Redefining Failure in the Muslim World

“I saw your picture with Dr. Yunus on Twitter” my friend Francesca remarked to me over email. She was referring to Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, who won the prize for his work with the Grameen Bank and microfinance and with whom I posed for a photo at the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship this week in Washington.

“So how come you haven’t referred to him at all in your posts from the summit?”

That’s because the gathering of 250-plus entrepreneurs, investors, and business leaders from Muslim-majority countries that took place Monday and Tuesday wasn’t about micro-business. “We’re sick of small,” one delegate anonymously told me. “Why is it that only you people in the West can get big businesses and we in the Muslim world get only micro this and micro that?”

Good point. It’s one that Putera Sampoerna, Indonesia’s tobacco king took on during the panel “Access to Capital,” by questioning how many jobs microfinance recipients create. “The jury is out on whether microfinance creates jobs,” he said, noting, “there is a difference mind-set between someone who opens up a one man shop versus someone who wants to create jobs.”

This summit was all about job creation. It was also all about redefining failure in the Muslim world.

It is impossible to talk about entrepreneurship without talking about failure. The Presidential Summit was no exception. Starting from the first panel on “Perspectives on Successful Entrepreneurship” right through the last one on women as entrepreneurs, panelists, most of who were from the Muslim world, said that failure is an inevitable rite of passage.

“Failure and uncertainty are the only constant things in business, especially in a country like Indonesia,” said Forbes-ranked billionaire Sandiago Uno.

Those following along on Twitter agreed and added, as Nathaniel Whittemore (@nlw) did, it is “easier to raise money with one good failure behind you than as totally fresh.”

Well, if that’s the case, why do entrepreneurs, from the Muslim world and beyond, struggle to raise funds? Aramex CEO Fadi Ghandour believes that’s because “no one actually celebrates failure.” I think he’s right.

Where we read about failure, we do so in the context of success. We read about it for inspiration and to gain insight about bouncing back. We don’t read about failure alone. That would be too depressing. Yet that is, more than often, the narrative throughout the Muslim world where there are few success stories. That along with how entrepreneurship is defined, Ghandour believes, is what needs to change.

On the panel on the "Culture of Entrepreneurship,” Ghandour, talked about redefining failure in order to redefine entrepreneurship. Here, he brought up the other darling of the entrepreneurial dictionary, the role model.

“Have you heard of the four-minute mile?” Ghandour asked. He then told the audience about Roger Bannister, who in 1954 became the first person to run a mile under four minutes. “But that’s not the story,” Ghandour paused raising his finger in the air. “The story is the 17 people after him who broke the four-minute mile.” Ghandour noted that the moral is that all it takes is one person to show it can be done. In the Middle East, that person is Samih Toukan, CEO of Maktoob.

Maktoob is the Amman-based online Arabic Web platform that Yahoo acquired in August 2009. Built by a pair of Arab techies, Maktoob is the region’s four-minute mile, proving that Silicon Valley doesn’t have a monopoly on technology and innovation or globally competitive companies. It is the example, Ghandour believes, that will transform how the Muslim world approaches entrepreneurship.

It would be a mistake to believe that the Muslim world is entirely responsible for rewriting the startup narrative in their communities. The West has a duty as well, which the Obama White House has acknowledged and taken concrete steps to fulfill.

Those steps include the creation of an office of Global Entrepreneurship at the State Department. This department will, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted in the closing session Tuesday, expand access to capital, strengthen business education, and what I think is most important, this Global Entrepreneurship office will facilitate “entrepreneurship exchanges,” where Silicon Valley innovators will travel to Muslim majority countries and promising talent from the Muslim world will spend time in enterprises in the United States.

The Overseas Private Investment Corporation is taking action too. They’re the U.S. agency that helps mobilize capital in the developing world. As such, they’re set to mobilize more than $2 billion in investments through the Global Technology and Innovation Fund throughout Muslim-majority countries. “This is private capital,” President Obama said when he spoke on Monday, “and it will unlock new opportunities for people across our countries in sectors like telecommunications, health care, education, and infrastructure.”

Technology and innovation in the Middle East. Global competition. Job growth. Business education. Silicon Valley exchanges. Two billion dollars in capital. Now do you understand why I didn’t mention Muhammad Yunus?

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More from the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship:

• For Once, Washington Forgets the PR—The White House may have brought together entrepreneurs from Muslim-majority countries, but these Muslim-majority entrepreneurs have no intention of being pigeonholed into such a category.
• A Passion for Transparency—The Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurs was meant to bring closer ties between business in the Muslim world and the U.S. But many of the same questions surrounding corporate governance and transparency obsess Muslim and Western businesspeople.
• The Subtle Summit—The Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship might sound like it’s an all-purpose event geared to boost American business ideas, but it has a far more specific intent: to offer guidance and inspiration to Muslim entrepreneurs from other nations.

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Elmira Bayrasli writes and works on global economic issues. She is working on a book that looks at aid and entrepreneurship in the fight against poverty.