“All the great progress has been the fruit of unreasonable people who made the world adapt to them; reasonable people adapt to the world. "
- George Bernard Shaw -
"Culture and entrepreneurial behavior"
If our national culture is characterized by something, it is to “reward” the status quo. This practice encourages conformity and it is common for those who struggle to achieve their " personal dream " to be labeled "crazy" or simply eccentric or "rare ". They, in most cases, carry it out against the entire "establishment", which means that they generally face belligerent bureaucracies that live and fight, in addition they have excellent health.
Some authors (Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington. 2000. CULTURE IS WHAT MATTERS: HOW VALUES SHAPE HUMAN PROGRESS) quoting Daniel Patrick Moyniham affirm: “The central truth of conservatives is that culture, not politics, which determines the success of a society. The core truth of liberals is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself. ”
By "human progress" in the aforementioned text, he refers to "an advance towards economic development and material well-being, towards socioeconomic equity and political democracy". For Clifford Geertz "culture" refers to all the ways of life of a society: its values, practices, symbols, institutions and human relations. In this book that we quote, culture is made up of all the underlying values, attitudes, beliefs, orientations and assumptions that prevail among the people that make up a society.
Most of the work in this book focuses on culture as an independent or explanatory variable: the way culture affects the scope and the way societies achieve or fail to achieve progress in economic development, and political democratization. However, we are also interested in culture as a dependent variable, that is, Moyniham's second truth: how can political or other action modify or remove cultural obstacles to progress?
Societies can also change their culture in response to major trauma. The disastrous experiences of Germany and Japan in World War II made them stop being the two most militarized countries in the world to become two of the most pacifist. Political leadership can replace disaster to stimulate cultural change. Singapore is an example of how, under certain circumstances, political leadership can achieve that goal. In this case, politics did change a culture and save it from itself.
With this good news that with political leadership culture can change, and considering that an entrepreneurial culture is desirable for the economic development of a country, let us analyze how education influences this type of behavior.
«Education for entrepreneurs»
There are studies that indicate that the teaching of entrepreneurship in intermediate level students have positive effects on the characteristics linked to the entrepreneurial profile.
For example, Rasheed studied 502 students from 28 classes. In some of these, he taught entrepreneurship training for 3 hours a week for 26 weeks.
He then measured entrepreneurial characteristics following the system proposed by Robinson (1991), which points out as distinctive characteristics of the entrepreneur achievement motivation (achievement motivation), self-control (control), self-efficacy (esteem) and innovation (innovate).
As the most notable results, it should be noted that the students who participated in the entrepreneurship classes presented higher values in four of the five variables used to define the entrepreneur, demonstrating that it is possible to stimulate these characteristics through educational processes.
Once the influence of the environment on potential entrepreneurs has been accepted and the possibility of stimulating entrepreneurial characteristics from teaching has been demonstrated, then, almost naturally, an outstanding interest in the participation of universities in the dynamics of this process arises, and the consequent need to prepare sufficiently stimulating spaces for the entrepreneurial process accompanied by more specific training contents, which take into account that the majority of graduates will not work in large organizations, which are the center of most of the topics taught in Administration careers, and that they adopt an orientation more focused on the new rather than on the established, on the leader before the follower, on the creator rather than the administrator (Ronstadt, 1985).
Timmons' (1991) model identifies three fundamental elements in the entrepreneurial process: opportunity, resources, and people. Currently, programs or courses for entrepreneurs in general are focused on the second of these elements (resources), highlighting the development of business plans, legal frameworks, finances, marketing and descriptions of the entrepreneur (Chelén et al., 1999). The contributions regarding the development of the so-called social capital and the detection of opportunities are not so numerous. Social capital has been identified as a fundamental factor for the success of the entrepreneur (Baron and Markman, 2000).
Baron and Markman define it as current and potential individual resources that are gained from meeting others, being part of a network with them, or simply being known and having a good reputation.
In many cases this social capital is the result of social skills, understood as specific skills that allow people to interact more effectively with others. These include the following: social perception, impression management, persuasion and social influence, and social adaptability. An adequate use of this set of skills is essential in a wide range of processes that occur in the entrepreneur's activity, from making presentations to investors and clients to selecting partners and forming teams and alliances, where the diversity of interests and characteristics are not at any time an insurmountable obstacle.
With regard to opportunities, these are directly related to creative activity, an essential component of innovation which comes to be as the heart of entrepreneurship (Thompson, 1999), and which can be understood as the ability to generate ideas or do things new, through processes that usually occur in an intuitive and non-systematic way (Hills et al., 1997). A program that aims to exercise creativity should be concerned with mitigating the effects of the blockages that may arise, be they perceptual, cultural or emotional (Simberg, 1964).
Perceptual blocks have to do with the initial problem statement and the inertia to use alternative approaches, due to the way they are presented to us at first. Cultural blockages are caused by the rules of conduct, thought and action that society produces and that lead to conformity. Emotional blocks are determined by the stresses of everyday life and are rooted in insecurity.
An intense creative activity has to do with the ease of relating to the new, which is itself unknown. In this sense, it is important to highlight that on many occasions, the educational system tends to give priority to the known and does little to prepare to effectively face the changes that represent the unknown. A better orientation would be to teach how to think instead of what to think (Olton and Crutchfield, 1969).
"Appreciative Dialogues"
The “Appreciative Dialogues” is a methodology of organizational development and social transformation, used for the strengthening of leaders, the creation of consensus, and the generation of shared visions and projects aligned with them. It is a methodology known for its excellence to promote cultural change.
We are ambitious and we want to change our culture. For this it is not enough to say it, to achieve it we must first change what we do every day, our daily practices and habits, so then, "valuing the entrepreneurial behavior" we train hundreds, thousands of entrepreneurs.
Their behaviors will serve as role models and examples. More so when today we know that according to Daniel Goleman (Social Intelligence, 2006) that there are what the author calls “mirror neurons”. ”Apparently, different experiments with apes have shown that in their brains there are a type of neuron that is "fired" (activated) both when the animal performs an action and when it observes another (especially its own species) doing that action. In other words, these neurons "replicate" ("reflect" like a mirror) the behavior of the other animal.
Furthermore, it appears that some experiments with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have found some evidence of the same type of neuron in the human brain. And it is speculated that they could have an important role in imitation skills learning, as well as in language development, and it has been said that problems with these types of neurons could be at the basis of autism. Mirror neurons transform visual information into knowledge. "
Let's change the visual information, so that young people see entrepreneurs and not public employees.
There is the need and there is the methodology, we have already proven that it is suitable to do so.
It is apt to do so, because "it is within us", because the first thing we do is discover the entrepreneur that exists in all of us (Discovery).
Then, with that seed of an entrepreneur that we all have, we begin to "dream" of our ideal situation as an entrepreneur and share our dreams, which in turn generates more feedback (Desire).
We already know that we are entrepreneurs and we have also established our vision, so let's move on to model our entrepreneurial behavior (Design), which is the seed for the positive change that is bodily alive in all our behaviors and decisions.
This is about being able to answer the question “ What would my entrepreneurial reality look like? ” The images of the future emerge from the positive examples, from what the system was in the best moments of the past and from the inspiring ideas shared in the previous stage (“mirror neurons”).
It is at this stage that the participants decide which proposal they are going to execute and how (Action Plans), in order to realize their Entrepreneur dreams.
Obviously, this is where a clear analysis must be made of the strengths available and those that could be needed to implement the Action Plan.
Finally we reach the fourth phase, Destiny. The final phase is an invitation to action inspired by the previous phases of discovery, desire and design.
At this point, we seek to make an invitation to personal initiative. We seek to demonstrate participants' commitment to action and support for those who choose to move forward.
The “Destiny” stage focuses especially on personal commitments. It involves change, its stability over time and monitoring of progress. Also known as "Obtaining Results.
Society needs entrepreneurs, this Methodology is available, is not it time to use it?
Because as Marilyn Ferguson says, “If I continue to believe in what I have always believed, I will continue to act as I have always acted. If I continue to act as I have always acted, I will continue to obtain what I have always obtained. ”
