Financial Times

Our pioneering spirit is timid and vacuous
By Nous
Nearly 30 years have passed since we laid the cornerstone of economic liberty in this country. Yet nothing visible has yet emerged in the struggle to construct an entrepreneurial spirit comparable in courage, vision, and vitality to that of even a just emerging capitalistic society.

More alarmingly, there is much doubt whether the quality and character of our entrepreneurial spirit is even widely acknowledged to be the most formidable problem faced by us. The blame for this problem of vitality has always been allowed to fall squarely and routinely on the realm of politics.

As a nation we have blundered through politics of resentment, minority party power grabs, elitist duplicity and cowardice, and psychopathic terror campaigns. Yet we are forced to confront the fact that nations more problematic than ours and historical periods wrought with more uncertainty than those faced by us have witnessed, by the mere presence of a measure of economic liberty, the emergence of a vital entrepreneurial spirit.

In any event, politics cannot explain why, in the recent past, we have allowed the most significant business initiatives to come from business sources other than those of our own.

Now it would be of no economic significance if our top 10 corporations were to be displaced in their rankings by foreign entities. However, it would be of immense significance to us all, if the loss of that eminence were a result of wanting in our entrepreneurial spirit.

It is not that we lack an entrepreneurial sprit. But that the entrepreneurship we have is found to be timid and vacuous. In an attempt to drive that very point home, this opinion column some weeks ago had the leisure industry and Keels juxtaposed with Otara of Odel fame. Many in the leisure industry failed to be impressed with the fairness of the column.

Norman Gunewardene whose reminiscences on the genesis of resort-tourism and the making of his daughter Otara, penned in response to the column, and published in last Suday’s FT, found it flawed.

Industries need luck in their pioneers. For instance, the confectionery industry hit the jackpot early on in this meagre economy in the founder of Maliban.
He took a bold approach to value creation, which evinced a compelling urge on his part to pursue the ideal he had perceived with an artist’s insight and imagination.

His approach was extraordinary because in his day what was commonplace, not just here but in the entire region, was to take a crudely pragmatic, tentative, and makeshift approach to value creation. What pioneers do set inescapable limits, for good or ill, on what others could do. Sri Lanka’s foray into resort tourism took place at a time of growing socialistic practices and scarcity, fuelled as Norman Gunewardene observed by the Colonial business houses.

Yet it was also a time when the Colonial managers were in the evening of their days. Moreover, the forced indigenisation of management meant local managers had first to learn the ropes of entrepreneurship and it was sometime before they came to their own as entrepreneurs.

Therefore, that these pioneers should have been tentative in their approach is at least understandable. There was obviously more fear than passionate attachment to any imaginative possibilities.

To our prejudices, the biggest blunder that the resort pioneers made was that no thought apparently had been given to integrating the surrounding villages into the resort experience, so that the visitor’s experience might include a stylised or pleasant experience of village life. Instead of beautifying the surroundings, the seeds of antagonism clearly had been sown there.
To make progress and to do so even gradually, there must be an idea of progress.

To the casual observer, at least, at the bottom of the problem of progress is the question of how to give depth of character to the resort experience in this country, using the surrounding heritage of each resort.

Surely, it is not just a matter of stars and spas. There is perhaps no better measure of the tourism industry’s underlining attitude to progress than to see the influence it has exercised in uplifting, beautifying, and internationalising the goods and services supplied to them. The evidence, however, appears to point to a practice aimed at exacting a pound of flesh from the supplier. After all, cost-benefits matter, and tourism, with virtually no subsidies, has a greater claim to them.

The marvel of entrepreneurship is not found in the neurotic chase after pleasure, profit, and prestige. Rather it is found in the compelling urge to strive after beautiful things in anticipation of immortality, sustained by profits. Otara for sure is aflicted with that uniquely American disease, which the rest of the world abhors, known as the Jeffersonian synthesis of beauty and utility, of idealism and pragmatism.

Back to Business