Entrepreneur and corporate lawyer, Mr Elikem Nutifafa Kuenyehia, has
challenged Ghanaian entrepreneurs to deliberately build cultures that
support their specific visions, missions, and aspirations, as the surest
way to make their businesses outlive them.
He said that was the only way the country could move from the one-man
micro and small scale dominated entrepreneurial landscape to a
high-growth inter-generational businesses environment.
Mr Kuenyehia, the Managing Partner of Oxford and Beaumont Solicitors,
one of the fastest growing law firms in the country which consults both
locally and internationally, said the Ghanaian traditional culture was
so strong on stereotypes, imagery, values and norms that it often found
its way consciously or unconsciously into a business and became the
default entrepreneurial culture.
“My research showed that too many of our entrepreneurs limit themselves
by our cultural norms and barriers. This seems most peculiar given that
most of our cultural norms and values were developed when we were
predominantly a rural-based agrarian economy,” the corporate attorney
said in Accra last week when he took his turn to deliver the Graduate
School Prestigious Lecture at the Ghana Technology University.
Also an adjunct lecturer in Entrepreneurship at the Ghana Institute of
management and Public Administration (GIMPA), Elikem’s disappointment in
the absence of any local content entrepreneurial textbook motivated him
to research and write a comprehensive book on Ghanaian
entrepreneurship, Kuenyehia On Entrepreneurship, which has been touted
as the first local content textbook on Ghanaian entrepreneurship.
He said the starting point for every Ghanaian entrepreneur should be a
conversation with self that would enable them to identify their
strengths and weaknesses as well as sifting through which cultural norms
and values could be fused into the business culture.
“Part of that process of having a conversation with yourself and with
your team is to filter out which cultural norms you want to embrace and
which ones you’ll want to modify, as well as being clear which ones your
business will have no room for,” he stressed.
In recognition that culture was a key competitive advantage, the firm
had distilled it into a document, “the Oxford & Beaumont Way of
doing business”.
“We agree with Herb Kelleher the legendary founder of South West
Airlines that ‘Personality is strategy’ and like South West Airlines, we
are conscious that our brand is based as much on our personality and
spirit as it is on our technical legal excellence’
“We take inspiration from the Kofi Amoabengs, the Kofi Dadzies, the
Steve Jobs, the Richard Bransons, the Donald Trumps, the Herman
Chinery-Hesses etc and recognise that nobody ever built an insanely
great company by being ordinary or by obeying convention…at least not
yet,” he adds.
Some negative stereotypes
He cited some of the negative stereotypes and cultural values and how
they affected the individual and the organisational culture.
For instance, the notion that children must be seen not heard assumes
that children have nothing to contribute and this could translate into
leaving out junior level staff in decision making process at the
workplace. It doesn’t also encourage staff to develop their own unique
voices or stand up for their beliefs.
Again the pervasive ‘wait till you are older’ belief suggests a
mandatory waiting time before becoming a leader, while at the same time
very little is done to prepare the young for leadership.
It is also often the case that the Ghanaian culture associates age or
experience with wisdom or competence, suggesting that adults know best.
And suffice it to say that the ‘Obema Nsu’ maxim, to wit “a man does
not cry” in business connotes business people should be heartless and
that the field is reserved for only the hard core.
Mr Kuenyehia shared his personal experiences as well as others in the
business world to motivate the graduate class and challenge them to dare
to make a difference.
‘Leadership by listening’
He said ‘listening’ was an important tool entrepreneurs should embrace as part of their organisational culture.
“It’s the most powerful and certainly the most cost effective
management tool that I know of. To listen, you need to create a culture
of talking,” he advised.
He explained that although it was not easy to always listen when one
owned the dream and was the leader, “when you do listen, you really
create magic by crafting a strategy that’s unique to the people on the
bus and which no one else can replicate.”
Source;Ghanaweb
