Monday, 30 April 2012
Phnom Penh Post
Business is the most important activity for the Cambodian people. The
government does not have the resources to support the 14.8 million
people who live in this small, unique country and the multi-national
corporations that come here are legally obligated to their shareholders
to make profits.
So what’s available to help poor Cambodians improve their lives?
Business.
If you look around at the faces of Cambodians who
survived the Khmer Rouge period you can see there’s no nostalgia for
communist terror and mass killing. There’s only gratefulness to be alive
and have a chance to rebuild the family, get a motorcycle or a car,
have a nice place to live and send the kids to school.
The
importance of business cannot be overstated. I’m not talking about
capitalism as an ideology nor am I promoting greed.
What I’m
talking about and what I’m promoting is a spirit of service to others.
Many successful Cambodian businessmen you see today stated out with
nothing.
They came to Phnom Penh from the province, stayed in a
pagoda, went to school, started repairing bicycles, got a job somewhere
and slowly, by degrees, they made something from nothing.
We
plan to feature those rags to riches stories in the business pages. They
saw what was possible and they created a way to serve other people.
They sat with a few tools by the side of the road and repaired bicycles
and motorcycles for whoever passed by.
Whether it was a car
wash, a restaurant, an internet shop, or a cart full of fresh coconuts,
this spirit of Cambodian entrepreneurship dates back tens of thousands
of years.
If you were a farmer in the Angkor period, you had to
get your bananas and mangos to the marketplace so you could trade them
for the things you and your family needed, clothing and shoes, tools and
medicine.
The principles of business, getting up early and
getting your product to market on time, were true a thousand years ago
and they’ll be true a thousand years from now.
This is the
spirit that needs to catch on here in Cambodia, more clearly, more
sharply.
The same spirit is also true in the news business and
Cambodia is a gold mine of stories. Everywhere you look are men and
women who survived the hardships of the past, have taken the risk to
lease premises, open shops, get inventory and hang up a sign.
We’re
going to increase the amount of local stories in Business Post and
create an atmosphere of rewarding entrepreneurship. We’re going to
offer stories to our readers about how people here in Cambodia have
overcome obstacles and hardships to triumph in business.
They
saw a market and they created it by their vision. That’s not only
inspiring; it is also instructive.
By reading these stories,
ideas may be gained of how others did it. This can be very inspiring and
enriching.
We have both the Post English and the Post
Khmer as instruments of this universal entrepreneurial spirit.
If
you know of a good story, rags to riches, or somebody who has had the
guts and taken the risk to offer something new to the Cambodia
population, send me an email at stuart.becker@gmail.com.
We’re
out to create an atmosphere for business of all kinds to flourish in
Cambodia. We are going to do this by rewarding entrepreneurship with
publicity.
We’re going to promote not only local Cambodian
entrepreneurship but also foreign investment.
We take a stand in
favour of business as the most logical means of enriching the lives of
Cambodian citizens and therefore when people come from all over the
world with their money to invest in Cambodia we reward them too, with
stories about their projects in our business pages.
Foreign or
local, male or female, big or small, risk-taking business people are
what the Business Post is all about.
In this manner we
keep the public informed of what’s happening and we show real people who
started out with little or nothing and overcame hardships in order to
serve their customers.
We love and support the spirit of service
to others.
Stuart Alan Becker is Group Business Editor of The Phnom
Penh Post, English and Khmer.Contact Stuart at stuart.becker@gmail.com
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