Nature of Enterprise

There are probably many ways that this blog could start.

Let’s do some etymology with “enterprise”. Thanks to some help from some nifty AI, We can say with confidence that it all started with Latin. Which is also to say that the thinking about this stuff started a long time ago by some people experiencing a very different or perhaps not so different reality of “Enterprise” as what we experience today. As such, we will likely explore with nerdy relish in future blog posts about how our ancient ancestors of thought got to be thinking about such things and using the language for it they ended up using in order to converse and advance the aims they were seeking to advance.

The etymological origins of the word “enterprise” is the Latin “prendre” – the literal English translation of which is “to take”. At this level, we could, therefore, assert that the origins of the way people thought about, described, conversed about, created and defended their “enterprises” appear no later in history than Ancient Rome. Likely much earlier, since the archeological evidence of people finding ways to converse (and likely scheme, strategize and plan) about how “to take” things from other people is prehistoric. Sticking with the more recent ancient, there is certainly compelling evidence in the historical and archeological records of our ancient Latin-speaking thinking ancestors indicating that they did a lot of taking things from other people.

Fortunately for us today, and thanks in great part to our thinking and speaking ancestors of the Old French parlance, we also have now have a more recent and nuanced root – “entreprendre” – which adds the “entre” or “under” to the “prendre” – “to take”, which combined complete the Middle English “undertaking”, which is also a definition of “Enterprise”.

How lovely and evolved! And there were have it: “enterprise” is “undertaking”, quite literally.

And with that, the enterprise of this first blog post is complete. We hope that in reading it, you, dear reader, have taken something worthwhile.