Super-entrepreneurialism: 2020 style

© Mohd Haniff – 123RF.com

Today, the entire 'world' is 'out of the box crazy' and without the overflow of super-entrepreneurialism, national economies are simply dwindling away. With widespread organisational failures across the world, the proof of what's gone wrong is already embedded in leadership's resistance to change. The hyper-accelerated global shifts will not guarantee the longevity of old establishments. Creating super-entrepreneurialism is poised to become a top national agenda point, but how will it succeed?

The art of creating entrepreneurs with magic wands is being tested by a hundred-plus countries. Every nation is desperately showcasing mega events, promising grassroots programs, and attempting to transform masses of 'job seekers' into 'job creators'. While the global search for a gene-altering entrepreneurial pill is still on, so far the massive numbers of events and well-funded programmes have produced great press clips and limited results.

All over the world, in this race, 'startup' buzzwords are increasingly becoming real-estate 'shutdowns' and playful innovation training sessions becoming mostly feel-good sessions. For most national political agendas and major institutions, the lack of any other solution still makes the national super-entrepreneurial agenda a top priority.

But where are the problems? What's taking so long?

We are crossing a chasm; it's deep, undecipherable and embedded with massive disruptions and yet stacked with the most and amazing opportunities. Super-entrepreneurialism can successfully deal with this, but how? Here are some key factors...

The seven societies: How 100 years of evolution has landed us in the current technocalamity

Technocalamity is when the tsunami of free technologies makes organisations look increasingly outdated. The same tsunamis can quadruple exports, innovative excellence and catapult into image supremacy. This makes technocalamity a new global age phenomena. Entrepreneurs understand such rare combinations.

The big picture

This era of corporate technocalamity is the accumulation of the last 100 years' progress, challenging our personal development, our own global age skills and our confidence level in coping with the highly twisted technologically driven surroundings. Future issues can only be solved with futuristic thinking and tools. Therefore, continuous and highly appropriate training is essential. Like test pilots breaking the sound barrier are constantly under training, today the majority of senior executives are not fully aware of the technocalamity; the highly integrated and complex fusion of products and services colliding with global market places under constant emergence of new technologies.

During the print society in 1900, when printed word was power, literacy was a prerequisite and only the privileged had access to knowledge. A similar scenario, 120 years later, is occurring today, as the thousands of options are only open to the highly literate who read between the lines and connect the dots, while the rest of the population watches as amazed spectators.

The radio society made its impact after a quarter century. It brought information freely available to the air, music to tap dance on assembly line floors. The 'voice' started creating radio personalities with opinions and this opinion leadership in public became noticeable. There were five other major societies: TV society, which brought live-action dramas, and started the colourful consumerism; telecom society, shorthanded distance and created standardisation; computer society created miniaturisation and a sense of accuracy; cyber society brought the world to the desk and started the diffusion between work and other lifestyles. We just left the click society, which brought the world into our pockets and seriously disrupted the traditional work model.

Two important things: The first four societies took almost a century to unfold, while the last three took only a quarter-century to unfold, so we will be landing in a brand new society by 2020. Second, the impact of this phase will be the extreme combination of all the last three societies. Our new society is a metamorphosis challenging our daily work model, something we have not experienced in the last 200 years. The change from a regimented work day to fully free-flowing work and rest lifestyles will dramatically shift habits in lifestyle and entail major psychological adjustments.

The proof Of technocalamity: Approaching 2020, the disappearance of traditional offices, elimination of procedural and repetitive work displacing a couple billion white collar jobs into massive gig-economy while global age thinking, knowledge and execution crushing widespread mediocrity. A brand new standard on innovative excellence will dominate, just like in the Nineties when very crude and post-industrialised businesses were suddenly transformed into massively computerized, sophisticated organisations.

Download this white paper on technocalamity and apply to participate in the Forum 2016.

Geo-entrepreneurial transformation: new global ideologies for creative interdependencies

There's been transformation from 'hard asset centricity', where most decisions are based on hard-wired mentality towards 'existing assets on the floor,' and where options are often limited by severe cost cutting and short-term profit demands to 'soft power asset management', where entrepreneurial skills connect major dots around innovative excellence and global execution and support 'out of the box' thinking.

Examples of soft power asset management and innovative excellence:

UBER, the world's largest taxi service without owning a single vehicle
FACEBOOK, the largest social media, without producing any of its own content
ALIBABA, the world's largest retailer without a single warehouse
AIRBNB, the biggest hotel provider without a single hotel
Examples of hard asset management and its entrapments:

The American auto sector and the bankruptcy of Detroit, despite all the funding and bail outs, simply stayed locked in old, hard assets and ignored the global age over decades. Some 100 million big and small plants are struggling with cost-cutting experts and trying to produce mediocre, unsellable inventories locked in hard assets. They await their demise.

Transformation from the old mentality of spreading out comfortably on a yearly plan spanning 365 days to rapid-fire contracting and attempting to achieve the same goals in 365 hours. The world is moving at a hyper-accelerated pace and will not stop for anyone. Current calendars and day-timer scheduling models are just not designed for the global age thinking and execution.

There is no such thing as 9-5 but rather 24 hours of constant 'sun rising' somewhere around the world.

Transformation from the 'schlocky' mentality of producing faster, cheaper, goods and services into a new global age thinking and new 'perfectionist' ideology of 'extreme value creation' is fully supported in parallel with 'extreme image generation.' Ideas, good or bad, simply die due to lack of quality and equally die for lack of global image and positioning. But when both processes are deployed in parallel, image supremacy and innovative excellence success starts to take shape. Currently swamped in the age of abundance, 'undervalued' goods and services offered in 'overvalued' and excessive packaging have only brought the majority of businesses of today to their knees. The rules of engagement with the image supremacy protocols must be on the forefront for any survival.

Nationalism question: If the entrepreneurial gene is widespread and massive job creation can only be solved by entrepreneurs, why is a nationwide programme not top of the country's national agenda?

The billion: A new world of a billion new entrepreneurs will ensure global prosperity

Nation-building can be bifurcated either by simply creating a cheaper labour force and continuously eliminating the middle class or by creating entrepreneurs to shake down all the barriers and create a new level of prosperity impacting local GDP.

Fact: Governments all over the world got interested in SMEs, especially during the last decade. Efforts, around the world have been initiated and the new global buzz is 'innovation, incubation and entrepreneurs'. But how far these efforts will go and at what point the supporting teams will be fully integrated with the true spirit of new global age entrepreneurialism and great success stories is still wide open.

Harsh realities: Now facing the truth

Can Mount Everest-climbers be trained by librarians or scholars? If a school of surgeons has no room for accountants or master chefs to deliver training, then what new measures will universities and other entrepreneurial programmes have to deploy to ensure the quality of pure and natural entrepreneurial fertilisation and execution?

Mass fertilisation: Superstar entrepreneurialism

Armies of entrepreneurs can be created, just like creating MBAs, but this demands a mega shift in thinking, knowledge, and execution at the deep-end of the organisational structures and academic corridors:

• When 'out of box' independence and 'risk-taking' become a positive part of a national agenda
• When failure gets scored as series of worthy experiences and not as a lost cause
• When entrepreneurs under a national agenda are recognised as a part of a nation's assets
• When the self-employed are given the same if not more accreditation than any other professional
• When risk-takers are showcased and not left in the backroom to be judged by other professionals
• When job-creators get rewarded and not overtaxed with extra paper work as punishment
• When entrepreneurs are asked to design major government programmes on job-creation
• When teaching entrepreneurialism in the classroom is considered outdated.

During last-century America, difficult, unpredictable and unimaginable 'out of box, crazy' behaviour and execution was considered as innovative excellence and applauded. Failures became part of the learning experience as an asset and not a liability. Around the world, no other experiment of human endurance has been as successful as the story of American people and their drive to free enterprise and entrepreneurialism. Now lost in abstract economy, American entrepreneurialism still offers the best-trained and educated entrepreneurial citizenry and still provides the best-trained minds and rapid-expansion national and global combinations compared to so many other nations.