I had made a nice presentation in a Harvard Business School program, and students in Wharton Business School invited me to join a panel. As I traveled from Boston to Philadelphia, my mind was set to listen to the keynote speaker for the event. Then, the moment came, and Tony Elumelu began to speak. He had titled his keynote “Perception & Reality: One African Entrepreneur’s Journey”.
The title of the presentation was not typical. He was a businessman, a banker, a magnate, but NOT an entrepreneur, I reasoned. Yes, the word “entrepreneur” had been built under the construct of an aspirational vision of overcoming challenges, in the process of building businesses, to fix frictions in markets. But when a man or a woman becomes super-successful, a new nomenclature becomes necessary. But the man is still using “entrepreneur” as he chronicled his beginning (the cowboy-34 year-old bank CEO), his ascension, and non-gravitational acceleration into the pinnacle of African business.
In Secondary Technical School Ovim (Abia State), we were taught Isaac Pitman shorthand (not offered in WAEC but my village heads hired outside tutors who taught us just in case for the future). I did not put a lot of effort into it, but nonetheless, I picked one skill: the ability to summarize any speech on the fly. This was my summary of TOE presentation:
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(1) You need a vision (2) Match that vision with strategy (3) Hire the right people (4) Test, validate and scale (5) Confidence (6) Be open-minded (7) Build a brand (8) Have balance (9)Think broad, Take Risks (10) Society matters: “… he kept reminding the full-packed auditorium that if he could do it, that any of us could certainly do what he had done.” Read here.
(I will follow up later what happened after the publication and another lesson on business leadership)
Comment on Feed
Comment 1: So, a time comes when one outgrows being an entrepreneur?
My Response: Not really. But you would not expect a bank owner to say he is an entrepreneur. You never overgrow it of course. but I was not expecting it since most times, we use the word “entrepreneur” on the path to ascension, but when you have succeeded, we drop it. But when he used the word for himself, he reshaped my understanding of the practical real meaning of being an entrepreneur. Most times, we look at it to break at the attainment of financial success. But from his angle, it is usable as the pursuit of value through enterprise continues. Indeed, you can find success in banking, but you can become an entrepreneur in oil & gas and other sectors, as you begin to build to fix frictions in that space.
Comment 2: Entrepreneur for me is the business guy who refuses to acknowledge his ascension. Attaining business goals require periodic realignments, new business targets, new milestones to be met, new products to be tested. Thats why only men and women who consistently strive to better yesterday’s business accomplishments are termed Entrepreneurs.
My Response: Great insight there. This was indeed what TOE had in mind as he used “entrepreneur” instead of “businessman” which is typical
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