Management
Issue No. 51 - February/March 2010
How entrepreneurship changes lives
Our Top 100 SA Companies Index guest speaker, David Bussau of Opportunity International, is a celebrated champion of microfinance who is doing more than perhaps any other Australian to lift people of the third world out of poverty.
As we learned at the Top 100 luncheon, David is achieving this by encouraging and supporting entrepreneurship. But how does he spot a likely, and worthy, entrepreneur living in an alien culture? His list of telltale signs offers a useful scorecard for any manager looking to encourage staff initiative.
“Firstly, let me state that the word ‘entrepreneur’ has been badly maligned in the past and even contemporary usage is excessively broad,” David says. “The term is often used by people who have no business acumen or commercial nous and is used to describe activities that are creative and innovative, but have no marketplace relevance.
“In the marketplace context I would describe an entrepreneur as someone who is able to take a business concept and create an enterprise of significant worth. This entails being a risk-taker and generally the nature of the person is to be impetuous and spontaneous.
“My favourite expression of a business entrepreneur is someone who uses the 4 P’s - ie see Potential, buy Potential, build Potential and sell Potential. To do this the entrepreneur becomes vulnerable and is highly leveraged but makes substantial net profit on the upswing.”
Local knowledge is key to judging whet...
