“Let us be the minds to dream up the tools and technologies that power Nigeria and sub-Saharan development. Let us be the hands that mold the economic landscape of Nigeria for our own prosperity and that of the whole Nigerian nation.” - Professor Barth. Nnaji
We live in an age where it is no longer
traditional to work hard, but to work smart. In this era, activity does not
necessarily translate to productivity. In this dispensation, the person with
better ideas wins and rules. The saying, “Build
a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door” is truer
now than ever. This era justifies to its very letter the saying by Thomas
Edison that “Creativity is 99%
inspiration and 1% perspiration.”
Entrepreneurship holds the key to a vibrant
economy. It is the solution to increasing unemployment in the land. A nation that encourages entrepreneurship and
entrepreneurs has no business with economic recession because entrepreneurs are
change-agents and solution creators. A nation of entrepreneurs is a grand
redefinition of economic prosperity. Entrepreneurs are men and women who think
out solutions to myriads of social, economic, and political challenges. A civil
service-oriented nation such as Nigeria with her vast amount of natural
resources will always court economic troubles.
WHAT
DOES BEING ENTREPRENEURIAL REQUIRE?
All you need to become entrepreneurial is a
simple value-adding idea. God had an idea and the world was created. Somebody
had an idea and electricity was invented. Henry Ford had an idea and automobile
was invented. Thomas Edison had ideas and many inventions were brought to life.
Mack Zukerberg had an idea and Facebook was created. Bill Gates and Paul Allen
had ideas and Microsoft Inc. was created. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had ideas
and Google was created. The list is endless.
What is your own idea? No one becomes
entrepreneurial without an idea. Get an idea and your success is born!
Ideas are foundations for purposeful entrepreneurship. We
must take our destinies in our own hands. We must do for ourselves what no one
else can do for us. We must take personal responsibilities for what we finally
become in life, knowing that nobody owes us anything, rather, we owe ourselves
everything. We must understand that our successes or failures in life are
entirely our own making. In his book, Reposition
Yourself: Living Life Without Limits, T.D. Jakes (2007:4, 8) observed and
asks,
Many of us attribute success or failure to
fate or some external force. We believe that we have to be in the right place
at the right time in order to achieve, much like winning the lottery. But
success is a direct consequence of our wanting a more abundant life and working
hard to earn it, like wadding through the mud puddles of life toward the
beckoning sea…. Isn’t it time for you to direct your hope toward building your
dreams instead of waiting on your dreams to build themselves?”
Achieving our goals in life are not serendipity affairs –
they are not chance happenings. Actions and reactions remain equal and opposite.
What we sow into life is what we receive back from it. What we throw at life is
what it throws back at us. We must learn to go for what we want even when
others are not prepared to help us birth our dreams. Succinctly stated: We must
take our lives in our own hands!
What does that mean? It means becoming entrepreneurial!
WANT TO BE AN ENTREPRENEUR?
To ascertain whether you are fit for
entrepreneurship, you would need to ask and answer these questions:
1.
Do you have a Protest mentality?
That is, are you satisfied with your present
economic condition? Do you “protest” over the way things are with you to cause
you to want your situation changed? Are you willing to make the necessary
sacrifice to turn your life around for good? If you do, then, you have a
‘Protest’ mentality.
2.
Do you have a Positive Mental Attitude?
Do you see things and issues from a positive
angle? Do you see sense in nonsense?
3.
Do you have a strong sense of personal awareness?
Do you know yourself: strength and
weaknesses? Do you know your unique selling points?
4.
Are you willing to take initiatives?
Are you selling-propelling and
Self-motivated? Do you have capacity to initiate an idea and to see it blossom
into a product or service?
5.
Do you have a strong sense of commitment?
Can you hold your ground? Are you
passionate?
6.
Do you have a high energy level?
Do you possess the
spirit-of-No-Retreat-No-Surrender?
7.
Do you have integrity?
Are you reliable? Are you monosyllabic – a
one-word person? Is your word your bond?
8.
Are you patient?
Do you have a quick-fix-mentality? Are you
led by the spirit of ‘Here’ and ‘Now’? Would you be willing to wait for your
leads to mature?
9.
Can you deal with failure?
Do you see failure as final? Can you handle
failure as much as you can handle success? Are you emotionally and
psychologically strong to face the realities of the business world?
10. Do you have
strategic fit?
Do
you know your way around your chosen field of enterprise? Would you be relying
solely on the professionalism of others?
WHAT IS
ENTREPRENEURSHIP?
Entrepreneurship
is all about job and wealth creation. It deals principally with needs’
identification and taking steps to bridge existing gaps by providing solutions
to identified needs. At the center of entrepreneurship is the entrepreneur who
is the vision-bearer, the idea-generator, who by default is a self-employed
person. Relying solely on his/her abilities to generate ideas for products or
services, an entrepreneur mobilizes factors of production such as resources,
personnel, and materials towards transforming his/her ideas into tangible or
intangible products or services.
In a society like Nigeria where jobs are not readily
available, one must begin to think entrepreneurial. This not only saves you the
hassles and stresses of job-hunting, but also gives you the freedom to explore,
exploit and maximize your human potentials; become your own boss and book an
important place in the annals of movers and shakers.
WHY
ENTREPRENEURSHIP?
In their book, Cash
Flow Quadrant: Rich Dad’s Guide to Financial Freedom, Robert Kiyosaki and
Sharon Letcher wrote: “If you want to
remain poor, seek employment.” This is not to denigrate paid employment.
Employment is good if you can find one, but what happens if you cannot find
any? Become entrepreneurial - Create one!
Paid employment does not guarantee wealth, nor does it
even guarantee job security because one could be thrown out any time into the
cold weather of joblessness, sometimes at a time when one may not find it easy
locating another paid employment.
Paid employees are people who serve others. Every paid
employee is a ‘servant’: it doesn’t matter if you are a public servant or a
private servant; civil servant or legal servant. A servant is a servant. Forget
about the title that an individual wears - a servant is a servant! As long as
someone pays your salary, you are his or her servant. Of course, “he who pays
the piper” the saying goes, “dictates the tune.” Refuse to go to work without any cogent reason,
you will be queried and if the ‘master’ is not satisfied, you are shown the
door.
All servants live routine lifestyles – from home to work
place and work place back home; week after week, month after month and year
after year. When they retire, most often, their entitlements are not paid (especially
in Nigeria) and they die as a result of lack of care.
What do you want out of life? Being a servant or being
your own boss? Being your own boss does require cultivating entrepreneurial
spirit. Entrepreneurship is not an option; it is the way out of joblessness,
dependency and servitude. Nothing is more exhilarating than being your own
boss, calling the shots and being regarded as the final authority. Most
materially successful people are entrepreneurs.
IDEAS ARE FOUNDATIONS FOR PURPOSEFUL ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Entrepreneurship is an art as well as a
science. Understanding the dynamics of entrepreneurship will help you to carve
your own niche so that you can play in the big league. At the heart and soul of
entrepreneurship are ideas. Because ideas rule the world, what will define you
and determine your success in any entrepreneurial activity are ideas.
This presentation is to encourage you to task
your thinking and to cause you to crawl out of your shell. Ideas hold the key
to your entrepreneurial success. This is why we must posit entrepreneurship
within the context of idea generation.
What will help you to book a place in the
committee of job creators is the quality of ideas you can generate. Look around you: your body and your environment, you
would readily see that next to God’s idea of your personality, you are a
product of entrepreneurs – other people’s ideas. From your haircut/hairstyle to
the shoes or sandals you wear, entrepreneurs have really defined you. In other
words, you are a by-product of two great ideas: God and entrepreneurs!
Every entrepreneurial activity is a product
of ideas. Whether you are into buying and selling, involved in the
manufacturing sector or in the creative industry, it is the quality and
relevance of your ideas that will define your operations and determine whether
you will be patronized or not.
Every great nation is propelled by the
quantum of ideas her citizens are able to come up with. America is a great and
inventive nation because her citizens are busy churning out ideas that are
relevant and productive.
Any nation endowed with abundant natural
resources, but are bereft of men of ideas will remain poor while a nation that
is deprived of any natural resource, but are blessed with men of ideas will be
a redefinition of success because they will use their ideas to exploit the
natural resources found in the naturally endowed nation to develop their own
nation, turning citizens of the naturally-endowed nation into servants (hewers
of wood and fetchers of water).
Idea generation is not Rocket Science. What is required is application of commonsense.
WHAT KIND OF IDEAS DOES ENTREPRENEURSHIP REQUIRE?
Entrepreneurship requires:
1. New thinking.
2. Ideas that are relevant to society’s needs.
3. Ideas that are constructive and affective.
4. Ideas that are proactive.
To generate entrepreneurial ideas a would-be
entrepreneur must learn to come up with ideas for a product or service that
would make a difference. To generate the needed ideas, a would-be entrepreneur
must learn to “think out of the box.” Thinking out of the box requires doing
what people would rarely do. Most times entrepreneurial ideas come from
unlikely places, from unlikely people and from unlikely situations or
circumstances. A good entrepreneur immediately recognizes these ideas and
seizes them.
YOU WERE BORN A THINKER, USE YOUR HEAD!
Every one of us was created, wired and born a thinker. In fact, the term, “Homosapiens” which refers to human beings implies, “Thinking beings.” While other creatures make use of their instincts, human beings were created to use their brains. We were all created to think and to think we must! When a person ceases to think, he ceases to live. Such a person merely exists, going through the motions of being “alive” as it were.
You can only carve a niche for yourself and book a place in history by the kind of quality ideas you are able to come up with, which will add value to the lives of others.
Ideas rule the world! People of ideas are the movers and shakers. They rule the world. The real rulers are not politicians and their cohorts. In his book, God’s Big Idea, Dr. Myles Munroe states that “the world is ruled by dead men and women.” How do dead men rule our world? Because our world as it presently operates is run on dead men’s ideas! Ideas never die even after their originators die; they live, live and live. They can metamorphose, change into different forms, but they never die.
Ideas-people dictate events and control other people as much as they wish. Rule your world. Put on your thinking cap. Ask, “Why?” Look around you to tap from the abundance of possibilities that nature has provided.
Everything you ever need to achieve greatness in life is lurking somewhere inside you. God is not unjust. He never created you lower than anyone on earth. No. He did not. Everyone God created was created equal with some level of equal opportunities. The difference between you and another may not be much, but can be attributed to whether you are really using your head or not.
We all have the same opportunities whether you live in Africa, South America, Europe, Asia, North America, et cetera. We enjoy the same breath from God with few exceptions in weather and topography. Some people are mistaken when they think that their destinies lay somewhere in America, Europe or Asia. I tell you: they are deceiving themselves. Are you aware that Africa as a continent is naturally more endowed than Europe, America and Asia combined? The kind of natural disasters that are experienced in those continents are strange to Africa. If Africa is naturally more endowed, why then are these continents doing better than Africa? Simple – they have learnt to turn their minuses into pluses; they have learnt to use their brains. They come to Africa, take our natural endowments as raw materials, go back to their home countries, convert them into finished products and send back remnants to us, still making huge profits out of what they had taken from us for peanuts. Do you not know that till tomorrow Africa is the one feeding the West? Their industries are fed by materials sourced from this continent.
Most Africans have not learnt to use their heads. The few who did are global citizens. It is only when we learn to turn the key inside-out that our redemption as a people would be realized. Hear this: poverty of the mind would always lead to poverty of pocket and even poverty of ideologies. Think of it, what does Japan of all industrialized nations have? In terms of natural resources, very little. In terms of technology and a booming economy, Japan today is a superpower. In fact, in international relations when Japan sneezes many countries would immediately catch cold. China, Korea, Malaysia and India are inching towards Japan’s status. What is their strength? Technology! What is the epicenter of technology? Ideas!!
After Second World War, the Japanese decided to take the bull by its horns, sort of taking their destinies in their own hands. They began to look inwards. They began to understudy others and their technologies. They realized that brain power is more powerful than any other kind of power. With brain power you can turn a prince into a slave and vice-versa. With brain power, Japan has shot herself into an enviable position. She is as we speak globally ranked in virtually all indices of global superpower. The power of ideas is much more than many have realized.
It, therefore, stands that the very day we all wake up to turn our eyes inwards, to encourage ideation, our redemptions would speed up. To become entrepreneurial, you must:
1. Realize that ideas are necessity-based
Ideas come when the human brain is activated by needs.
The saying, “Necessity is the mother of
invention” remains true at all times. Ideas are the lifeblood of creativity
and innovation. These are critical to product generation and service rendition.
To ascertain the possibility of an idea, you have to conduct a SWOT analysis of
that idea. This will entail the use of brainstorming, cross-pollination of
ideas, screening of your ideas using the instrumentalities of micro and
macro-screening exercises.
2. The art of
fostering ideas will be greatly facilitated when you do the following:
§ Do not always think the way others do.
§ Always question conventions. Ask, “Why?” When things do
not work the way you had expected them to, ask “Why?”
§ Think comparatively. Comparative thinking compares one
object with another. Anyone who thinks comparatively sees issues and objects in
the light of other issues or objects. He crossbreeds to see what can come out
of the universes of the two issues or objects being compared.
§ Think out of the box. Think upside-down down-side up;
right-left and left-right. See things beyond their surface realities.
3.
Emulate God Who is Ideator Personification
Ideas exist in the realm of imagination. The ability to
draw them out into the realm of reality is what gives ideas their form. God is
the personification of ideas at work. At creation He brought to bear the things
which were not. He spoke into existence the very things which have their forms
today. It is from these that humans have been using as raw materials for
further creative activities. God ideated things and called them into being as
if they were already in existence. Since we are created in the Image of God, we
can be creative. You are already wired with everything needed to unleash your
creativity. Ideation begins with dreams and crystallizes in imagination. It is
imagination that fuels and fires ideation.
WHAT
DOES IT TAKE TO GENERATE IDEAS?
1.
Have an open mind
The greatest disease plaguing mankind today is “Lock-in-thinking.” This is a thinking pattern that says, “Nothing can be done about it.” Open your mind. Believe in possibilities.
2.
Scan your environment
When Apostle Paul arrived the City of Athens, the first
thing he did was to scan his environment. By so doing, he discovered a solution
to the people’s needs (Acts 17:22-23). Look around you, identify a need, an
existing gap in a product or service; determine how the need or gap can be
filled. Bingo! You are in, employing people and creating wealth!!
One great business idea can stem from scanning your environment or other environments to see if there is a need you can adequately satisfy and bridge. If you are able to spot one, you can be sure that an idea has been born.
3.
Question convention
In questioning conventions, you simply ask: “Why did we always do things in this particular way?”
4. Engage in
Reverse-thinking
Instead of adopting the
logical, normal manner of looking at a challenge, you reverse it and think
about opposite ideas. In other words, do things differently.
AREAS WE CAN DIRECT OUR ENTREPRENEURIAL FOCUS
Nigeria is an interesting country where there are vast opportunities in agriculture, service and creative industries. We are a people who are more interested in “already-made.” Everywhere you look in Nigeria, you see opportunities. What we need are eyes to spot opportunities and exploit them.
We must learn to begin to see sense in nonsense, look where others have failed to look and begin to do what others think are either too demeaning or impossible.
CONCLUSION
In a Keynote address titled, “Powering the South-East Economic Renaissance: The Geometric Power Experience” which he delivered at The SUN Newspaper’s South-East Economic Summit published in The Daily Sun Wednesday, December 17, 2008, Professor Barth Nnaji enthused:
“Let us be the minds to dream up the tools and technologies that power Nigeria and sub-Saharan development. Let us be the hands that mold the economic landscape of Nigeria for our own prosperity and that of the whole Nigerian nation.”
The question is, “How can we dream up these tools and technologies without idea seeds?” The
key to purposeful entrepreneurship is idea generation. I encourage you to be
a person who devotes himself or herself to critical thinking so that we will be
able to come up with ideas that will provide solutions to needs. By doing this,
we will not only create opportunities for massive income generation, but also
job creation.
