Entrepreneurship in India #4 : What do you want?

This is a guest post by Alban Leveau-Vallier of Socialter.The aim of Socialter is to spread the good ideas using social media. As they travel, they spot interesting social entrepreneurs and then they write about them on the blog, make video about them, and spread their word and their good ideas through facebook and twitter. They also offer to advise them on the use of social media.Said bluntly, most of the Western entrepreneurs want money, and want to grow, to get more money. It is not true of every entrepreneur, especially the increasing number of social entrepreneurs. But it is even enshrined in French law which says that the manager of a company should never act "against the interest of the company", the interest being understood as the profit. On that topic there may be a slight difference in India.

These appeared in the answer of Swami, a Tamil entrepreneur : When an advice was given to him : "You should provide free wi fi in your hotel / restaurant, be sure it will be always full" , he answered "I don't want my hotel to be always full, I prefer to have only a few nice people and to keep time for myself." An answer which is quite similar to what Snehal Trivedi, an entrepreneur from Gujarat who started an alternative community in Auroville. When asked why his community has no website, he would answer "I like the fact that the people who come here are people who know people I know, even if it's less people".

Both didn't want to grow to be the most successful and profitable. Their goals were different. In India, even if the majority is working for money, many entrepreneurs – maybe more than in the western countries – want something else.

At the question "what do you want?" they don't answer "plenty of money" all the time. Some just want to sustain themselves and their family, and will not work more than necessary. Others want to be recognized, to maintain and continue a family business because it is the pride of the family, to help erase poverty, to transform education, or simply to change the world.

This fact was absolutely startling for a Frenchman we met in Kerala. He told us the story of a woman that worked until getting enough money to buy a bicycle, and then stopped. She didn't want to get rich, she just wanted the bicycle. For him it was the most irrational way of thinking...

Maybe not. In these kind of logic there is space for those who are entrepreneur for a reason which is not profit. That may be why there are so many social entrepreneurs in India, and why India may have a message for the rest of the world : A company must have a goal, and that goal should not always be profit.

And you, what do you want?