Entrepreneurs Who "Play God"

One of the things that really stayed with me from my research on "the baby industry" for my latest BusinessWeek.com column is the courage of the women (and their partners) who embark on the fertility search. Committing to having a surrogate birth mother requires surrendering not only control but lots of other emotional attachments that are part of the birthing experience. It also means putting yourself out there in a unique way.

The willingness of so many women to do that is testimony to the power of parenthood. For all its stresses, parenthood is one of the great joys of life, and its attraction continues to be enduring in an ever-more-uncertain world.

As in all such health-related matters, there is a lot of money at stake. And whenever there is money at stake, there will be the less than scrupulous. I didn't get to meet these individuals in my brief foray into the baby business, but I know they are there, and prospective parents heading down the fertility path should stay alert.

Comments

[Michael Felberbaum]

I think you hit the nail on the head in your article when you said that trust, or more broadly, personalization, is one of the main factors in this industry. There are so many difficult issues and decisions that it is bound to revolve around small personal networks, constant communication and face time and a genuine sense of caring and emotional connection. This is the quintessential relationship business - you are dealing with someone's family and their future life in an intimate way. For an entrepreneur to take that seriously almost seems to require that she or he have close personal experience with the issues involved, and think of their business rather like a nonprofit or government agency - there is a much higher calling than the profit involved.

On the other end of the lifecycle - death - there is a similar kind of tricky business, I think, in funeral homes and cemetery plots. People's rejection of "commercialization" in their intimate and emotionally difficult phases of life is largely due to the impersonal nature of business in many cases. At emotionally challenging times I think most of us want people, not workers. It needn't be this kind of division, but it often is. In a recent movie called Little Miss Sunshine, there is a very dark and very funny parody of the process of dealing with a recently deceased relative that comments on what happens when you bureaucratize death.

Businesses naturally set up a buyer-seller interaction based on a transaction of some kind. In a business based on life and death, there has to be a disappearance of the transaction, and it has to transform into a people-people interaction. Because businesses are succesful when they provide value and satisfy a need, in this case, the incentives on the part of "buyers" is a desire for normalization, caring and attention, a different need than businesses often look to satisfy. This requires that the business orient in a different way than when buyers are looking for efficiency, service and price.