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2001 Conference - Rotorua
Dr. Ernesto Sirolli - Keynote
Address
Capturing the Passion -
Supporting Your New Generation of Entrepreneurs
>>Background Paper
 Contents
Introduction
To describe to you what I do, I have to go back to my
intellectual growth, and where these ideas come from. I have to take
you back to a journey with me in time and in space and you will see
that there is a logical understanding and a progression on why I am
so passionate about working in local economic development the way we
do now.
When I was 21 I was a young Italian volunteer and I had joined an
organisation of technical cooperation with African countries. In
1971 the Italian Government introduced a volunteer overseas
organisation, and so many young Italians did not want to join the
army. I had the choice to go to Africa instead for 24 months. My
agency was one of the very first ever created and the Italian
Foreign Office asked my agency to think about something to do in
Zambia. In 1969 the Zambian Government, with international funds,
bought itself the largest copper smelter in the world; Lundia was
deemed to be the future of Africa simply because Zambia had some of
largest copper mines in the world and Italy wanted to be a good
trading partner with Zambia. And the Foreign Office wanted to bring
to the Zambians some presence to become good trading partners, and
we were the presence from Italy to Zambia.
We were five young Italian volunteers; we were told to conceive
something to be done to assist with technical cooperation in this
remote village, this community in Southern Zambia. We were told that
there was an old Catholic Mission which had been closed down, and
that the land was still available, and what we would do there. My
agency conceived this wonderful scheme to teach Zambians
agriculture. The Zambians there are traditional hunters and
gatherers. They don't cultivate the land and that, we thought, would
be a fantastic programme. So we conceived that plan in Rome. What we
did was a little bit like you guys conceiving plans in Auckland
maybe, or Wellington, and you deliver them to the country. We
sketched this five-year training plan. And then we said, "will
it work? Well, let's find out by inviting some experts to tell
us." We invited some Roman experts, they came into the room and
we said "critique us", and they came up with all sorts of
reasons why it would not work. But guess what, none of them came
even close to the real reason for the failure of the project.
From Italy to Africa
What happened was so bizarre to Italians that none of the
so-called experts came even close to understanding what would happen
there and what would be a disaster. The Italians arrived with five
21-year-old volunteers for their first time ever on an aeroplane,
the first time ever away from Momma. They arrived in Lusaka and got
a car and drove down to Chirundu and the first thing that hit them
is that Southern Zambia is not the Africa that they thought of.
Southern Zambia is tree forest, it is the most beautiful wonderful
environment - so they were amazed. But they were really surprised
when they arrived and they looked at the land around the old
Mission. The land was by one of the largest rivers in Africa. The
Zambezi River. It separates Zambia from Zimbabwe - which was at that
time still Rhodesia. The Italians looked around, saw how beautiful
this land was and the first thing they did, since they had studied
agriculture - they were all agricultural graduates - they picked up
some soil and tested it and discovered that the soil was like
chocolate. It was the most beautiful soil they had ever seen.
Imagine an alluvial plain never cultivated, millions of years of
deposits. Rich wonderful earth.
And then they looked at the river and the sun and said, "my
god we can grow food crops here, this is paradise, the temperature
is always 27?." And then they stopped and they said "wait
a moment, if the place is so wonderful what's wrong with the native
people? Why don't they grow things here, what's wrong with
them?" And then they said "thank god we are here
now." You know it is always up to Italians to spread the light
of civilisation and here we are now and we have to teach people
agriculture, next thing teach them how to make espresso coffee.
Giant Red Tomatoes
So these five Italians started, they got 30 strong men from the
village to come, and tried to clear the land by the river and they
had these wonderful seeds brought from Italy, including these
fantastic, phenomenal Italian tomato seeds. We are very proud of our
tomatoes. So we planted these tomatoes in there, put in big stakes
and the plants kept growing. And then the fruit came up and in Italy
it stops at some point but in Zambia it kept growing and growing -
one tomato was like a rock melon. You could feed one family on one
tomato. Italians had never seen anything like that. While this was
happening with the tomatoes, the eggplants the Italians had planted
had become huge, and Italians had never seen fruit this big. This
was fantastic, so the Italians took pictures and they became very
anxious to harvest these famous tomatoes because they wanted to
write home, they wanted to say: "Guess how many tonnes per acre
we get in Zambia versus you guys? We are better than you."
So they prepare the crates, and restored an old truck, the
trailer was built ,and they are ready to take the tomatoes from
Chirundu to Lusaka to the farmers' market on Saturday. They ask the
workers to come early to harvest all the tomatoes. So they get there
to harvest the famous crop and there are no tomatoes to be found.
There are no plants to be found, everything has been absolutely
devastated and that beautiful field of maybe five to ten acres of
tomatoes is completely muddy and looks as if somebody has gone wild
with a dozer and excavated the place. The Italians ask what happened
and then the sun starts to come up and they start to see a little
bit better and finally they turn around and they look at the river
and in the river there are 300 hippos, digesting tonnes of tomatoes.
These hippos were floating no more.
The river was red, red, these hippos had been watching these
tomatoes for a month saying "um.... not quite ripe enough, give
it another 24 hours" and when the tomatoes were perfect they
came out at night and they gorged themselves. The Italians said,
"my god the hippos came out," they turned around and
looked at the Zambian workers who had huddled in the corner laughing
and falling, some had laughed so much they had tears in their eyes
and fallen on their knees laughing and pointing at us, the Italians.
"Did you know about it?" "Yes." "Why didn't
you tell us?" "You never asked." And then the
Zambians said that everybody knows in Africa that you should never
plant anything by a river, "that is why we have no agriculture,
and in any case the hippos are not the problem, they don't do much
damage." We said, "what? Look what they have done!"
The Zambians said "you should see what happens when the
elephants come." In other parts of the Zambezi, the river is
too wide for the elephants to swim across, but the Chirundu part
unfortunately, has islands on the river, so when the elephants
migrate north out of Zimbabwe, they island hop, they swim to the
first island, then swim to the second and then they come. How do you
keep 500 hungry elephants off your crops? You don't. Where does the
600 pound gorilla sit? Anywhere he wants. Where do 500 elephants
eat? Anywhere they want. My god, the joke was on us all the time and
when I heard the story I became so embarrassed because I went, and
they told me, I said: "how stupid can we Italians be?" And
when they said "what do you do in Africa?", I said:
"travel, like anyone." I was so embarrassed by this
blunder. We were taking people there and did not even know that we
should not grow by a river.
Then I saw what the other countries were doing in Africa. I saw
what the English, French, American and Canadians were doing in
Africa and guess what, after seeing what they were doing I felt
quite proud of our produce, because at least we fed the hippos.
Those hippos love us. Those hippos are still thinking about us. You
should see what the other people did: unbelievable.
International Aid: Example 1
I work in Canada right now and they are interested in helping
Angola after the Civil War. They took a wonderful Canadian bakery,
an industrial bakery, took it to pieces, took it to Angola and
rebuilt it. They took a shipment of grain from Canada all the way to
Angola, and as soon as this beautiful bakery starts to work all the
local little bakeries go bankrupt. They can not compete with this
one. And the Canadians say - "wait a moment, we can not create
this kind of dependency, these local people had better learn how to
grow their own grain." So what they did was stop the shipment
of grain. And Angola, torn by the war, had absolutely no trucks to
transport grain, so the industrial bakery shut down, the local
bakery had folded and for a time in Angola if you wanted bread, it
had to be air lifted. This story was told to me by a someone who was
involved.
America is my host country, I have been there for six years.
There is one thing that Americans do, that I have seen very few New
Zealand people do. They go around the world to look at people with a
brain and invite people to go and work in America. There are many
things that I am learning from American guys, but for me to come
back to you by Washington D.C. because one of you heard me speak in
Washington D.C., when I was round the corner from you for 17 years,
seems to be quite ridiculous. I have always been here, guys. How
come an American professor discovers my work and brings me to
America and yet no Kiwi professor discovers my work? You know how
expensive I am now?
International Aid: Example 2
American Peace Corp - fantastic, they took pictures of Africa,
discovered that around every African village there is a desert, why?
Because in the morning the women and the children go out of the
village to gather wood and then they cook on a wood fire. The Peace
Corp said "this is really bad for the environment, this is
terrible, we have a solution for them" and what the Peace Corp
did was a study on how to build solar ovens, so that the local
people could cook with the sun. What a wonderful idea! What is a
solar oven? It is a big shiny dish and welded in the middle is a
black pot. When you tilt it towards the sun the rays convert to the
middle, the pot becomes really hot and you can cook with the sun.
What a wonderful idea. So they manufactured some of these solar
ovens, they introduced them to Africa and they went to all the
tribes that only cook at night. If you only cook at night, you have
a slight problem using the sun. So then they said, "why do
these people only cook at night, what's wrong with them?" It is
very hot in Africa - 46?. The middle of the day with the flies in
your eyes and in your mouth? Culturally you have this guy chasing
this gazelle, oh! 12 o'clock lunch time. Lunch time. Goes back and
then eats and then says "Where was that gazelle?" Oh yes,
20 miles. In any case what is happening is that now when I speak to
people at conferences afterwards very often I have people coming to
say to me "let me tell you what really happens." I get to
hear all these blunders to the point that I am thinking seriously of
starting a web page called "International Blunders.com".
International Aid: Example 3
A recent blunder story was told me by this guy from an American
agency, about what they did in Paraguay:
We arrived in this village that had a river that
was difficult to cross. The farmers could not trade the goods on the
other side of the river. And so we decided to help them, we would
build them a bridge. The local elders said they could not build a
bridge here, but the guy said, "what do you mean, we are
Americans, we are going to show you how we build a bridge".
They had to bring heavy equipment through the jungle, it was
unbelievable. The river was pretty wide, we had to build this
amazing ramp so from the ramp we could span the bridge. So it took
months to get the machinery in, and then we built this fantastic
ramp, and when the ramp was finished the river shifted its banks two
kilometres, so now we had a beautiful ramp over nothing. The local
people said: "we told you, you couldn't build a bridge
here".
They guy said it would be really interesting in 2000 years when
there will be an archaeologist coming to the jungle in Paraguay, and
he will find a beautiful ramp, and will say, I wonder what the
native people did with this ramp?
Small Is Beautiful
While we were blundering around the world of absolutely
extraordinary human beings, I read a book which changed my life. The
name of the author is Ernest Schumacher. The book is Small Is
Beautiful. The subtitle of the book is Economists ask if
people matter. No economist since Schumacher has even come
close to this honesty. If you have not read the book, read it. If
you read it when I did in 1974, read it again. It's time.
Schumacher's was the voice which took the criticism of our
inappropriate development, took the voices of all the critical
people in the 60s and published something which was extraordinarily
provocative.
Small Is Beautiful has created an enormous movement
around the world, and still people like me can attest to the fact of
the importance of this thought. What did Schumacher say? I only want
to mention to you one thing that he said that changed my life. And
the lives of all the people who have come in touch with me since.
In a chapter called "Ten Million Villages" on the
economy of India, Schumacher wrote something that was so outrageous,
that when I read it the first time I had to go back and say
"what?".
Were You Invited?
Schumacher wrote "if people do not wish to be helped, leave
them alone". And let me repeat this because it is something
which is so provocative, it is something that you do not practice.
If people do not wish to be helped, leave them alone. Did we ever
ask permission to go to Africa? - never, never. Why, because we
thought that we had a moral obligation to go to Africa to help. You
know why we thought that? Because we always thought that we were
superior to the Africans. We had the better technology, better
civilisation and better god, and we never asked permission to go
there. We were going there to help them.
Did they ask you? Did they want you? Did they invite you? As
Schumacher said:
Don't you dare go anywhere uninvited. And when
somebody invites you make sure that when you arrive there you don't
arrive with a briefcase full of solutions, if you don't even know
what the problems are. How can you know the answers without asking
the questions? Who the hell do you think you are? You call what you
do development. Without having the honesty, the guts, the patience,
the intellectual propriety to shut up and listen to what the local
people's needs are. How dare you. How dare you think that because
you have money you are better than the African people.
Well there is a bit of news for you guys. Schumacher was a very
Christian, very religious person. Do you know what Schumacher said:
The way Jesus Christ lived was similar to the way African people
live today. No running water, no electricity, no television. Are you
smarter than Socrates? Socrates lived with no television, no running
water. Who the hell do you think you are? You western people. We
carry an arrogance to develop forward. We western people are the
most arrogant people in the history of the universe. We always know
the answers. Schumacher said you go somewhere only if invited, and
if they invite you, shut up and listen. Take time to learn the
language. Take time to understand the culture and what are the
problems. Why did they call you? If you had been invited they must
have a problem, what is the problem?
It blew my mind. Schumacher obliged me to say - "If I can
only go if invited, what kind of a person do I have to be to be
invited?" I have to have values that I can bring to people.
Just the "Gofer"
I left Italy after getting my degree from Rome University, I went
to South Africa first, then I went to Murdoch University in Western
Australia with one overarching passion. How do I get to do
developing like Schumacher? How do I develop something where I get
invited to go into communities, and then I bring nothing to that
community except for my passionate determination to help people in
that community? They have a need and a problem and I will become the
"gofer", the passionate helper, I will become now what is
starting to be fashionable. I will become the servant leader to help
that person in that community to solve the problem that they have
and transform the passion into something.
So I spoke to my supervisor, an exquisite university professor,
called Peter Newman. Peter Newman is the world authority on
transport policies. He is an environmentalist, an extraordinary
human being, and I said to Peter, "this is my challenge, can
you help me?" And he said, "Ernesto, what do you want to
do?" and I replied "I want to be invited by somebody who
is struggling." He says "send an invitation, I would like
to see what happens, I would go to that community and I will put
this theory in place."
Peter Newman introduced me to the Minister for Regional
Development at the time. And his staff said: "look, we have a
community that is really suffering, it is called Esperance." It
is a community of 10,000 people, the price of wheat and wool has
collapsed and the tuna fisheries have been basically destroyed due
to the introduction of a tuna quota. On top of that, Esperance has
15% unemployment, 37% youth unemployment and the highest rate of
juvenile suicide in rural Australia. The second largest coast death
in boys 18-24 after car accidents was suicide. How desperate do you
have to be to kill yourself? They were white people killing
themselves and aboriginal people. So I was invited to go to
Esperance and I arrived in the town when they were doing one of
those famous strategic plans. I looked around the room and said I
wanted to be part of this.
This reminds me of Rome. There were 80 of their local
aristocrats, the people with the time or the money to sit on boards,
deciding what 10,000 people should be doing. And it is never the
kids, they ought to do that. The government ought to do that. And I
said, "I want to participate in this. I want to work through
somebody who has a need, see what is the need and see if we can fix
it." So, I made a fool of myself, it was embarrassing, it was
painful.
Ask the People
I walked the streets of Esperance asking a simple question.
"Do you know anybody who wants to do anything here?"
The mayor blasted me, every single problem in Esperance was
somebody else's fault. Either the State or the Federal Government.
He was told, don't come looking for entrepreneurs, basically what
you are looking for is somebody who can create some jobs, we don't
have these kind of people here. These people are blue collar, they
used to work on farms and fishing boats, what are you looking for,
we don't have these kind of people. Go back to university, go back
and learn how you do economic development. Economic development is
not done the way you want to do it, economic development is done by
business recruitment, main street beautification, industrial parks,
business incubators, this is the way we do economic development.
So it took me four or five days and finally I went to the
Department of Social Services, and even before I could speak to the
Director, I came into his office and the guy had never met me and
said: "don't even ask." I asked "how do you know
me?" The word was already around town about this crazy Italian
guy who looked like Peter Sellers going around asking these stupid
questions. "We don't have the people who will create the
economy here. We don't have people who have what you want."
"You have 500 long term unemployed people, introduce me to
somebody." So I went in there the second day and he organised a
meeting and two people had showed up, only two. The first one is
young and he has a big smile, the other old and beat and cranky. So,
of course, I wanted to speak to the young guy and ten minutes into
the conversation I realised this guy had a big smile and his pupils
are big, he was on a substance. So I looked at Greg, and he goes:
"yeah." So this is how I was reduced after five days
looking for somebody with a real need. I had to speak to this man
who was fat, bald and cranky. And guess what?
Just One Person
I found my first evidence that in fact there was passion in the
community that was totally frustrated, totally repressed and yes,
there was a big need, but nobody was fulfilling it. This man was a
Kiwi, he was a New Zealand fourth generation fish processor, who had
been the manager of the largest company in town, 160 workers, and he
was canning fish. When the tuna industry collapsed the factory
closed down, and he lost his job. He had remarried, had no money,
but did not want to die on an unemployment list. So for $250 he
built himself a kiln to smoke tuna. He put the kiln in his garage
and when he had gone around the town to find some assistance, a
little bit of money to buy a tuna smoker and sell it, nobody would
touch him. He had gone to everybody. He had gone to the bank and he
had tried for small business assistance but had no collateral;
nobody would touch him. When he made noises with the council to see
whether he could find somebody, the council sent the health
inspector to look at his garage and the health inspector shut him
down.
So not only did they not help him, but they shut him down. So I
said to Murray, "would you like me to help you?" He said
anything you could do. And I wanted to demonstrate what would happen
for the only man, just one person in a community of 10,000, what
could happen if I were to put myself and all my energy and all my
passion and my endorsement and my support behind this frustrated
unemployed broke individual?
A Royal Feast
Because I thought that would be a very good way of starting
something completely new in the community, some sort of belief that
the local people can do things. So I went absolutely all out for
this guy and I was able to go back to an authority that had rejected
him and get a $4,000 loan. With $4,000 we took the kiln from the
garage, rented a space in an industrial area. I got him to prepare
some samples and then I went to Perth, 700 kilometres away. I went
to see all the big deal chefs in town and then Murray came up and we
went around introducing all this product to the chefs. They said
where have you been, this is fantastic. This is what we need, can we
order. So he started to employ his wife and daughter and then I
found a guy who had just sold a goldmine in Togoodlee and was
looking for investment. I took him to restaurants and he put in $1m
into the company. Murray started to employ twelve people. When the
Queen came to Australia in 1986, on the Royal Banquet in Canberra
the first item was Esperance Smoked Tuna, so Murray and I renamed
the company Royal Esperance. Beautifully smoked, beautifully
vacuum-packed. The Minister for Regional Development came to launch
the business. Murray was in tears, he was saying this is fantastic,
nobody has ever believed me. The fishermen were there, they said to
me "my god, Ernesto, we have seen what you have done for
Murray, can you help us?".
"What Is Your Problem?"
I said: "What is your problem?" They said: "We
catch small size tuna because it is the only tuna we can catch, and
sell it to a cannery. There is only one buyer - 60 cents a
kilo." And I helped them to find somebody who became their
marketing director on a commission-only basis. In nine months they
had leased another Kiwi. The five fishermen who had formed the old
company, took the tuna to Tokyo. So what they did was overnight from
Esperance to Perth and then a nine-hour flight to Tokyo, and we took
five small blue-fin tuna to Skigi market. Skigi market is the
largest fish market in the world. We got a fax back, fish A1, a
Japanese distributor wants to talk to you. One week later, a
representative of the largest fishing company in the world arrived
in Esperance, he put the stamp of the fishing market on every box of
fish, and they distributed 150 tonnes of tuna, $15 per kilo. We went
from 60 cents to $15 in nine months.
The farmers in Esperance would never come to close to me - you
know farmers, they sit on the fence and watch it happening. See what
the neighbours are doing. Well the farmers came to see me and said
"if those idiots of fishermen have done this, what is wrong
with us? We should be ashamed." I asked them what their problem
was. Problem: "we are shooting one million sheep a year and we
bury them in mass graves. Because when we send them to Kuttaning for
sales they get unsold, the trucker comes back and they give us a
bill for $2 to go to the sales and come back with sheep unsold. So
we pay $2 to send our sheep on holiday. Then we shoot them, that is
20 cents per bullet, and then we have to bury them. But we should do
something with the mutton."
I got 50 farmers to get together for a study. They paid and I
found a consultant who wrote a study called New Uses for Old
Ewes, which I thought was a very clever title. The study showed
that if they processed the meat in a certain way at the local
meat-works, selling the wool and the pelt, each animal would be
worth $14.70.
Because of that a group of farmers came to see me: "we have
a problem, we are losing soil, our land is very fragile, what can
you do to help us? What can we do in terms of additional
crops?" I got them to employ the enemy, an environmentalist
called Kit Bradbury who they despised, and I got all the 29 farmers
to pay his salary to teach them how to make money out of naked
plants and naked flowers -how to dry flowers and plant material for
the international flower market. It was a wonderful success and at
the end of one year in the community where the mayor and the
community development people told me they didn't have entrepreneurs
here, we have 29 projects. So they decided to celebrate. We invited
lots of people to come, had a wonderful day of celebration and we
had 29 folders on the wall about all the different groups that day,
and the microphone was given to Murray. Murray said: "Do you
remember me? I now employ twelve people." The fishermen stood
up and said: "Fisheries Department told us that we will never
sell one tuna to Japan, our first order was 9 tonnes, we are going
to sell everything to Japan this year." The farmers said:
"Nobody told us to work together before. We can do it, if we do
it together."
Enterprise Facilitation
At the end of the day, two people from the Municipal Regional
Development and the bureaucrats from the Department of Local
Government in Canberra said to me, "we want either you, or you
can teach somebody to do what you have done." I offered to
teach somebody. So after ten years of working in Africa, and
post-graduate, I can teach somebody to do this. And they said
"prove it. Because if it is you, this is of no value to us,
because when you die it is the end of it, but if you can teach
people to do to rural communities what you have done here, we would
be very interested." I moved out of Esperance and went to
Geraldton, and in Esperance a guy was employed called Brian Willowby.
Brian became involved in my first training. We invented a name,
"Enterprise Facilitation". Brian became the first
Enterprise Facilitator. Brian has just become the Shire President
and has just left the job as an Enterprise Facilitator that he took
in 1986. Let me tell you what Brian did - 280 new businesses in a
community of 10,000, without ever giving local people an idea of
what to do. Out of 280 at the last count, 270 are still happening,
and 270 people are creating more than 1000 jobs in a community of
10,000, which by the way has grown to 14,000. There have been three
national television programmes in Australia about Esperance. I do
not know how many articles I have written; a book about it. It was
because of Esperance that the Western Australian Government said to
me that they wanted this all over.
There are 37 people now in Western Australia who live in small
rural communities and they only do certain things - for free in
total confidentiality - one on one for as long as it takes. In blue
jeans, these people will go to your house, to your daughter's house,
to the garage, and they will sit with anyone who has an idea for a
new business or wish to expand a new enterprise. Then the Enterprise
Facilitator becomes the family doctor of business, a general
practitioner who then gets linked to every single government
resource which exists in the country, and is the facilitator who
becomes the repository of know-how to be given to the grass roots.
So it is not only the agency in Perth now, but there are all these
family doctors of business who know precisely what the agencies can
offer to people at the grass roots.
My work was discovered first by people in Victoria, and that
created years ago the new Enterprise Victoria, then I trained the
very first manager of the B.E.C. - the Business Enterprise Centres
in New South Wales; and Ashtongoff who died of cancer two years ago,
then trained all the BC Managers in something that resembled my
model and my idea. Then Brian Willowby came to New Zealand and he
had the good fortune of meeting Neville Foreman who is in the
audience today. Neville is probably the greatest facilitator I ever
met. Brian Willowby will complain about that, but Neville Foreman
and I, in about two years, helped to start 205 businesses and
Neville embarked on all sort of government activities to help other
people to understand his philosophy. But I was never invited to New
Zealand to bring this personally to New Zealand. I was never in the
position that I am today. I am here today because somebody
discovered my work. A professor from a rural university in Minnesota
discovered my work, he invited me to go there and I was a visiting
Fellow first in Minnesota; two years later I was invited back to
South Dakota and I started doing work that was the impossible: with
incredibly poor communities South Dakota.
People and Infrastructure
If you think that America is all wealthy, please go and have a
look. I was in a community where the income per capita was $8,000
per year. So I have seen some great poverty in America. What has
happened since, is that there has been an incredible validation of
this kind of approach which is: build your own community from
within. And there are also some words and other terminology that is
being used. It is called A Gardening Economy - Grow Your Own.
There were very different views about economic development. One said
basically economic development is done by a group of people in a
community who have a better [design?] than the locals. And what I
have to explain to you is that I am not opposed for you, at your
community level, to have economic development corporation
strategies, but I believe strongly that there are two legs of
economic development.
One is the top down creation of infrastructures to development.
But don't kid yourself. An infrastructure without people using it is
useless. It is not true if you build it they will come. It is not
true. I have proof of that, I have seen enough rural communities
where not only the new infrastructure is not going to be filled, but
you have perfectly good old infrastructures in decay. In America I
have seen something that I have never seen in Australia before - two
communities, one in Northern Kansas and one in South Dakota, where
the rates have gone so low that they don't even have the money to
reseal the road every year. What they have done is, they have taken
the asphalt off and they have reversed it to dirt. Now I am talking
about two years ago. They have reverted to dirt roads because the
communities have lost it.
What you need is both: infrastructure ready for the
entrepreneurs, yes, but you need to recognise that if you would
spend a little bit of time and thinking and money to provide
something which can help entrepreneurs to fulfil the passion you
will be much better off. So what I have been doing is going around
convincing civic leaders to take initiatives. And the initiative the
civic leaders can take is one of, say, "what would happen if we
would have a mature ex-private-sector person who then would become
the full-time management coach who works with people, getting them
feeling confident and helping them transform their ideas into new
enterprises?" Then this person will link these new
entrepreneurs to the vast resources which you already have. You know
what resources are there, that these people can tap into, but they
have to make it first. So we have invented the family doctor of
business.
What we do in America, Canada and Australia, and what we hope to
do in other parts of the world, is to convey this idea that the
family doctor of business is the missing link that will link local
government responsibilities to state government action and your
grass roots operator, your bottom-up to your top-down development.
But how do you train, how do you deal with entrepreneurs who are
these people? Do you really have people in your community right now
who need somebody to talk to them about their dreams? I am telling
you that right now, in your community there is somebody scribbling
figures on a kitchen table.
Change the Fortune of Your Community
My promise to you is that if you would learn to help one person
in your community go from solitude and frustration to be able to
feed herself or himself and employ somebody and look up in people's
eyes, because they now have some self-respect, if you do it only
once you will change forever the fortune of your community. You know
why? Because there will be a ripple - success breeds success. When
the local people in Esperance saw Murray running a business and
employing twelve people, they said: "Murray my god he can't
even write. If he can do it, I can do it!"
And we de-mystified business, and these ripples spread from one
person like Murray the fisherman, and the farmers; and Brian
Willowby has been telling me that over the last ten years an average
of 1600 people every year in their community came to see him. 1600
at least made an enquiry with him, a telephone call.
What do we tell? How do we train this enterprise facilitator?
What do we tell them to do? There is a secret to business. I would
like those in the audience who are business people, those who are
advising businesses to listen to what we have learnt. This is the
secret to business success. And what we simply say is that we have
discovered that every business, no matter how small or large, has to
take care of three things beautifully.
Take Care of Three Things
The first thing is, you have to produce the product or the
service that you want to sell. So the first thing is the product,
the technical skill. The second one is the marketing - absolutely
useless to produce something if then you don't know how to sell it.
And marketing is much more than selling. It is brilliant, the man
for your product, advertising, packaging and so on. The third thing
you have to do in a business, whether big or small, is take care of
the money - the financial management. We have never met a single
human being in the world who passionately equally loves to produce
the product, market the product and keep the books.
We have never met a marketing person who is also a passionate
financial manager, never. We have never read any book about it, we
have never even read a fiction book which describes this
personality. Because this personality will be somebody who in the
morning would be confronted by two opportunities, to get dressed and
go and close the deal or stay in the pyjamas, go to the study,
switch on the computer and re-do all the finance for the company -
is so passionate about both that he is paralysed in the middle. That
person we have never met. So what do we teach people? We say to
people starting a business, we said to Murray the fisherman -
"don't ever dream of going into business alone."
Follow Your Passion
What is your passion? If your passion is go fishing, go and fish.
Do it beautifully, but remember that your entrepreneur is to find
somebody who absolutely passionately loves to market, you have to
find somebody who is absolutely passionate about financial
management. What we do in small country towns all over the world is
transform the solitude, the frustration of one individual in a small
team and we use the community as the networking agent and we
transform the solitude in a small team which learnt management one
on one. Do what you love to do, but co-opt people who passionately
love to do what you hate. Beg people to help you, barter with
somebody to come and do the books but don't ever go into business
alone. The facilitator becomes the person who listens to your
passion, helps you create this nucleus or small company that can
become a large company if it is well managed. What we do, is do this
in a context which is a community context, where the community
assume the responsibility for the employment of the Enterprise
Facilitator.
My Wish
What is my wish for you? My wish for you is that you start to
look at your own people in a different way, they are there. I know
because I have heard the stories about what happens in New Zealand,
I know that you have absolutely extraordinary entrepreneurial minds
in this country. What my wish for you is that you stop being
self-deprecating New Zealand. That you stop having a chip on the
shoulder about who you are. I agree that if you would play the
entrepreneurial game the way you play your sports you would
"kick butt off everybody" to use an American expression.
Are you doing it well enough? No! You can do more. I want to talk to
you and I want to invite some of your leaders to go and visit a
small region in Italy called Emilia-Romagna. I was there with a
Canadian delegation. Emilia-Romagna has a population of 4 million,
like New Zealand. A land mass which is half of New Zealand land
mass. In Emilia-Romagna there are 400,000 in a population of 4
million people. The gross national product of Emilia-Romagna is much
higher than New Zealand. But in Emilia-Romagna there are also 7100
cooperatives and 2400 rural cooperatives. They cultivate in a
cooperative, they own their own added value, very much like New
Zealand. But what they have is a national supermarket chain which is
a cooperative chain, and now they are moving into Europe, with the
supermarkets which they own, to deliver their goods to the European
market.
So there is room for New Zealand, absolutely to have an economy
based on this original entrepreneurship, and I have absolutely no
doubt that the moment you start to play the game you are going to
have some enormous rewards. I would like to see it, I would like to
come back to New Zealand, I would like to participate in your
success. Good Luck.
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