A blueprint is needed to revive the midsized business economy across a nation, but first priority is its driving philosophy. Today, no additional proof is required on the critical lack of grassroot prosperity among economies of the world. To explore reality, we must acknowledge that when mankind is in trouble, only mankind’s rules will solve the issues. NASEEM JAVED writes.
The old systems have failed and the restless citizenry of the world is now demanding answers. The mind is limitless and is hardwired like the open universe; therefore, a focused mind is one of the biggest achievements of life. If the mind is a miracle of the universe, the body is an amazing temple that houses this gift, and while mankind has slipped badly on this realization, self-discovery, self-optimization and lifelong learning are where we need to start once again on a new blank page.
An entrepreneurial mind — a product of lifelong learning — is cognizant and very capable of handling local, national or global tasks. Today, a billion new entrepreneurs are being added to the world. Historically, some 100,000 entrepreneurs carved out the entrepreneurial supremacy of the US that lasted well over a century. A new world is advancing by the hour and nations that are slow have no chance of winning in this race of economic performance.
Can Islamic economies re-prioritize their new national investing?
Historically, Islamic economies, unlike the west, never understood ‘soft-power-asset-management’, the art of imagining staying stuck on old factory floors. This is like when bicycle makers are forbidden to dream of drones or flying cars. With new measurements of success, nations are now required to prove their mastery of transforming their own citizenry to be capable of global age skills with lifelong learning. This is to ensure a nation ends up with soft-power-assets and become globally agile on trade and claim their global image supremacy of innovative excellence, leaving far behind hard-asset-centric, traditionally structured economies based on short-term profit results.
New models of creating national wealth and identity
If investing only in selected lower hanging fruits is considered a good strategy, nowadays investing more in the jungles and trees while they grow to new heights will become a better strategy. Islamic economies will increasingly face restless youth and anxious citizenry and there is nothing more critical than creating nationwide grassroot prosperity.
Today, hard work is being replaced by smart work which in turn is being replaced by machines. The ‘masters’ of robots will be the new smart learners, while the ‘slaves’ of robots will be the deniers of change. New ‘dams’ and ‘bridges’ are now critically needed when tsunamis of technologies overflow ‘riverbanks’ and ‘shores’ drowning the populace.
This can be a wake-up call for Islamic economies to rethink and reinvent their investing plans. Is it is easy to transform people? No, it is almost impossible at times, but here are some global age options and new-style thinking.
The ‘four enlightenments’ when calling for mass transformation and positive mobilization of citizenry are as follows:
1. Self-discovery
Close your eyes and discover your hidden talents, create supreme performance and become a global age thinker. This will open up entrepreneurial thinking with enterprising journeys. Open your eyes and study the global age and indulge at the enterprise level, and build and create massive growth. Do something phenomenal. This will open up new business ideas.
2. Grassroot prosperity
Open your mind and lead by example, deploy and create grassroot prosperity, improve surroundings, help teams, share knowledge and create extreme value. This will open up collaborative thinking, leadership roles and national mobilization. Open your heart and share your authoritative command and knowledge, mobilize and help your own nation and make sure it is moving in the right direction as well as assist in boosting the national economy. Mankind demands straight answers, seeks new alternatives, strives for grassroot prosperity and is ready to lift the weight via the power of entrepreneurialism.
3. New challenges for Islamic economies
Can a nation declare that its top priority is to discover the hidden and untapped talents of its citizenry? Can it demonstrate superior skills to mobilize small and medium businesses across the nation? Can it adopt continuous self-learning to foster occupational superiority for the nation? Can national leadership demonstrate a refined understanding of entrepreneurial skills?
4. Facts
The world can easily absorb unlimited exportable ideas in unlimited vertical markets. Fact: The well-designed innovative ideas are worthy of such quadrupled volumes. Fact: The entrepreneurial and dormant talents of a nation are capable of such tasks. Fact: The new global age skills, knowledge and execution are now the missing links.
The five pillars of global age transformation
What’s really stopping a high potential enterprise from expanding to 100 countries? The following are the five pillars of global age transformation:
• Global age thinking: What will it take to reorganize and operate as a multinational organization with little or no extra costs?
• Global age modeling: Optimize and integrate soft power assets against sluggish hard asset centricity.
• Global age execution: Get trained to achieve what normally takes 365 normal days to do it in only 365 hours.
• Global age presence: Bring the image supremacy of innovative excellence into global space and profit.
• Global age prosperity: Become a magnet of prosperity with new revenues, new funding and new alliances.
Cold facts and warm realities
Success at times is failure management; failure is often a lost battle, but not a lost war as ultimate success is not necessarily winning the war — success is far more about understanding the battlefield, as the real victory is hidden outside the war. Soon, economic leadership will be less about raw commodities and infrastructure and more about mental endurance and global age skills of its citizenry. Imagination and entrepreneurialism are far more important over just commodities and infrastructure.
The three steps for the Islamic economy to advance on grassroot prosperity are
1. Identify 1,000 to 10,000 or one million small and midsized entrepreneurs within a nation, and create a national agenda to quadruple their performance on innovative excellence and exportability.
Caution — this is not to be confused with old outdated, dysfunctional, government data; rather it requires the assembly of ultramodern, digital and current profiles of midsized enterprises within a nation.
2. Deploy digitization of top national trade associations and chambers of commerce to upgrade to world-class digital platforms so that their entire membership can skate nationally and globally, showcasing their goods and services.
Caution — this is not to be confused with already broken and disconnected websites from the last decade; this is more like the LinkedIn format with colorful and highly interactive platforms.
3. It is time to engage the national entrepreneurial talent — 1,000 to 10,000 or one million small and midsized businesses — in ongoing discussions and high-quality entrepreneurial debates and to create global bounce that will unveil unlimited growth.
Caution — this is not to be confused with a single plastic award night; this is about outstanding performance during 364 days of the year with every day filled with active and daily engagements.
Timelines: Once the mobilization agenda is set, such issues are tackled within a year or less.
Why is there a critical lack of knowledge?
Some 10,000 chambers of commerce of the world are sorting out trade wars and trade disputes, but there is little or no concentration on new global age demands of the global marketplace for their memberships. In the meantime, there are some 100,000 national trade associations of the world stuck in last-century thinking when it comes to advanced level digital platforms and are afraid about their future roles and return on investment on membership fees. They will all shine under new flags of creating new global bounce and prosperity.
Caution — what’s already on the floor of these organizations is just dead weight in need of a scale to measure the opportunity loss. The public sectors of the world are grossly under-optimized and have little or no knowledge of their own hidden talents. They are seriously afraid of entrepreneurialism and without global age skills or innovative ideas, they know nothing about taming the elephant of global survival. It is time for the public sector to become confident, highly optimized and fearless, and contribute freely to new ideas and prosper.
By all means, such transformations are no easy task; however, they are less dependent on new funding but heavily dependent on global age-execution and strategic agenda.
The small and mid-sized enterprises all over the new and old worlds, though in critical need of global age expertise, are already in boiling pots and do not have the time, finances or luxury to intellectualize such issues. They have already lost faith in their local support but will rejuvenate with joy and become the number one source of new job creation within the nation once they wake up to the fact that prosperity is easily accessible.
The overflow of free technologies and progressive local, national and global solutions are grossly misunderstood and the least optimized areas. This is an ocean in need of swimmers and scuba divers.
Such programs also improve the current status of national issues like: Nations are already flooded with massive innovations, but lack massive commercialization. Nations have over-certifications and degrees but seriously lack business directions. Nations have empty incubators and exhausted accelerators like real estate projects. Nations have economic development programs but often without a mega punch. Roundtable or senior cabinet-level discussions are a good starting point.
Naseem Javed is a corporate philosopher and the chairman of Expothon Worldwide, a think tank on national mobilization of entrepreneurial powers and innovative performance. He can be contacted at [email protected].