Quote:
Originally Posted by SeijiSensei
Social psychologists like David McClelland wrote about the "need for achievement" as an important factor motivating entrepreneurial behavior. I see Japanese culture as built more on McClelland's "need for affiliation" which puts social order and harmony ahead of the pursuit of individual success. That's not the type of cultural setting where entrepreneurship thrives.
|
The problem with that line of thought is that it's a bit too culturally deterministic, not far from the idea that
Asians can't think, presumably because our cultures and traditions frown upon innovation and favours group harmony above all else. Anecdotal experience does indeed seem to show that East Asians (sorry, I'm not familiar enough with Indians to speak on their behalf) today are risk averse, but historical evidence would strongly suggest that this was not always the case.
Song China (960 to 1276), for example, was on the verge of an industrial revolution before the Jin and the Mongols conquered the country. And the mammoth encyclopedia
Science and Civilisation in China — British scientist and historian
Joseph Needham's magnum opus — clearly shows that there was no lack of scientific curiosity and innovation in supposedly repressive Confucian China.
Moreover, if we were to look at the even bigger picture, you'd soon see that practically every other country in the world is no match for the United States when it comes to modern entrepreneurship. That would immediately suggest to me that, rather than there being something inherently wrong in Japan (or elsewhere, for that matter), there is rather something particularly fortuitous about conditions in the US that encourages BIG BUSINESS entrepreneurship.
And, if you ask me, it's simply because there is no other country in the world at the moment where the best brains are easily matched with the deepest pockets.
Steve Jobs had a better-than-average chance — compared with his contemporaries anywhere else in the world — of getting his ideas off the drawing board because he could easily find venture capitalists or angel investors to fund his craziest (but wildly successful) ideas. Few other places in the world, not even London, can boast the kind of high-risk-superb-returns venture-capital ecosystem present in Silicon Valley.
And then, there is the sheer size of the US economy. Japan was just until recently the second-largest economy in the world, with a
GDP of US$5 trillion. By comparison, the US economy is valued at US$15 trillion, three times that of Japan's. Practically speaking, it's far easier to scale up a business in the US than anywhere else in the world. Hence, again, I would say that Steve Jobs enjoyed a better-than-average chance at mega business success than his contemporaries in other countries.
All that aside, if we move away from the idea of an entrepreneur as a mega-hit success like Jobs, you'd probably see that entrepreneurship is not really "dead" in places like Japan, or even in Singapore, another country that suffers periodic angst over the seeming lack of entrepreneurship.
Yet, even here, among my closest circle of friends, three of them are businessman, out of which two of them are already well on the way towards being self-made millionaires. Of these two, the first one originally secured the local franchise for an international modelling agency, then used the contacts he built up over the years to establish his own luxury events-management business. Having all but clinched the account of every major luxury brand in Singapore, he then branched into a new business, setting up private schools in China. The second friend built his own jobs-recruitment portal from his bedroom back in 2000, and grew that business over 10 years, making it the third-largest company of its kind in Singapore. His company was just this month acquired by a far larger American business, suddenly giving him a brand new reach across the entire South-east Asian region.
As for the third friend, his idea hasn't quite hit the big jackpot yet, but his food-review portal is already by far the most recognised brand of its type in Singapore. All he needs now is a "killer app" to turn a great idea into a steady flow of cash, and he'd be a made man.
Meeting such friends for dinner or supper every now and then often leaves me privately depressed. It makes me feel like a hopeless underachiever.
But, back to the original point, nah, I can't fully agree that culture is what's holding back Japanese entrepreneurship. It is possibly
a contributing factor, but not the only one, nor even a particularly crucial one.
I mean, think about it: almost all the anime studios you can think of are self-started businesses. That's entrepreneurship! Granted, not on the same scale or even in the same universe as Apple's, but still healthy entrepreneurship all the same, albeit on the mom-and-pop, small-business level.