Entrepreneurship is a state of mind
– Amanda Dormehl
Moky Makura is a presenter at the 2011 South Africa Innovation Summit. Her workshop is on ‘secrets of the entrepreneur’. She is an actor, journalist, author and above all, successful entrepreneur.
M
oky recently published Africa’s Greatest Entrepreneurs. It features the success stories of sixteen top entrepreneurs
from the whole of Africa. Moky feels that Africa’s business successes are being overlooked. “I was tired of going into bookshops and seeing books about Richard Branson and Donald Trump. Where were the books on Africans that had made good? The continent is full of hard working people who have prospered greatly by any standard. Why did they have to remain anonymous? I don’t think that, in general, as Africans, we tell our stories well enough. And we have to present new role models for the younger generation,” she describes as some of the motivation for writing her book. This very ambitious woman views
entrepreneurship as a state of mind. She feels that the main idea underlying entrepreneurs’ success is their intrinsic qualities, rather than their external qualifications. “Their ways of thinking, their creativity and their visions that are often bigger than the environments that they are in. There is also a certain amount of risk-taking that entrepreneurs are comfortable with. They have a defined sense of ego and they are creators. It is often not enough for them to work in a corporate environment and manage someone else’s business. They need to know that they can create a business themselves and that takes a certain amount of confidence – and that confidence comes with an ego,” she explains.
Nollybooks is one of Moky Makura’s enterprises. Her objective here is to market branded books. She forms partnerships with institutions such as GIBS (Gordon Institute of Business Science). Through them she currently offers South African Entrepreneurs, a publication that discusses business communications. She is busy expanding her ideas on branded books in two ways; firstly by finding brands that match up with content she already has in mind and secondly by forming
partnerships with brands to scope publications they may have in mind. “I have a passion to connect with the sixteen to
twenty-four year age group. I’ve found that there are few publications that cater for this group. I connect with them to determine their interests and I then publish accordingly. I have done some romance and crime novels and am now busy compiling some self-help books. These are centred on what young, working adults want to know more about. I am answering questions around credit facilities such as credit cards and buying cars. These questions may seem basic, but I’ve found that many young people today don’t have good role models and mentors. My aims are to get messages, rather than just stories, out to this group and also to promote literacy. I am also busy with a project where we are turning some of these books into movies,” Moky elaborates. There are many people that Moky sees as her
mentors. She highlights Herman Mashaba as one such person. Growing up, Herman saw his contemporaries become either gardeners or golf caddies. But he decided at a young age to be a businessman and started walking around carrying a briefcase. Today he is the founder and Managing Director for Black Like Me (Pty) Ltd. “I am a mentor myself in two ways; through the self-help books and also with the staff that I employ to work on my different projects. These people are generally interns or freelancers. I want to devise a way in which I can get feedback on the impact my mentoring has had on them,” she explains her own mentoring role. Moky Makura is very optimistic about the
opportunities for entrepreneurs in South Africa. “I don’t think there has been a better time than now for people to be innovative. The speed at which the daily landscape is changing means that we all have to become more forward thinking. Not just entrepreneurs, but people in middle management too. There may be an opportunity where social media can be used to enhance customer interaction with your organisation. You need to take the risk and do something ground-breaking, do something no one else is doing,” she concludes.
September 2011 | Management Today 15
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