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BOOK EXTRACT: Business flags from Clem Sunter

Famous scenario planner Clem Sunter provides a diverse set of flags to watch in the world at large as well as in South Africa in his brand new book. It is meant to be an aid to help businesses or organisations become leaders in anticipating our fast-changing times.

Below is an extract from Flagwatching: How a fox decodes the future, by Clem Sunter and published by Tafelberg.

Entrepreneurial spark

This flag is the one that changes the fortunes of nations the most. When I facilitate a strategy session in London, I sometimes ask the participants who put the ‘great’ into Great Britain. The answer I most often get is Queen Victoria. I say: “No, she was a consequence, not a cause.” The people who made Great Britain great were all those humble scientists and entrepreneurs who invented among other things the steam engine, the flying shuttle and the spinning jenny and who hailed from Scotland, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool.

They ushered in the Industrial Revolution in the second half of the 1700s which made Great Britain the richest nation on Earth by the 1850s, thus permitting Queen Victoria to rule so regally.

Look at the difference between North Korea and South Korea. Same people, same historic culture but South Korea’s open democracy nurtured the entrepreneurs who created new car companies and Samsung. North Korea, otherwise known as the ‘Hermit Kingdom’, has done nothing except manufacture a nuclear weapon.

America understands all this. In order to stay the Number One economy on the planet, it knows that every generation
has to produce hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs among which are world-beaters like Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and now South-African born Elon Musk.

Musk began with developing Zip2 and PayPal as two popular internet sites; then founded SpaceX to manufacture space launch vehicles and reduce the cost of space travel for human beings; then expanded Tesla Motors into a leading maker of electric cars; then helped his cousins to establish SolarCity with the intention of making it one of the largest solar plants in the world. He has also laid the conceptual foundation for a Hyperloop train system which will reduce the travelling time between Los Angeles and San Francisco to 35 minutes.

The train would be powered by linear induction motors and ride on an air cushion in a reduced pressure tube. It could thereby travel at speeds of around 1 000 kilometres per hour.

Lastly, he has just unveiled a new lithium-ion battery to hang on your wall to power your home. In short, he is an entrepreneurial genius with a real talent for monetising scientific advances. Take a bow, Waterkloof House Preparatory School and Pretoria Boys High School where he was educated before leaving for Canada and then America.

South Africa has an ambivalent attitude towards entrepreneurs, even though its own destiny was transformed by all those diggers who swarmed to Kimberley for diamonds and the Witwatersrand for gold. The profit motive is reckoned by some people of left-wing persuasion to be evil. I always say to anybody who feels this way in the public sector that they draw a salary at the end of the month whereas an entrepreneur has to make a profit to put bread on the table. Family businesses are the same, even collectives.

One foreign investor told me the other day that they roll out the red carpet for him in other countries. In South Africa, they roll out the red tape! Bureaucracy here really cramps the style of entrepreneurs. One only has to think of what the new visa regulations have done to tourism. I would like our President, Jacob Zuma, to change the mantra from ‘we need to create five million jobs by 2020’ to ‘we need to create one million new enterprises by 2020’. Given the flag around the changing nature of work, it is the only way to create five million jobs. Moreover, this is the best way to produce the 100 black industrialists that the government profoundly wishes to do as one of the features of the developmental state.

The irony is that the people who have done spectacularly well since 1994 in the entrepreneurial category are the Afrikaners. Necessity is the mother of invention because all their career entitlements fell away in that year. This should make one pause over the sense of entitlement fostered by black economic empowerment programmes, which admittedly are now broad-based. One does not want to undermine the creation of new black entrepreneurs. Much more important is to pull down the barriers which face many township entrepreneurs at the moment and which prevent them from spreading their wings in the mainstream economy.

Before concluding this section, it would be remiss of me not to mention Siyabulela Xuza who hails from the Eastern Cape. He has had a minor planet named after him by the MIT Lincoln Laboratory in America for the advances he has made in homemade rocket fuel. After studying at Harvard University, he is now back in South Africa looking at ways of storing energy in micro fuel cells. I want the climate for him, and all the bright South African inventors, to be one that spurs them to turn their ideas into successful business ventures.

Our own industrial revolution will only happen under these circumstances.

* The book, which is being published on Monday November 16, is available from the Amazononline book store.

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