Organizations do not exist because they have tangible assets, but because they attract, train and integrate people who, imbued with a philosophy aimed at serving, are capable of seeking their own personal, professional, economic and emotional fulfillment, conquering and keeping satisfied customers.
Thus, the development of people determines the development of organizations, providing the only sustainable basis for competitiveness. As the new global order imposes ever greater challenges to survive, grow and perpetuate, companies need individuals capable of thinking politically and strategically, who know how to work as a team, visualize the future, communicate, educate, create and innovate, gifted entrepreneurs, prepared to think globally and act locally, decide effectively and act efficiently, thus meeting the demands of a constantly changing world.
Therefore, we are talking about a new economy that no longer needs employees and bosses, but partners (leaders and followers). It needs entrepreneurs who know how to make their capacity for achievement productive and how to turn risks into opportunities, exercising their freedom with responsibility. Those who have not been prepared to take orders and perform tasks and, yes, gain and satisfy customers will succeed. In this sense, schools and universities must prepare young people to manage their knowledge, skills and competences as if it were their own business.
Educating young people so that they become entrepreneurs of their knowledge and activities is the function that the family must start and the school needs to complement. The main challenge of our educational institutions is to offer young people the basis that will allow them to transform every moment of their professional life into an opportunity for learning, participation and self-development, which is a condition for individual growth and the consequent growth of companies. which ones do.
In doing so, the school will act as an agent of personal emancipation, stimulator of productive autonomy and vector of a new awareness that refutes the traditional concept of employment, changes the pattern of worker dependence on the market and transcends the narrow views that prefer to feed back the dichotomy between capital and labor.
It is up to companies to provide a favorable climate for young people, being “owners” of their business, to improve their knowledge, behavior and attitudes and have autonomy over their own destiny, as the world begins to experience a new era in productive relationships.
The previous era – that of employment, a notary concept inducing accommodation – increasingly gives way to the era in which the awareness that professionals can and should self-remunerate themselves through part of the results they produce begins to prevail. The results generated must be greater than the survival needs of the worker and the company, so that the surplus can allow the growth of both and the creation of new opportunities for other workers, also endowed with the entrepreneurial spirit.
One of the effects of this new reality is the preponderance of the concept of service provision, which determines that, regardless of the economic activity in which the company operates, what shifts is the emphasis from cold business relationships to interfaces between people. In this context, educational institutions and companies are co-responsible for training talented young people so that, in the future, they are able to serve their customers, seeing, feeling, understanding, deciding, acting and reacting in increasingly complex business environments .
Emílio Odebrecht is the current chairman of the Odebrecht Board of Directors, where he served as CEO for ten years.