Korean way to go for entrepreneurs
TOP TIPS: We can learn much from South Korea’s budding entrepreneurs who realise success doesn’t come easy
MALAYSIANS are keen to learn from the Korean experience in nurturing its budding entrepreneurs to succeed globally. Take a leaf from current offerings via the KBS (Korean Broadcasting Services) world programmes made available on Astro and try and understand some of the messages they want to pass on to viewers.
Much thought and energy have gone into the making of such excellent documentaries. Their main focus is to highlight goals and directions that have propelled the respective entrepreneurs to become world-class entrepreneurs.
Each story tells of the entrepreneur's early struggles to overcome poverty, failures, discrimination, dislocations and uprootedness and, above all, the willingness to start all over again in new and strange surrounding. Many even have to go abroad to seek new opportunities. There is no fixed formula to follow and not a single model to be embraced.
Success as it were never came easy. Even in their adopted countries, in the United States, Vietnam and the Philippines, they had to start small and slowly "learn the ropes" before really hitting the "home runs" and climbing the ladder of wealth and public recognition. In between, the Korean way seemed to suggest several truths of entrepreneurship that are discussed below.
First, we need to think that we are always at the centre of the world. From this perspective, said one of the entrepreneurs who was presented, we will be able to see things more differently. This is a value-judgment on a truism that has been heard many times over. It refers to the human habit to speak with authority only from a position of some strength. In management it is known as the principle of "where you sit is where you stand". Being at the centre of the action, it is believed, gives one flexibility of thought, clarity of vision and intensity of energy in making decisions.
Second, Koreans are always conscious about the need to pay up on all debts, more so the indirect ones. In fact, this message has been drummed in for viewers in many instances throughout each of the programmes.
In one of the segments, a successful Korean entrepreneur based in the Philippines said that he was moved into action by the thought that what he was doing and the reason he had done it was more an attempt to pay back in other ways all the good things that have been done for Koreans by the so-called "blue-eyed people" (meaning Americans after the World War 2 who helped rebuild the country).
In other words, he had found the motivation to move him forward and in this case it has been the debt of gratitude he felt for the American gesture. Now he is paying those "considered" debts by helping to make others successful like him too.
Third, an element of success for many Koreans abroad has been the strong belief in the concept of sharing what you know with others. This was the truth underlined in another segment involving the Korean-inspired idea behind the setting up of restaurants in Hanoi and other countries in the region known as Koto.
The "Know-One-Teach-One" (Koto) has enabled the entrepreneur to select displaced and underprivileged children in various cities in the countries concerned.
They were given training and business skills to manage the Koto restaurants.
Here, the experience of entrepreneurship has been one of selfless sharing of knowledge with another in order to bring up another and make them more successful than you.
All the three truths discussed above -- be in the centre of the action, repay your debts and share your knowledge -- are universally accepted business practices.
They have been made into powerful motivational factors for excellence by many entrepreneurs. When applied by the Koreans and assumed as part of their national experience, these truths and others have become the essential elements of the Korean way to global success
Source : New Straits Times
Date : 26 June 2013
Today's Pick (01/07/13/1015/1040)
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