Bangladeshi entrepreneurs have played a significant role in shaping the country’s economy over the past few decades. This has resulted in the rapid growth of the country’s economy, mainly by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and entrepreneurs.
The private sector is now a new driver of development. And it is from this private sector that true entrepreneurs arise.
Due to businesspeople joining politics and dominating Parliament, there is a wide range of criticism.
There is hardly any study on the profession of the members of Parliament to know their social, financial and political background since entrepreneurs are entering into politics and many politicians are also joining business.
In Bangladesh, there are three types of entrepreneurs: poor rural women entrepreneurs struggling to improve the economic position of their households with the support of non-governmental organisation (NGO), struggling business owners growing small businesses, and urban creative youth entrepreneurs with ICT ventures.
Over the past 5 decades, ownership has started shifting to second generations and investment in innovative and technology-based businesses.
The literature on entrepreneurship tries to give stories of successful entrepreneurs as poor, illiterate, hard-working common people. They become successful with hard work and skills, etc. The five ‘macro traits’ that cover a distinct set of characteristics of an entrepreneur are:
- Openness to experience: describes the breadth, depth, originality, and complexity of an individual’s mental and experimental life
- Conscientiousness: describes socially prescribed impulse control that facilitates task- and goal-orientated behaviour
- Extraversion: implies an energetic approach toward the social and material world and includes traits such as sociability, activity, assertiveness, and positive emotionality
- Agreeableness: contrasts a prosocial and communal orientation toward others with antagonism and includes traits such as altruism, tender-mindedness, trust, and modesty
- Neuroticism: contrasts emotional stability and even-temperedness with negative emotionality, such as feeling anxious, nervous, sad, and tense
An entrepreneur really is more than a business owner.
An entrepreneur is an individual who entrenches or establishes a new business by bringing innovation, bearing most of the risks, and then enjoying rewards. An entrepreneur is now an ‘agent of change,’ a new kind of citizen whose role is to reframe dissatisfaction and poverty into opportunities for their backers.
International Labour Organisation (ILO) identifies the entrepreneur with a set of characteristics, including risk-taking, leadership, originality, self-confidence, being result-oriented, and future-oriented.
On the other hand, entrepreneurship blends the capacity for innovation, investment, and expansion in productivity. Qualities of an entrepreneur result in terms of entrepreneurship.
Schumpeter defines entrepreneurship as purposeful and systematic inventiveness. Entrepreneurship as a creative activity leads an entrepreneur to innovate and introduce something new in society.
A link between entrepreneurial ambition and personality characteristics, including self-confidence, risk-taking capacity, accomplishment needs, and perceived control, influences entrepreneurial decisions.
On the other hand, a person is surrounded by the diversity of social, cultural, socioeconomic, governmental, demographic, and technical influences. As a result, such situational elements can be separated from personal attributes.
Some situational factors also influence the preference for entrepreneurial intentions.
The determinants of entrepreneurship development are constructed along the socioeconomic conditions of a state. According to the Global Entrepreneurial Monitor (Global Entrepreneurship Report, 2011), 24% of Bangladeshi young men can start a business, while 43% in Pakistan, 31% in Malaysia, and 42% in Turkey.
The success rate is very low. Successful entrepreneurs distinguish themselves from unsuccessful entrepreneurs by interacting with their internal and external loci of control.
Entrepreneurship development is the process of integrating all the entrepreneurial qualities- confidence, commitment, hard work, flexibility, persistence, independence, determination, initiative, versatility, perceptiveness, leadership, innovation, profit orientation, foresight, creativity.
Some of them are professional entrepreneurs and remain in the profession for their entire life and some partially retire at one point and they are lifestyle entrepreneurs.
A lifestyle entrepreneur is a person who creates a business with the purpose of altering their personal lifestyle. The choice is not solely about making more money. In fact, many lifestyle entrepreneurs make less money for the first few years than they did working in a ‘conventional’ job.
A lifestyle entrepreneur focuses more on the life rewards (rather than the monetary rewards) provided to those who have a true passion for their work and enjoy what they are doing.
These life rewards include: Autonomy, Fun, Freedom, Time, Flexibility, Happiness. They work for a major part of their life but go for partial, so called retirement’. Some of these lifestyle entrepreneurs join politics and make a fortune out of business from government contracts.
Some of these lifestyle entrepreneurs join the leadership of different trade associations and/or social clubs. These lifestyle businessmen use the club and organize parties with expensive food and other entertainment. They frequently go abroad for tourism and medical treatment, etc.
The transformation in their class within one generation has created a mixed culture of the middle class and upper class of the businesspeople in language, behaviour, and other aspects.
The reasons for retiring from full-time businessperson to lifestyle businessperson are due to the lower social status of the entrepreneurs and the lack of recognition of their innovation and creation.
Our society has a very negative impression about business and is hardly recognised as good members of society, although their entrepreneurship is the act of self-motivation, originality, resourcefulness, imagination, and ingenuity in setting up a new venture in a society with uncertainty.
Sometimes, they are recognised for wealth, and therefore they try to show up the wealth at the first opportunity to get some recognition.
There is an example of how the businesspersons are deprived of due recognition. The export of ready-made garments is the lifeline of the economy along with Agriculture and remittances from expatriates.
This change maker export business was started by two businesspersons in 1977, Mr Zakaria Bhuiyan, a typewriter mechanic and owner of Jewel Garment Ltd for export against Telegraphic transfer of funds to France, and Reaz Uddin Ahmed, the owner of Reaz Garment Ltd in New Market and started export against L/c to Germany.
On the other hand, Mr Nurul Qader started his Desh Garment Ltd in 1981 and has given a new dimension to RMG. He has convinced the government to allow bond facilities and back-to-back L/c for the import of raw materials.
The nation has recognized only Mr Nurul Qader, a bureaucrat, as the founder of RMG exports, ignoring the contribution of two businesspeople.
The family and society encourage children to be ‘Doctors or engineers’, and College Universities encourage them to be BCS officers, and the new generation of private universities teaches students to be executives of Cell phone companies.
The motivation to be a business entrepreneur is a very exceptional incident. These businesspeople change their lifestyle and try to become the ‘real elite’ of society due to their life experience as businessperson. They try to speak, dress and think like other professionals.
The author is CEO of Bangla Chemical & Legal Economist. E-mail: [email protected].
