An entrepreneur is an
opportunist, means he has an eye to identify a problem and more importantly has
a solution, also resources. Entrepreneurship is all about undertaking
innovations and bearing risks associated with those innovations in order to
transforms innovations into economic goods. Some people say that entrepreneurs
are not made, they are born but in others opinion, being an entrepreneur
requires hard work, a strong will and determination. Well, in my opinion you
don’t need to be ‘born’ with some superman abilities to become an entrepreneur.
In Pakistan, people are more inclined towards going for searching a job instead
of starting up their own businesses and becoming an entrepreneur. People in
Pakistan prefer jobs because:
Job is easy option
No need to take pain of start-up
Attitude of people
They are right to some extent. We all want to live a luxurious life but we are
not ready to pay the price required for that luxurious life. We are more willing
to do work that cause minimum pain to us. We always try to find our ease. But
instead of criticizing, my purpose of writing this article is to identify the
entrepreneurial vacuum that exist in our society. The following section briefly
describes some of the common and important entrepreneurial weaknesses in the
Pakistani business community.
One of the very common attributes of Pakistani business, is lack of vision.
Vision has two aspects – “dream” or ambition and foresight. It is common, among
the most successful enterprises around the world, to have business vision or
dream that serves as the nucleus of higher organizational goals.The other aspect
of vision is foresight – the ability to anticipate the future. Both senses of
vision, serve as the heart of organizational direction and planning, around
which business operations are or should be regulated. Unfortunately, this
farsightedness is widely wanting in our economic Institutions, both public and
private. The natural outcome of this shortsightedness is that our economic
activities are conducted in a “firefighting” (reactive) mode rather than
proactively.
The state of business itself, is another reflection of the existing
entrepreneurial weaknesses. Pakistani businesses even old ones, operate at a
much smaller scale than their Indian counterparts, and are far more vulnerable
to economic and environmental fluctuations. The Business and Industry mostly
look up to government for “initiatives”, incentives, policy making and planning
for their sectors, while they sit pretty on the sidelines, in the hope of
favorable government policies, subsidies, incentives and tax relief.
Businesses produce goods and services that fulfill the wants of a market. These
wants generate, what is referred to as demand in economics. Thus needs and wants
of a people, when viewed from an economic perspective are business
opportunities. The greater the needs, the greater the demand and the greater are
the entrepreneurial opportunities. And the greater the gap between the demand
and the supply, the greater is the profitability of a future supply. Education,
health and transportation, are all good examples of the above situation. All
these sectors have very high societal stakes. There is great demand, both in
numbers and qualitative terms, for education and health facilities, due to
largely poor quality services in both areas. The public sector has brutally
failed to fulfill, the market needs in this regard. The private sector in
Pakistan could have played a positive role in these sectors, and in return could
have earned a lot of profit. Unfortunately, like the public sector, the private
enterprise in Pakistan also lags behind in entrepreneurial abilities, and thus
has failed to capitalize the opportunity.
While the Americans (from North America) and the Europeans dig oil in the Middle
East and establish their offshoots in Central Asia, one may ask, how many
Pakistani businesses were able to expand their market to Central Asia, on the
fall of the Soviet Union? The political turmoil in the region, that started from
September 11 and has lasted through to the invasion in Iraq, has also left an
impact on the economy of the region. There is a wave of “anti-multinational”
feeling - not just in Pakistan, but throughout the Middle East and the Muslim
world, (in fact, even in many parts of Europe). This wave was a “business”
opportunity for the local entrepreneurs, that was capitalized by some, in other
regions. An example being an Iranian soft drink called “Zamzam Cola” marketed
throughout the Middle East. According to BBC News:
Zamzam Cola, an alternative to US brands Coca Cola and Pepsi, has gone on sale
at the same time as a campaign to boycott American goods gathers momentum.
"The campaign of boycotting American products and the good quality of Zamzam
Cola have given us excellent sales," general manager Firas Khawaja told Reuters
news agency.
"Demand in the eastern province alone has put a lot of pressure on the Iranian
supplier."
Preparations are under way to establish a bottling factory for Zamzam Cola in
neighbouring Bahrain, where the drink has also proved very popular.
Zamzam says it is also planning to upgrade and expand production plants in
Iran to meet the growing demand for its drinks.
Unfortunately, in Pakistan, such opportunities are mostly lost due to lack of
vision, initiative, and responsiveness and also due to a risk avoiding factor
that is generally much higher in the Pakistani society.
The business in Pakistan is accustomed to “playing safe”. Our businesses
generally follow the trend. Planning and initiative are integral ingredients of
entrepreneurship. Lack of initiative as already discussed, largely contributes
to underdevelopment, lost opportunities and diminished growth potential. Let’s
consider some practical examples.
How many multinationals has Pakistan been able to establish in half a century?
Sialkot is the hub of sports (and surgical) goods. It produces the best
quality products (football, bats, shoes, sportswear etc. etc.), and is known
worldwide for its quality. But how many “brands” have Sialkot “introduced”?
Interestingly, most of the quality products that we produce are FOREIGN BRANDS –
Nike, Adidas, etc. etc. and are often stamped “Made in France” etc. once
shipped.
While Pakistan serves the whole of Europe and North America in Information
Technology, to meet their national needs, how many Pakistani software “products”
have we launched in the past two decades?
While Pakistani physicians hold top positions in the world wide “chains” of
hospitals, how many “chains” of hospitals have we established?
While Pakistani businesses may be making millions, they are unfortunately unable
to realize their economic potential due to the above-mentioned entrepreneurial
weaknesses. The result being, that we are deprived of huge “potential” growth
and development, and have a much higher unemployment rate, than we should have,
if we had capitalized on the opportunities around us.
Reliability is yet another aspect that stems from business vision (or lack of
it). Pakistani products (and services), as compared to competing foreign
products, are inferior in both quality and reliability. Similarly, Pakistani
exporters do not enjoy a great reputation in the international community in this
regard. The cases of marked difference in sample quality and the items shipped
are not rare. It is for this reason, that some of the Pakistani brands (e.g.
basmati rice) are often marketed by Indian businesses because of their superior
reliability.
In Pakistan, the policies have always been biased towards the high class of
country. This is true of the economical policies which have been biased towards
the high scale sector. Rather than entrepreneurship, policies are planned for
investors and investments became the norm. Incentives were offered to attract
investment. Such incentives included licensed monopolies in protected markets,
cheap land and credit and subsidized inputs.
Despite of all these hurdles and vacuum that exist in our society,
Entrepreneurship is increasingly being accepted in Pakistan as an important mode
of income generation for rural youth. It is widely accepted that
entrepreneurship has number of potential benefits and the most obvious one is it
creates income beyond just the individual but entrepreneurship generates
employment for society, conferring the social benefits that accompany high
employment societies. Moreover, increased unemployment rate has forced the young
generation to think out of the box. Government could not produce as many jobs as
the number of graduates from different universities and this has lead the
foundation of a thinking that “if government cannot give us employment, we’ll
come up with our own businesses” and we can say that failure of government to
provide jobs has resulted in more number of entrepreneurs than ever!