Opinion MSD drives entrepreneurship

What do you need to become entrepreneur centric? The answer is the three fundamentals of MSD: (1) Management skills to lead people and administer work,(2) Salesmanship,from the basic to a sophisticated approach,and (3) Domain knowledge,from the nitty-grity to the top end of the spectrum of your subject. To raise the taste and pleasure of being an entrepreneur,you have to embellish these 3 fundamentals with the 3 additional ingredients of passion,daringness and an aptitude for hard work.

The entrepreneurial mindset is self-directed and animated by a sense of autonomy and purpose. It’s not like managing work through automation. Nor does it reduce everything to a series of rule-based steps where you find one correct answer. It means being open for multi-disciplinary inputs and the non-routine. Entrepreneurship involves juggling stimuli from society and technology trends,then blending them with elements of design and empathy. All the while you’ll be considering the big picture to lead towards creating a symphony. Most of all,motivation is intrinsic in an entrepreneur to do something not for its rewards alone,but for that inherent satisfaction of just doing the task. You yearn to get better at whatever matters to you. So your achievement becomes personal,like losing weight or learning music.

From the large number of furniture stores mushrooming in every locality of India’s growing cities,you can tell lifestyle purchase is on the rise. If you go to the place the furniture is sourced from,you’ll find a mediocre-minded owner,himself an exceptional carpenter,working together with many employees. Their domain knowledge and craftsmanship would undoubtedly be terrific. But the environment in which they are working? More likely than not,conditions would be unhygienic and untidy,their working instruments almost as shoddy as their working clothes. When you experience their deliverables in a cocktail party at a sophisticated home,you may never realise where the exceptional furniture you are sitting on came from.

What’s missing in these people? As per my three MSD fundamentals,and three ingredients,they don’t have the right salesmanship and daringness. So they continue to have miserable living conditions and work hard throughout their lives. There are innumerable small home industries running in India. With practical coaching on entrepreneurship,they can become highly potent SMEs for the domestic market and refinement of that can uplift their businesses to hit the global market. Entrepreneurial methods need to be taught in every livelihood practice. Take a farmer with two acres of land. He earns a maximum of Rs 3,500 after much hardship. Surely

Rs 10,000 per month is possible,but who will teach him how to apply better techniques for growth? Check this example: When I was working to design tractors for hobby farming in the US market,I had to visit farmers across states as part of my research. A farmer family owning 30 acres in Sacramento,California,said that having big land tracks does not mean they make more money. Their neighbour was earning significantly higher revenues proportionately from just an acre of land. That neighbour was cultivating heirloom tomatoes,the tiny cherry-looking boutique vegetable that sells at considerably higher rates than common ripe tomatoes.

Even the self-employed can lack the drive for entrepreneurship. When they have a trader-like mentality,they make no effort to understand the customer beyond the basic requirement. They cut corners and are not conscious about sustaining quality. So small,medium or big enterprises all end up acting like “order takers” for the demand led market. In the IT services business,most Indian IT companies lack trained talent to upgrade their basic services to the next level for their global customers. There’s no dearth of IT engineers and diploma holders who pass out with flying colours. But how many of them have the entrepreneurial stance to dialogue with sophisticated global customers in customer business language? Most often,barely a handful.

Salaried employees who do not absorb the entrepreneurial frame of mind always seem to have an urgent need to satisfy the boss. Decisions scare them. The larger majority of people continue to vie for comfortable jobs where challenge and responsibility are minimal. Earlier it was a government job everyone was after for the life-long security it gives. Now an IT job or working for a global company is considered the plum,for the big size pay packet that brings. As they take no initiative to benchmark themselves and their work at a global level,they are not confident about personal delivery capability.

In our free economy,if the government wants to really solve the BPL (below poverty line) factor,an initiative can be taken to create the MSD entrepreneurial mindset at the mass level. A radical shift is required from seeking job security to developing the free enterprise spirit where risk and reward exist in equal measure.

Shombit Sengupta is an international creative business strategy consultant to top management. Reach him at http://www.shiningconsulting.com