explores what our entrepreneurs may look like in 20 years' time.
Part One:
Recent surveys reveal a quiet but telling shift: the public now places greater trust in business leaders than in politicians. Why? Perhaps because entrepreneurship appears to demand a clarity of vision and an accountability to outcomes that politics has increasingly failed to demonstrate. Businesspeople, governed by profit and survival, seem grounded in measurable realitywhile political discourse spins endlessly on its own axis.
Entrepreneurs are now public intellectuals, cultural influencers, and media panelists. Their voices, once confined to shareholder meetings, are now sought on prime-time broadcasts. They represent a form of modern success, one that is self-authored and performance-measured, rather than inherited or ideologically hollowed out.
Yet this evolving stature brings weighty questions. What happens when entrepreneurial ambition outpaces ethical responsibility? When economic innovation collides with fragile social systems and a planet in distress?
Globalisation has delivered cheap goods and astonishing technological leaps. But it has also delivered consequences: a climate crisis, ecological collapse, mass inequality, and a silent epidemic of mental ill-health. Microplastics float in the oceans and flow into our cells. The virtues of privatisation wane as essential services degrade, and regulators appear ineffective.
When business and politics coalesce, the waters grow darker still. The collusion of capital and state interests too often produces a toxic hybrid: unaccountable, self-reinforcing, and vested. One need only witness the dysfunctional relationship between Donald Trump and Elon Musk less statesmanship and democracy, more playground dramatics of wealth and privilege masquerading as influence.
The tacit belief that “business gets things done” can no longer go unexamined. When entrepreneurship dismisses community wisdom, cultural values, and environmental limits, it becomes a blunt tool. Efficiency is not a virtue if it flattens complexity or sacrifices the long-term for quarterly returns.
The political vacuum created by failing parties and uninspiring leadership is now being filled by entrepreneurs-some visionary, some opportunistic, others just plain narcissists. As populist narratives surge, fueled by crypto-evangelism and anti-institutional sentiment, entrepreneurs are stepping into that space. But will they build a better system or replicate the same extractive logic in a different way?
What’s needed now is nuance. Behind every “fortune favours the brave” success story lies countless unspoken failures. For every unicorn business, a thousand ventures collapse. For every millionaire entrepreneur, thousands struggle in precarity. The mythos of entrepreneurial heroism often hides a deeper inequality: one in which risk is privately rewarded in success and socially distributed when in failure.
That dissonance is mirrored in climate policy. Globally, political leaders and economic actors alike have deprioritised climate imperatives in favour of short-term economic gains. Despite the overwhelming clarity of the science, denialism has rapidly crept back into the mainstream. Political lifecycles and business pressures mean that long-term welfare-whether of people or planet-is often seen as a problem for tomorrow.
But time is a continuum, not a weight point, tomorrow is substantially already here.
The Arctic is melting. Rather than heeding this existential signal, entrepreneurs are preparing to exploit new shipping lanes and mineral deposits. Few seem to ask what happens when those same melting permafrost release billions of tons of methane, accelerating catastrophe. In such a future, today’s business icons may be remembered less as pioneers than as perpetrators.
We must now ask: What kind of entrepreneur does the future require?
See part two in the next edition….
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