Is philosophy relevant to entrepreneurs? Hell yes. It can provide the conceptual framework that allows you to notice or ignore an entire approach to solving a problem.  

I've been re-reading one of my favorite philosophers recently. His name is Gilles Deleuze, and unless you are really into philosophy, his name probably does not ring a bell. He passed away in 1995, but he was a very radical thinker, seemingly bordering on crazy... But crazy like a fox.

I think Deleuze is insanely relevant to entrepreneurship... My friends in academia would likely throw up a little bit upon reading this, but they don't read this blog anyway... And the joke is on them, because I have a very reasonable hunch that Deleuze himself would both laugh and applaud the unintended cut/paste of his ideas into an apparently market-based activity like making new kinds of software... He was a person who saw past convenient dichtomies like capitalist/anti-capitalist, at a time when that very distinction was the obvious battle line in both society and certainly within western philosophy... He was a true conceptual renegade, a bull in a china shop. His work is an ideational time bomb going off in slow-motion as global culture catches up to the approach to reality he expounded. 

Viewed from one perspective, reconsideration of boundaries can be used as a phrase to describe the entire point of Deleuze's life's work, especially once he began to undo the edifice of orthodox society and thinking in his main works.

 Be warned, Deleuze and his collaborator Felix Guattari are not an easy read. Their works are a puzzling Gordian knot of ideas, definitions that intentionally change, play with boundaries, re-arrange themselves, encourage the reader to get lost, to depart and return again. They will mess with you. The density of their work is alien-level detailed, then pulls back into completely straightforward prose... In short, their work is designed to reflect the worldview their texts describe. Check out these illustrations that a great artist named Marc Ngui did that capture the concepts of their collaboration better than anything I've ever seen.

The rhizome (the plant) is a common theme in their work. When they wrote about it in 1980, it was a major innovation to think about an abstracted, anarchic, non-linear organic network of nodes without leadership. Reading it now, it seems eerily comfortable in many ways: Its the very worldframe of our internet-based reality.

So, what's "in it" for entrepreneurs? Since 99% of readers here are not going to read a lick of their work, here are a few "riffs" that are relevant, and in my own words. I do encourage anyone interested to order a copy of A Thousand Plataeus and let it play with you. Just having it around to remind you that you CAN jam an entire system (or die trying) is in and of itself a useful totem, especially if your goal is to change the world. It also makes a great present for friends when you just want to mess with them.

A few ideas from Deleuze and Guattari to consider:

1. Let what you are be your line of escape. Artistic expression (like building a company) can take place in a ground of repeating old patterns with slight modifications and innovations, or it can attempt to rip the world apart with its very novelty. It can do this by taking what has been and completely moving away from it by sheer virtue of the new thing that becomes. In doing this, the novel thing cannot help but bring along  "old ways" for the ride, and -low and behold- it changes them in the process. This creates a bridge to novelty that other people/systems can use to cross to where you are now. Yes, your radically novel approach will be so alien that it will at first confuse and anger many, but that is the price of deep novelty. How much do you need?

2. Hardenings and Softenings. As systems of nature get established (e.g. geology, organs, politics, companies), there are parts that will crystallize and even calcify. They can be very productive, very powerful, and they may seem permanent, but they never are. They are temporary stasis points resting amidst the flows... Outside of those hardenings, there are even more powerful smooth spaces, where the crystallized system is destroyed or reconsumed into a frictionless flow... think lava, bodily regeneration, political revolutions, corporate growth and acquisition. View your work through that lense for a bit. What changes? What has hardened, what systems are flowing in the background that you're actually depending on? Can you co-opt them and harness their free-form to work for you to solve problems (even literally: crowdsourcing, user communities)

3. Embrace Opposition. Don't fear and resist the thing that is your opposite. The idea itself of an established and constant "opposite" is merely a temporary stance taken for your own advantage at that particular time. Its okay to have the enemy, to know the thing you are not, to identify boundaries, but accept that what is in opposition to you is not an eternal constant. Change -always beyond your control- is already in play and turning the wheel into a new position, a new relationship of parts. There is no privileged perspective from which you can somehow avoid this. The answer? Embrace your apparent opposition. Understand it, feel it. Know why it is, and move through fear or the unknown realizing that you may live to see yourself actually become that opposite, and then move through even further to something new yet again.

Those are a few of the hundreds of great nuggets that can be deduced from Deleuze and Guattari. I hope Mssr. Deleuze is enjoying a chuckle as I bastardize his brilliance. It is, after all, exactly what he described would happen.