Entrepreneur

An entrepreneur is a person dedicated to leveraging resources of one kind or another (or set of kinds) and first-order opportunities in order to create or expand second-order opportunities for value-addition or value-creation.

'Resources' in the sense used here include financial or physical or social or cultural capital, skills, talent, drive, insight, time space/geographies and other assets. 'First-order opportunities' refers to initial opportunities which, if seen and seized, lead to other opportunities. Thus, the opportunity to export oil (itself the result of successful exploration and the subsequent building of the requisite infrastructure and legal framework) avails the added opportunity to create wealth and jobs, and improve the general quality of life. Second-order opportunities are thus the added opportunities -- such as creating jobs, making a profit, enhancing community welfare, and being upwardly mobile.

Second-order opportunities may be, and indeed typically are, considered the "ultimate goals." And so be it. As I have said elsewhere, "You cannot have fruit if you don't grow fruit trees" -- unless, of course, someone gives or 'loses' or sells it to you, But what lies past the second order? That is, how are we to characterize third-order opportunities and those cascading beyond? The third-order, I would like to argue, is the beginning of self-creation and self-propagation; the beginning, in other words, of self-creating and self-replicating opportunities, and even resources.

That is the evolving idea I had in mind when I recently posed this crude CAT question to my Work and Industry class:

“When the ingenuity of well-educated or well-trained minds collides with the ‘hidden’ potentialities of an inter-connected world, the result is bound to be a wealth of self-creating jobs” Critically discuss this proposition, in terms of scholarly conversations about job-creation, wage-employment  and self-employment.

All in all, then, an entrepreneur -- when truly successful (and sometimes/conceivably even in failure) -- is a catalyst for civilization's self-replication and evolution in any field of human endeavor, and in any of society's ecologies of presence.


Notes: 1. Inferences relevant to this conversation can be derived from this useful text: Click Here  
           2. You may also want to read this text, and check the references .
           3. I find the imagery of the "sphinx" hexiamond to be an intriguing way to interrogate self-replication

Updated: May 22-23, 2013

Universities Act 2012: Toward Quality Varsity Education in Kenya

An online article posted in Daily Nation on January 21, 2013, and titled  "New Law Wants Varsities to Walk the Quality Talk" (To read, click here), observed that several universities in Kenya have recently been bragging about their quality-based ISO certification. However, a new law to govern the operations and steer the standards of Kenya's public universities -- Universities Act 2012 -- was recently enacted, and was to be implemented under the auspices of the Commission for University Education (CUE), successor to the Commission for Higher Education (CHE). Quality is the key word at CUE, and the newly appointed Head, himself a university don of long standing, could not during an interview say enough about quality as the over-riding criterion of excellence in Kenya's higher education. And yet, I am thinking, quality is a vexed concept, being easier to talk about from a distance than to implement in any comprehensive way, and to assure in the trenches. I am sensing that comments already made in response to the article -- comments such as by TumuTumu, Mheshimiwa and Kenya Yetu -- have hit the nail on the head in substantial measure. 

Quality and standards are the driving concerns in the online article as well. So is walking the talk. However, there is room to make a few other observations, fill a few gaps, as follows:

CUE must go beyond platitudes if it is to make a difference in quality assurance. In the first place, it has to define quality in measurable and, importantly, consequential ways. I don't think KEBS has the standards to make our universities great. It can of course create them in proper consultation with those who operate exactly where the rubber meets the road -- the lecturers and researchers (though, indeed, a disappointing number of lecturers have deeply ingrained habits which exacerbate the rot). 

The main point, however, is that you cannot demand quality on a higher plane if you don't have (or squander in administrative excess and impunity) the financial, material and technical resources required to realize the desired quality. Exceptional or just good lecturers, as human resources, are, up to a point, a component of these resources that must be sourced. They cannot procure, retain, remunerate and motivate themselves -- someone else must do so, and not grudgingly -- in an environment which no one seems to tend with any healthy passion. There's too much inbreeding at our universities. Too much, and in some instances growing, ethnicity -- and even clanism and cronyism.

You cannot have fruit if you don't grow fruit trees, or have procurement power. When all else is said and done, the Achilles' Heel of our higher education is that we have not closed the loop in PhD training, in two ways: (a) We are not training enough based on our own priorities and resources (no sovereignty here) to meet present needs and replace those we lose to attrition of one kind or another; (b) Too many of the few we train we train locally -- and so under-expose intellectually/scholastically and experientially, and so condemn to what may turn out to be, in quality terms, a downward spiral toward a mediocrity we may be too afraid to acknowledge. 

It is a joke for our universities, which are supposed to be universal institutions, to call themselves world class when you have to search and search and not find find any world-class academics from other places willing to join us full-time.

Decision-Making and Response in Emergency Situations

It is not just the rapidity of decision-making that determines the effectiveness of response to emergency (or disaster) situations., far from it. Two related factors are just as important, if not more so. These are: (a) the ready availability of response resources (skilled responders and materiel, as a minimum); and, (b) the speed, as well as the logistical robustness and flexibility, with which the responders and the materiel can be mobilized and delivered. In the absence of the said resources and logistical capability, rapid decision-making systems will appear out of place and ineffectual..