TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Believe it or not, Javanese values breed innovation
Having espoused values is not enough to mobilize a country to reach a greater cause; it needs to be translated into muscle memory and a mental model.
Change Size
Illustration of entrepreneurship. (Shutterstock/Igisheva Maria)
R
ecruitment is the key to achieving a strong fit in corporate culture. Successful companies strive to apply a stringent process in recruitment using many available tools. Accelerators, incubators and bootcamps with proven successful track records are methods believed to predict entrepreneurial success for candidates. “Strengthfinder” and the Big Five Personality Dimensions Test Plus Individual Interview are commonly used in searching for candidates’ exposure to entrepreneurship in their adolescence.
The latter provides five traits to observe: Openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. It is accepted that the scores of agreeableness and neuroticism among entrepreneurs are significantly lower than the scores among managers. On the other hand, the score of openness to experience and conscientiousness among entrepreneurs are significantly higher than in managers. Interestingly, the score of extraversion suggests that entrepreneurs do not differ from managers on this dimension of personality.
During my four years of experiments, recruiting and co-learning with proto-entrepreneurs, I found fewer than 2 percent end up becoming innovation-driven entrepreneurs and 5 percent choose to become small, medium enterprise (SME) entrepreneurs. Despite those small numbers, when the intangible entrepreneurial thinking is measured, 80 percent of them graduate with more entrepreneurial thinking than they had before.
It is worth noting if no recruitment criteria are applied, the population will comprise 93 percent who work in their linear industry of study, 6 percent wish to enter state enterprises and only 1 percent wish to become entrepreneurs. Reality checks then suggest that those proto-entrepreneurs account for fewer than 2.5 percent of generation Z and millennials who pursue their studies in state universities.
Those are unpleasant numbers and brutal facts.
The good men and women who have promised to create hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs per year in a province or thousands of entrepreneurs per year in a large university in this country must humbly learn from Adm. Stockdale “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end, which you can never afford to lose, with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be”.
Just like in the development of any other skills and talents, for example in performance and creative industry, or sport, the training starts at the early stages of life, as young as in the womb. Entrepreneurs must undergo a long, robust, stringent curriculum of learning, which occupies most of their brains before finally creating a neuron pathway in their brain for the rest of their lives.
