The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that the true source of our wealth is not in oil or our tourist resources; not even in the voluminous remittances that our nationals send from the other side of the Rio Grande.
The wealth of our nation is in young people and our ability to make them the entrepreneurial capital that the country requires, to train a whole generation of men and women from today to turn resources and strengths into sustainable sources of employment.
Despite the deniers of business success, the source of the wealth of every nation will always be found in the ability to detonate, encourage and train young people with a spirit of success, young people with imagination to transform problems into business opportunities and in innovative job-generating organizations; young people with vision, imagination and tenacity, with the wood of entrepreneurs, who are not stopped by the government bureaucracy or disoriented by the tiny and ephemeral media paradigms.
And the younger we start them in this training, the better, because someone who starts his attempts to do business at 18 years of age has a 5 or 6 year advantage over a university student who starts a business given the difficulty of finding the expected job, or an advantage of many more years over being laid off after decades of relying on an employer.
As Olded Shenkar points out in his recent Chinese Century book, China is an economic miracle today, not because of its soaring labor costs, but because of its army of experienced businessmen. Whoever has negotiated with a Chinese knows what we are talking about.
Common concepts in the jargon of economic language are those of financial capital, physical capital, human capital and intellectual capital, understood as technologies, methodologies and processes that make the functioning of organizations possible.
Francis Fukuyama, in his book "Trust", recently called our attention to the importance of yet another category, Social Capital, defining it as the collective value of the communities and the currents that arise from these groups to support each other.
Few have reflected, however, on the importance of entrepreneurial capital, which is nothing other than the human capacity to face uncertainty and turn problems into business opportunities and job creation. A capacity fueled by values and attitudes prone to innovation and the realization of achievements.
And although there is not yet a distinguished foreign academic who has concerned himself with this category of capital, we should consider it inaugurated as of the publication of this article.
I am convinced that in our youth there is a large stock of entrepreneurial capital, it is scarce in universities, business schools, in large financial centers and even in incubators promoted by the secretariat of economy, where it is thought that by supporting the development of a A business plan has already become a homeland, but it abounds in the streets and in the thousands of young people who take risks to seek a better life outside the country.
Just take a look at the cruise ships in the big cities of our country, to feel the entrepreneurial spirit of Mexicans, who with practically no resources and against all laws, build their own source of income, or the growing businesses of Mexicans in the other side of the Rio Grande, not only in the United States but also in Canada.
Without pretending that our development model is that of the underground economy.
Unfortunately there is little real effort in our country to unleash that potential of our young people as successful businessmen; there is rather a perverse pseudo-social discourse, which from the family, religion, the educational system and even from the media, encourages in the minds of people the idea that being successful in business and achieving a buoyant fortune, it is and will always be the result of collusion with the government, of bad habits or of perverse dealings with the underworld.
There is no better example of this Manichean vision than the recently published book entitled “Los amos de México”, in which eleven of the most important businessmen in the country are scissors, and where the amount of jobs that these businessmen generate, and a Machiavellianism of intrigue is weighted that makes them look like perverse men.
When it comes to the formation of entrepreneurial capital, our educational system has a poor response capacity. Except in some elite circles, in general the system "programs" in the chip of the students "complete chains" of negative messages about the entrepreneurial figure and wealth.
Entrepreneurship and commercial vision are shown to students as synonyms for exploitation and shady practices.
At its basic level, the educational system is responsible for inhibiting any genetic sign of an entrepreneur. I always remember the time my nephew was brought home and suspended for wanting to sell his friends some toys that he no longer considered useful.
At the middle and higher levels, the system provides skills that the production system required 20 years ago, but not now that information and communication technologies flatten the executive and administrative structures of companies and that the medium rationality of public spending reduces bureaucratic posts to the minimum limit to occupy the first-born of the political caste in turn.
As long as we continue to allow higher education to concentrate 75% of the enrollment in a highly saturated career, we will have nothing in our educational institutions other than factories for the unemployed.
From the invention of the fishing net to reading the human genome, new technologies have always made workers more efficient, causing momentary structural unemployment.
Over time, however, displaced workers end up producing new goods or services, which add to the wealth of the entire society. Through a process of creative destruction, entire productive activities are born and die, jobs are created and destroyed. The only new thing today is the speed with which this process is occurring.
Changes that used to take place over millennia or centuries now take only years or months. Getting ahead implies flexibility to adapt to changes and not sit around waiting for the one who took the cheese.
A prediction published by the United States Department of Labor indicates that of the thirty jobs in which the job offer will grow between now and 2012, five will be related to health and four to education and many more in the areas of knowledge. This is where the business opportunities are.
If we want to avoid that in Mexico the much announced, by President Felipe Calderón, “Demographic Bonus” from becoming a true demographic bomb, we will have to invest heavily in the generation of entrepreneurial capital; we have to train hundreds and hundreds of young business people, visionaries, capable of redirecting resources from traditional low-profitability activities, towards innovative sectors with high returns and the capacity to generate new and numerous jobs.
Those who know about "making money" say that money will never be a limitation for business. What is needed is that a business is a good business so that financing offers remain. And for this to happen, what is missing is the entrepreneur, the man with a business vision who has the sensitivity to detect it and the skill and tenacity to turn the opportunity into profitability.
We must understand, as the well-trained technocrats of the Ministry of the Economy have not, that the vast majority of business failures are not due to lack of resources, inadequate planning, bad fortune or lack of experience. They are in the lack of a mercantile culture to do business.
A culture that we will hardly obtain in any of the best universities in the country, a culture that some peoples transmitted to their children through lullabies such as the following: "Go to sleep, child, sleep now, buy cheap, sell expensive: make money"… "Go to sleep child, go to sleep now, buy cheap, sell high: make money"… etc. "
Successful businesses are those that, as Paul Zane Pilzer points out, in his book “The Next Trillion”, meet the five distinctive characteristics of penetrating industries: accessibility, legs to walk on their own, continuous consumption, universal application and low time. of consumption. It is not the consumption of the rich that makes great fortunes, but that of the masses.
Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Michel Dell and Doctor Simil himself know this well enough.
Our country needs to train more and more young people who understand from a Schumpeterian perspective that the world changes dramatically and that the rules of the knowledge-based and network-based economy are very different from those of a manufacturing-based economy.
That to be successful you must have at least the following basic attitudes and skills: vision and ambition, sales skills, discipline to manage time and money, ability to exploit new information and communication technologies, and mastery of at least two languages.
Today the means of production - as Marx called them - are once again available to everyone. Today, a guy with a brilliant idea, a couple of friends, and a little luck can make big money fast, just like the creator of Napster did with his 38 million visitors.
In his fantastic book "While the Future Reaches You," Juan Enríquez Cabot points out that rich countries no longer need large deposits of gold or diamonds, or large tracts of land; they need a government that provides economic and political stability, but above all they need smart and enterprising people.
We must understand this and act accordingly, let us not continue to train the unemployed, let us train young entrepreneurs with business vision and generators of the thousands and thousands of jobs that the country will require in the coming years.
The wealth of our nation will depend on our ability to form from now on the Slim, the Servitje, the Azcárraga, the Bailleres, the Zambrano of the 21st century.
