Only entrepreneurs with multiple competences can survive 21st Century – NBCC
Adedapo Adelegan, president and chairman of council, Nigerian-British Chamber of Commerce, says only entrepreneurs with multiple competences can survive the 21st Century.
Adelegan defines entrepreneurs with multiple competences as those with core, pedigree and talent competences. Core competence involves skills acquired through training or studies, while pedigree competence involves skills acquired through parents. Similarly, talent competence means natural endowment or natural ability bestowed on people by God.
“When you have multiple competence, you have multiple streams of income,” says Adelegan at a post-AGM lecture in Lagos.
“Core competence is for the 21st Century, while multiple competence is for the 21st Century,” he adds.
According to him, this is an internet century, where jobs are being replaced by machines and robotics across the world, urging job seekers to look closely at opportunities that will enable them become employers of labour.
The majority of Nigerian youth think that job search begins immediately after studies. But the NBCC president thinks otherwise.
“When a century is 20 years to its end, monumental things happen,” he says.
“A couple of things happened between 1980 and 2000 that gave glimpses of what would happen in the 21st Century. The first is the Internet, which came in 1984. The major consequence for a developing economy is loss of jobs. This is a robotic century, a machine century,” he explains.
“Now is for customers, not jobs. Anybody beside or close to you now is a potential customer. So the focus of this century is how to generate customers, not jobs,” he further says.
He points out that the 21st Century is for ‘unreasonable people’, not for reasonable persons. He defines unreasonable people as those whom the world tries to adapt to, while reasonable ones are those who try to adapt to the world.
He notes that the 21st Century is for those who are willing to dare, not for cowards.