The Thompson Chamber of Commerce is bringing in Italian-born community economic development "enterprise facilitator" Ernesto Sirolli, founder of both the enterprise facilitation concept and the Sirolli Institute in Sacramento, Calif. as the keynote speaker Sept. 19 for what is being billed as "Northern Business Week."
"Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!" Sirolli has famously said many times. "In 1975 I read Small is Beautiful by Ernest Schumacher. He was an economist who was critical of the Western approach to development in the Third World and he proposed a different approach known as 'intermediate technology.'
"I was intrigued by his approach but what truly inspired me was something he wrote: 'If people do not wish to be helped, leave them alone. This should be the first principle of aid,'" Sirolli said.
It's not clear yet how much of the tab the chamber will be on the hook for as Sirolli will be speaking to other local organizations as well over several days, but the supper at the Juniper Centre should gross them somewhere between $10,800 and $13,500 at $60-a-plate for members and $75 for non-members, if it sells out at 180 guests, which it should easily. He will also be speaking in Saskatchewan.
While the week used to coincide locally with national Small Business Week the third week in October annually, and which began in 1979 at Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) branches in the Lower Fraser Valley of British Columbia, it has moved around here a bit in recent years depending on the availability of guest keynote speakers.
Sirolli was in Manitoba in May as a keynote speaker at the Vision Quest Conference & Trade Show where some Thompsonites heard his presentation at that time.
His visit this time comes as local businesses stand at a crossroads as the implementation work coming out of almost 2 1/2 years of Thompson Economic Development Group (TEDWG) meetings, dating back to May 18, 2011 and resulting from Vale's decision six months earlier on Nov. 17, 2010 to close its surface smelter and refinery operations here in 2015, needs to begin in earnest. Vale paid out $2.5 million in cash over the 2 1/2 -year period to fund TEDWG, mainly using Toronto-based consultants rePlan, a Canadian firm with decades of experience helping resource-based companies and communities adapt to change, and their subcontractors, such as Heather Buttrum and Jim McGimpsey of Hamilton, Ont.-based On Three Communication, who worked on the soon-to-be-rolled-out "place branding initiative." Place branding refers to how people view a place based on the experience they have had with it and involves using traditional marketing and branding techniques to try to help communities and regions improve their image.
Efforts continue to be made to bring together in economic development initiatives and partnerships the local private sector - both large and small employers - and the Thompson Chamber of Commerce and aboriginal organizations, in particular Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak Inc. (MKO), a non-profit, political advocacy organization that has represented 30 First Nation communities in Northern Manitoba since 1981.
Sirolli received his Laurea di Dottore in political science from Rome University in 1976 and a PhD from Murdoch University in Perth in Western Australia in 2004. In 1995, he founded the Sirolli Institute, a Sacramento, California-based non-profit organization that teaches participants how they might successfully establish and maintain "enterprise facilitation" projects in their community.
"There is a problem with community meetings. Entrepreneurs never come. And they never tell you either in a pubic meeting what they want to do with their own money the smartest people in your community, you don't even know, because they don't come to your public meetings," Sirolli said last Sept. 1 at the Aurora Centre for the Performing Arts in Christchurch, New Zealand, during a TEDxChristchurch talk. "Planning is the kiss of death of entrepreneurship," added Sirolli, using one of management expert Peter Drucker's most famous quotes.
TEDxChristchurch is an independent event operated under licence from TED, a non-profit organization devoted to "ideas worth spreading" and started as a four-day conference in California in 1984.
Prospective entrepreneurs have to be offered confidentiality and privacy, Sirolli said, and need to be worked with one-on-one in way that resources transform passion "into a way to make a living."
Sirolli told his Christchurch audience that he had worked in Africa as a young man from ages 21 to 27 from 1971 to 1977 - in Zambia, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Algeria and Somali - on projects of technical co-operation with African countries for an Italian non-government organization (NGO). "Every single project that we set up in Africa failed," he recounts in his 1999 book, Ripples from the Zambezi: Passion, Entrepreneurship, and the Rebirth of Local Economies.
One of the stories he outlines is how his NGO colleagues started a tomato farm on the banks of the Zambezi River. When the locals they hired to work on the farm, the expected beneficiaries of the project, got enough money in their first day of work to buy a week's worth of food, they didn't return to work until the following week.
"Rather than reconsidering how their projects might engender more of a sense of ownership, the young Italians proceeded to get the workers hooked on buying consumer goods - watches, trinkets, beer - so they would have a motivation to come to work," wrote Miriam Axel-Lute in a review of Ripples from the Zambezi: Passion, Entrepreneurship, and the Rebirth of Local Economies, published in the September-October 1999 issue of the Montclair, New Jersey-based National Housing Institute's quarterly Shelterforce, the oldest continually published housing and community development magazine in the United States.
"That motivation 'worked,'" Axel-Lute wrote, "but the tomato patch failed. In a single night soon before harvest, hippos from the river ate every plant in the field, a danger the foreign development specialists had never considered. The story embodied for Sirolli the folly of trying to impose the vision of outside 'professionals' on different cultures or specific communities."
To get a better understanding of what happened in Zambia, Sirolli suggested to his New Zealand audience they read the 2009 book Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way For Africa by Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian-born economist who analyzes the macro-economy, foreign aid impact and global affairs.
In 1985, Sirolli pioneered in Esperance, a small rural community in Western Australia, what is now known as his "enterprise facilitation" approach, based he says on harnessing the passion, determination, intelligence, and resourcefulness of local people. Esperance, an isolated coastal town of 8,500, had 500 people registered as unemployed in 1985, and a recent quota on fishing tuna that shrunk the local fishing industry.
"With the assistance of my university," Sirolli says, "I set out to prove that responding to people is immensely more effective than trying to motivate them. I was invited to try the approach in a remote, rural community that was suffering from a dramatic economic downturn.
"It took me four days to find a local individual who trusted me with his ideas, his dream, of how to get out of unemployment. I worked with him for a couple of months to help him establish a smoked fish factory. The fishermen selling him tuna, after seeing what I had done for him, asked me to help them. I suggested that they invest their own money finding a better market for their tuna and after some months they were selling all their catch in Japan for $7.50 per pound instead of 30 cents. The local farmers similarly asked for help and 50 of them paid to conduct their own marketing research. After one year I was working with 27 individuals and groups willing to transform their own ideas into ways to feed their families and fulfill their own ambitions.
"We invented the term 'enterprise facilitator' and since then we have trained hundreds of professionals to "shut up and listen" to the ideas and dreams of local citizens.
"In 2004 we received our first invitation to share our story at an international mining conference in Melbourne, Australia. We hardly knew the meaning of 'social licence' or 'triple bottom line,' yet mining companies became intrigued with our approach and now invite us to train their personnel.
"Using our approach mining companies become involved in the expansion and diversification of the local economy but they do so by responding to passionate local people who are totally committed to the success of the venture.
"Enterprise facilitation leaves behind a legacy of entrepreneurial know-how that can be applied equally to business and social enterprises," said Sirolli.
After four years, the town had 45 new enterprises, and since then number has grown to about 10 times that today.
Since then, 300 communities and 40,000 businesses around the world adopted the enterprise facilitation approach to local economic development, he says, similar to what he pioneered in Australia 26 years ago.
"There's a lovely story that I read in a futurist magazine many, many years ago," Sirolli told his Christchurch audience. "There was a group of experts who were invited to discuss the future of the city of New York in 1860. And in 1860, this group of people came together, and they all speculated about what would happen to the city of New York in 100 years, and the conclusion was unanimous: The city of New York would not exist in 100 years. Why? Because they looked at the curve and said, if the population keeps growing at this rate, to move the population of New York around, they would have needed six million horses, and the manure created by six million horses would be impossible to deal with. They were already drowning in manure.
"So 1860, they are seeing this dirty technology that is going to choke the life out of New York.
"So what happens? In 40 years' time, in the year 1900, in the United States of America, there were 1,001 car manufacturing companies - 1,001. The idea of finding a different technology had absolutely taken over, and there were tiny, tiny little factories in backwaters, Dearborn, Michigan, Henry Ford."
