THE ART OF TURNING GARBAGE INTO GOLD

A true entrepreneur is the man who can transform garbage into gold—somebody who sees an opportunity and has the creativity to pursue it. Not monetary capital, Indonesia needs human capital— creativity and innovation—whereby our country will create its own opportunities. Creative innovation should aim beyond making a millionaire of the inventor. It should hold community needs paramount. Dr Ciputra suggests that Indonesia cannot wait for chances to come this way; it’s time to create them.

Able to see but not to understand. Able to understand but not to act. This characterizes our handling of Indonesian laborers abused and tortured in foreign countries. Dr Ciputra is both apprehensive and critical of Indonesian reaction to this ongoing tragedy and national embarrassment.

He emphasized that protests to Malaysia, or other country using Indonesian laborers, are futile. The core problem is our duty to abolish the deeper roots - which lie in Indonesia. Why are so many destitute Indonesians forced to other countries to find a job? Why are we so encumbered by debt that Indonesia cannot afford to invest to advance its own people’s prosperity?

An honest and genuine answer includes admitting failure to build a prosperous Indonesia despite 64 years of independence. Although Dr Ciputra has been involved with education for 40 years, he realizes that education alone is not enough.

“I thought education could solve poverty, one of Indonesia’s biggest problems. That’s partially true – only minor problems have been redressed through education,” Dr Ciputra explains.

He suggests that the roots of our poverty and lack of jobs can be traced to a lack of entrepreneurship. Indonesian people cannot “transform garbage to gold” because Indonesian education only creates worker scholars – jobseeker scholars.

It’s not just the educators fault. Family and community also contribute significantly in molding a generation that lacks entrepreneurship. Most Indonesian parents encourage their children to become an employee. Teachers and lecturers educate children to be doctors, lawyers, accountants, professors, etc. The community teaches children that having a good job equates with being an employee of a large company.

“Almost none of our children have been educated to become entrepreneurs,” Dr Ciputra says.

Indonesian people have mistakenly equated entrepreneurship with mere trading – an offshoot of entrepreneurship. Thus, many “entrepreneurial” training exercises only instruct in the basics of trading.

True entrepreneurship involves creating opportunity, innovation, and taking calculated risks. Entrepreneurship doesn’t only benefit business; government, academicians, and community leaders should all deploy it.

Under colonization, we were trained into a colonized mentality. Regrettably, this mentality has outlived winning our independence. There’s no lack of will to work creatively, just an unfamiliarity with it.

Dr Ciputra feels that discipline, morals and ethics – the old and established pillars of education – remain relevant to educating today’s generation. These pillars need only to be upgraded to better accommodate more creative and innovative education, and to reduce emphasis on rote memorizing.

“How many lessons that we memorized do we still remember? None! Hence, we should not waste too much of our brain’s capacity on memorizing. We need to focus it more on creativity and innovation,” Dr Ciputra explains.

According to psychologist David McClelland, to be considered a developed country, a country should count at least 2 percent among its population as entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, among 220 million Indonesian citizens, we can only find 0.18 percent who can be called entrepreneurs – around 400,000.

Education cannot guarantee children an occupation. Every year, Indonesia turns out 300,000 new graduates, and by the end of 2008, 1.1 million university graduates were still unemployed.

This indicates that we lack either job opportunities or scholastic competence. If most of us were able to provide ourselves with our own job, and eventually create one more, the problem would be solved.

Education should train children with the competence to create their own job. This job of educators should involve parents and community in a combined commitment to equip children with entrepreneurial competence.

Dr Ciputra highlights Peter Drucker’s reflection that entrepreneurship can be learned. It is not a mere natural talent nor “fate”. He enthusiastically spreads his messages about entrepreneurship throughout Indonesia. He pushes schools to introduce entrepreneurial studies on their curricula.

Namibia is poorer than Indonesia, but trains entrepreneurship in its school from the 8th grade. Will we wait until our foreign workers and laborers are heading for Namibia to find jobs before we make our own commitment to train our children in entrepreneurship? “The lessons of entrepreneurship are rapidly spreading through the world. Indonesia needs more than a morning wakeup call, we should already be bathed, dressed, fed and in action!” he affirms. Dr Ciputra emphasized the need for a drastic mental transformation among Indonesians – especially our youth. Young minds must be open to consideration of the job-creator option as a priority over the job-seeker option.

Parents shouldn’t just raise children to become scholars. Their children’s skill should have higher priority. The principle rule of entrepreneurship is to be able to think and act “out of the box” within the boundaries of ethics and law. We need to feel free to be creative and innovative.

Lester Thurow, a professor of management and economics at MIT for 30 years, says “without entrepreneurs, economies become poor and weak. The old will not exist and the new cannot enter”.

Dr Ciputra dreams that, in 25 years, Indonesia may boast entrepreneurs from Sabang to Merauke, from across the full spectrum of economic, cultural, educational, social, and ethnic backgrounds. CA