Why this current urgency about visions and entrepreneurship

Mar 18, 2013

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Why this
Current Urgency about Long Term Visions and Entrepreneurship — Global
Challenges and Opportunities

Information age economy will have most people working from their homes and mobiles through internet on a per project basis for different companies. They would be paid not because they have a CV containing a list of large number of degrees or diplomas, but they would be paid on the basis of their portfolio of past projects and their ability to complete the projects on time and within resource constraints. Even in Pakistan, there are already several organizations that allow their employees to work from their homes. This trend is going to explode exponentially. Very soon all services would be outsourced to off-site people or organizations. Information age requires people to be enterprising enough to find out opportunities where ever they exist after every few years or even months. This age requires people who are nimble enough and who can quickly learn new technologies and new ways of doing things. There will never be time enough go in to expensive training institutes and universities. People will have to learn quickly on their own. Therefore, self learning and intrinsic motivation is a very important part of the required skill set today.

Work in the information age will often be short term, contractual, assignment oriented and project based. Organization will not be mega organizations employing tens of thousands of full-time people. Organizations will be smaller, entrepreneurial and virtual. Rapid changes in technology will not allow companies to settle down in one particular area. A company will often have to reinvent itself and its work every few years. Such entrepreneurial organizations require self-employed people who are enterprising and who can look at the big picture and have the ability to solve real life problems and can quickly shift from one domain to another. Companies would require people who like to work on their own developing crucial new skills and new understandings to enable them to take advantage of the shifting scenarios.

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More work would revolve around entrepreneurial initiatives rather than settled jobs. This means that instead of waiting for someone to tell a person what to do, people would have to be enterprising enough to seek out new opportunities, explore new worlds, and to scan for new ways of doing things. What is required is the intellectual independence to think on one’s own.

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Strive for intrinsic motivation, self learning, and self-direction are the essential functions of long term visions and ability to take risks and not be discouraged by failures and adversity are the hallmarks of an entrepreneur who is forever on the lookout for new worlds.

To make sense of the rapid changes driving our life, we need long term visions that can provide us with anchor. To make world a safe place from exploitation, deterioration, climate change and global monopolistic control requires social and environmental leadership/entrepreneurship.

Apni dunya aap paida kar agar zindoan may hay
Sirr-e-Adam hay zameer-e-kun fakan hay zindagi! — Iqbal

This is the time of change. We have a small window of opportunity. While other forces are scrambling to understand and control the emerging environment, we need to proactively understand these changes and develop our long term visions and entrepreneurial ventures that can take us through this transition. Otherwise we would just be reacting to outside changes as we were doing through the industrial age and be always at least 50 years behind the others.

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To overcome exploitation and oppression from outside, we must develop our own consciousness of self and our own destiny in view of the aspirations of our religion, our history and our society. This self-consciousness must permeate our long term visions and should drive our entrepreneurial ventures to safeguard our environment and our humanity.

Dr Syed Irfan Hyder

[Talk at IBA, March 24, 2013]