SME failure due to paradox of Originality and Success

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man- George Bernard Shaw

Whenever I travel through most African countryside and even cities its often interesting seeing those one roomed shops or bandas spread out near the road side selling almost identical stuff be it artifacts or fruits and vegetables and after a year or so they are abandoned. This often gives a snapshot of the failure rate of African SMEs; for example in Kenya over 60% of SMEs fail to reach their third birthday.

Question I often ask myself; is creativity in business a factor of education, natural talent and gifts or can it be learnt?. Why is it that African enterprises are involved less in value creation though originality and more on purchasing cheap to resell at a mark up.

To try answer these questions we need to reflect on the question of originality from the lenses of social orientation and childhood influences In the African context. Growing up in Nairobi and having gone through the Kenyan public education system there were often two categories of students; the geniuses and the rest of us.

The geniuses were the teachers favorites and were prophesied to transform the nation as business leaders, entrepreneurs, CEOs you name it. The genius kids were not only the darling of teachers but society as a whole; most kids would often be reminded to perfume as well as so and so who were used as the SI unit.

A particular group of students were the non conformist or rebels as we liked to call them; most of whom we later discovered were creative’s but were branded as trouble makers because they would not follow the laid down education protocol.

Recent psychological studies have shown that there is no correlation between formal educationally gifted children and influential transformative adults. Although such gifted children are talented and ambitious they most likely become good at learning fast and consuming existing knowledge and rarely are involved in insight production a situation direly reflected by University lectures in Africa who focus on teaching regurgitated stuff over research.

These gifted children just like the average rest of us are short circuited from exponential creativity and originality in all spheres of society more so business by the need for tangible achievement fuelled by mundane societal conformance pressure.

Studies have shown that when the need for achievement is high; originality takes a back burner. The more African society place premium value on achievement evidenced with certificates, money and wealth the more entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs dread failure.

Instead of aiming for unique and transformative accomplishment often riddled with great risk the desire for success leads most of us to strive for guaranteed success which often mean accepting status quo, maintaining stability and achieving minimum acceptable goals of food, shelter and clothing.