“All you care about is money. This city deserves a better class of criminal.” So say Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight. And before you go thinking that I’m comparing the entrepreneur to a criminal, let me stop you. Because, actually, I am. Furthermore, I am suggesting that one of the key Success Principles for the entrepreneur is to accept that the best entrepreneurs are criminals.

From the perspective of the business establishment.

But let’s be honest here, shall we: the Joker is no mere criminal in The Dark Knight. As the Clown Prince of Crime himself observes, he is an agent of chaos. And when you start thinking about it, isn’t that what a real entrepreneur is?

Where is the dividing line between entrepreneur and CEO? What makes one person a really fine manager and another a genuine entrepreneur?

Remember the defining phrase from the economic meltdown of 2008? “Too big to fail.” Too big to fail may mean one thing to Congress, but in the world of entrepreneurs, too big to fail means the death of the spirit that drives them. Because the very concept connotes an environment utterly averse to risk. Or, to put it another way, when risk is introduced into an environment where even the slightest possibility of failure can mean systemic devastation, what you are really talking about is the danger of setting loose an agent of chaos into that situation.

You hear the word risk associated with entrepreneurs so much that it has become muddled in the netherworld of meaninglessness. To some, entrepreneurial risk actually has come to mean nothing more nor less than betting the farm on a crazy idea when what it really means is being able to experiment or innovate or spit in the face of conventional wisdom without the repercussions of failure automatically being handing over the deed of the entire farm to some smug guy in a Brooks Brothers suit who could not represent the old class of criminally negligent business behavior any more aptly.

If all you care about is money, you belong to that old class. You will never be viewed by a bloated, hierarchical, bureaucratic and risk-averse mode of business thought as a criminal. Because if you put the accumulation of mere money ahead of the genuinely endorphin-producing actions of selling traditional products with techniques long deemed unusable or overturning fixed and established approaches to conducting business or proving that an idea that failed before did not fail because it was an unsound idea or using profits to improve flaws in your system have no significant impact on those profits rather than to buy faster cars and bigger mansions then you are not the agent of chaos that is to be feared.

You are not an entrepreneur. And Gotham City has no reason to take notice of you.

Is that what you really want? Or do you think that what the world really needs most at this moment in time is a better class of criminal as viewed from the perspective of the bloated business-as-usual crowd? The forward progression of business is dependent upon the introduction of chaos. Chaos need not be a bad thing. Without a little chaos thrown into the mix, progress quickly transforms into stagnation.

Which brings us back to where we started. Stagnation is the perfect environment for the entrepreneur. Once the entrepreneur reveals a better way of doing things, you can start caring a little more about money. Because, to quote the Joker one more time, “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.”

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