Posterity only has the patience to study and analyse character not existence. If it were the case that all men will be studied in the course of time, I guess there would not be enough space in our brains to contain all the not so important.
However, when one shows identifiable character traits, people almost always take a pause to ask after such a character. You may have a character of empathy, cheating, stealing, love and whatever; this is what the world is interested in. In business, character is synonymous to a brand. A brand may be perceived as inconsistent, efficient, disloyal or quality and that will be the character of that business. Even when you decide not to have a character as a business, that in itself becomes a character.
Brands like the Electricity Company of Ghana, the Ghana Water Company Limited, our political brands, the media and some financial institutions have proved beyond reasonable doubt that they cannot be trusted and do not care if they are not consistent.
Very little apology is offered for wrongdoing and most of the time, it is as though they are doing their customers a favour by serving them. When a brand lacks integrity and good character, the motivation to study and learn from them is usually lost. This accounts for one of the reasons why we have very few generational businesses.
Ingredients of character development
While at this, let me also commend brands and companies like Papaye Fast Food, Aunty Muni Waakye at Labone, Accra, GHACEM Limited, Ashesi University College and many others, which have also been consistent in communicating and ensuring that their service deliveries are characterised with consistent taste and product functionality.
It must, however, be emphasised that no one character practice can forever stand the test of time. As a business with character, you must evolve in the way you put your principles and beliefs into practice. The act of being consistent also enjoins you to develop your character. No state in character development is finality; there can always be some tweaking and adjustments.
In my estimation, there are three ingredients for character building and development. These are pretence, willingness and action.
These ingredients ought to be worked together at the same time and consistently for them to become beliefs and reasons why you pursue such.
Developing a character as a person and for your business must be a conscious effort; it does not happen because of wish but rather due to an innate desire to make your business known for something. It is that identity you give to your business, which will make others want to do business with you. It can be corruption; if your business is noted for that, you will attract corrupt people who will have a field day working with you because you sing from the same hymn book.
Pretence
All human beings - and for that matter businesses - have a little bit of hypocrisy in them. We all hide the obvious and pretend to be what we are not. Pretence, in my estimation, is not a bad trait. In fact, you need to pretend to have something so you can cause it to happen.
Pretending to be caring, loving, generous, wicked, destructive and others are all acts which start by trying to be what you are not. However, gradually, as you feed your spirit of these notions and begin to consistently practice what your spirit is beginning to believe, then you start developing a character, which ultimately translates to your soul (character).
So, for a business, you need to write down how you want to be known to the outside world. These are translated into policies, mission and vision statements, values, ideals and standards.
They form the building blocks of your company and to which people will want to study. Much effort needs to go into building a character. It is not just what you wish and decide on. You ought to see the character traits being practiced and promoted consistently to workers. These traits have to be made exciting and doable for employees to want to adopt them.
Willingness
The other crucial ingredient for building a character is willingness; the inclination to do or act on your pretence. It takes courage, determination and the ability to have the end in mind to forcefully push an agenda. Willingness is a burning desire to allow your mind to gradually drift from the definitive to something new. You might not have the experience or know the repercussions but you consciously start to believe that by putting pretence into action; there will be a better outcome.
In the coming year, the motivation for doing what you do should not just be money. Customers desire to have a relationship; it is just trite that human beings want to spend their lives with somebody - in this case your brand or company, so make it worth their while. Let them know who you are; that you do not give and accept bribes, that you perfectly complete what you start and that you are a gentle and reasonable company.
Employees will stay or leave based on what your company stand for, suffice to say some will also come and leave because of money.
Action
Staying mute and wishing for something to happen is disaster in the making.
Ghanaians are known to be big on talk but low in acting. Several wishful ideas like having a rail network, having a four lane road from Accra to Kumasi, having better schools and solving our utility problems will not happen without action. Also, it is not just any action, rather one which is well thought out, researched and analysed.
The fact that you need to act on something you haven’t done before does not mean you do it halfheartedly. You have to plan and execute flawlessly.
Also, no amount of action is perfect enough. Improve on your actions and purpose to perfect the act continuously.
It is in this vein that I am excited about the new Katanka 4X4 cars yet to hit our roads. I do not expect them to be perfect but it is just so good that they will be launched into the system.
We all owe it to posterity to make sure the brand gets successful. As potential customers, we will review the brand, criticise and analyse the details but it is for the brand owners to get better at their act with every production batch, which comes on stream.
Nothing has ever been made perfect on the onset; it takes time, faith and the right attitude to get addicted to perfection.
Conclusion
Every successful business in the country is a good thing for budding entrepreneurs. It teaches us what is possible and what needs to be aimed for.
If we continuously lose our businesses at the demise of the founding fathers, we will remain stunted in our growth as a nation.
Our motivation should be to leave a business which can survive us and for us to achieve that, we need to as a matter of necessity build characters into our business.
