A very big load of horse manure… and the next entrepreneurial revolution!

author: Dr. Ernesto Sirolli

Futurologists are people who speculate about the future. They have their own magazines, journals and conferences. One such conference was held in New York City in 1880 and the question that the futurologists addressed was the following: “What will New York City look like in 1980?” The consensus was that by year 1980 New York City would not exist anymore. The reason, according to the futurologists, was that to move the ever increasing population of New York in 100 years, 6,000,000 horses would have been needed, and the problems created by the manure would have been impossible to deal with!

The preferred mode of transportation had been, for centuries, the horse and the horse could not meet the requirements of the new cities anymore…it was, like today’s cars, too polluting. Yet the average person could not imagine a future without them and Henry Ford famously said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Instead by 1900 in the USA there were 1001 car manufacturing companies.

Small, tentative, entrepreneurial and private sector the pioneers of automotive transportation started a revolution in response to both the market needs and wants. In fact they started a revolution in advance of market wants.

Who are the entrepreneurs at work today? Where are they? What are they doing? Can we predict their appearance? Can we plan for them to appear when we want them to appear?

We believe that we are confronted by many “horse manure” problems in the world and that the need for original solutions will be addressed, right now, by entrepreneurs that are all but invisible not only to the general public but to many economic development practitioners as well.

What can be done to assist and expedite the work of entrepreneurs in our society? Old methods don’t work. Planning, for instance, is totally inadequate to the task as eloquently put by Peter Drucker who wrote: “Planning as the term is commonly understood is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy. Innovation does indeed need to be purposeful and entrepreneurship has to be managed. But innovation, almost by definition, has to be decentralized, ad hoc, autonomous, specific, and microeconomic. It had better start small tentative, flexible. Indeed, the opportunities for innovation are found, on the whole, only way down and close to events. (…) Innovative opportunities do not come with the tempest but with the rustling of the breeze.”

Facilitating Entrepreneurship

If entrepreneurs cannot be created nor planned what can the economic development professionals do? There are no doubts that the present economic and social crises will bring about a wave of innovations that are going to change, once again, the world we know. At the Sirolli Institute we believe that to be part of the change we have to be prepared to deal with entrepreneurs anywhere they may be, no matter how small, tentative or inexperienced.

Enterprise Facilitation is about capturing the passion, energy and imagination of our own people in our own communities and advocating for generalized entrepreneurship, no matter where it occurs.

It is also, and most importantly, about being prepared to offer, to a new generation of entrepreneurs, the management skills necessary to start AND sustain their ventures.

The economist and philosopher Ernest Schumacher once wrote: “I can't myself raise the winds that might blow us, or this ship, to a better world. But I can at least put up the sail so that, when the wind comes, I can catch it.”

We, economic development professionals, may not start the entrepreneurial revolution ourselves but at least we can prepare for it!

Since 1985 Ernesto Sirolli and the Sirolli Institute have worked with hundreds of communities worldwide to build their capacity to respond to entrepreneurs. We do so by working closely with the existing civic leadership and by training them to deliver this second leg of economic development. The Institute trains local Enterprise Facilitators by either establishing a new position or by re-training existing personnel to carry out the facilitation role.

Ernesto Sirolli on Africa and the first Enterprise Facilitation® project in the Democratic Republic of Congo

From 1972 to1977 I worked for an Italian Agency of Technical Cooperation with African Countries call ASIP. ASIP was one of a number of private sector Agencies created after the passage of the Pertini Act of Parliament of 1971. Under the new law young Italians were able to volunteer for two years of work in Africa in programs designed and endorsed by the Italian Foreign Office. The role of my Agency was initially a recruitment and training role for young volunteers but very soon we became involved in designing the Technical Cooperation programs in a number of African countries including Zambia, Kenya, Somalia, Algeria and Ivory Coast.

What I experienced visiting our projects and our volunteers in Africa during the five years period was devastating. The experience shaped both my personal and professional life and Enterprise Facilitation®, the local economic and community development approach that we have developed over the past 30 years, is the direct result of it.

We failed miserably in Africa .Every single project failed to sustain itself and often we damaged the local people by introducing practices and technologies that were antithetic to local mores and inappropriate to local needs.

We started Training Farms by African rivers full of Hippopotami, only to see the crops eaten as soon as ripe, and we convinced the native people to come to work by “motivating” them with increasingly damaging enticements; from sunglasses and watches to beer and whiskey.

The Foreign Office started a faculty of Medicine in Mogadishu. My Agency sourced the books in the USA, had them translated in Italian and then established Italian Classes for students who, being well educated middleclass Somalis, spoke English.

During the period I came in contact with many foreign Aid Agencies working in Africa and I came to believe that it wasn’t only us Italians blundering in Africa. It seemed to me that all of donor nations had their own ideas of what the African people needed and were doing their blundering best to impose it onto them.

We collectively failed, and some still fail in Africa, because we made plans in our own countries and then we superimposed our programs, technologies and practices to people who did not ask us for our help and who did not need what we thought they needed! Our programs were about us, not them and without buy in from the locals we were always reduced to reward, motivate, cajole and bully people to do what we wanted them to do.

Instead of helping people do what they passionately wanted to do we paid them to do what we wanted done; as soon as the money would end the program would disappear!


Enterprise Facilitation is born of two ideas:

• Only go where invited
• Help people do beautifully what they love doing

The idea of “only going where invited” came from understanding the radical work of the German born economist Ernest Schumacher who, after working in Africa and Bangladesh in the sixties wrote “Small is Beautiful- Economics as if People Matter” (1973).

He famously wrote: “If people do not wish to be helped, leave them alone. This should be the first principle of aid.” The implication is that we should only work with people who sincerely want to be helped and that we should wait to be invited before showing up with our own ideas.

“Helping people do beautifully what they love to do” comes from studying Positive Psychology also called “Growth”, “Third Force” or “Humanistic” psychology.

Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Adler, Fromm and a host of post Freudian and post behaviorist psychologists, hence Third Force, advocate a person centered, respectful approach to working with clients that is steeped in the belief that people are always striving for self improvement. The role of the “helper” is to “remove the obstacles” that are stopping the individual from “growing”. But the growth is unique to the individual and has to do with “their” needs and aspirations not the helper, the program managers, the Aid Agency or “society”.

The idea is that better individuals make for better husbands, wives, parents and citizens and that by facilitating personal growth, by helping people become proud of their achievements for instance, everybody benefits including the community at large.

Enterprise Facilitation is the result of thirty years community practice in facilitating the transformation of good business ideas into sustainable enterprises, but Facilitation, a la Carl Rogers, can be used in many other fields; from counseling to the delivery of education, social and health related services.

If invited we, Sirolli Institute International, a non per profit organization based in the USA and Canada, train the community leadership to employ an Enterprise Facilitator who, for free and in confidence, helps anybody who wants to transform a talent or a passion in a way to feed his/her family.

The first Enterprise Facilitator, Fabrice Ilunga Mujinga, was trained, and will continue to be trained, by the Sirolli Institute both long distance and during his regular visits to the USA. It is hoped that future projects in the African continent will be established with Assistance of our first African’ Enterprise Facilitator (who speaks French, English and Swahili on top of two local languages) as soon as he will have completed his training and at least one year practice in his community.

For more information please contact us: info@sirolli.com