Sophisticated business needed

It is not too early to predict that Lok Jack may one day be regarded as the John D Rockefeller Jr, of Trinidad and Tobago and a principal architect of what will be the country’s ability to effectively deal with these challenges.

Business today has become more sophisticated and the training of both our young people and persons already working with companies, whether in senior or junior positions, is crucial. Even long established business will be able to benefit.

Clearly, how we respond to globalisation will depend in large measure on the levels of domestic business activity and a growing number of persons trained in the art and discipline of business.

We have to bring our costs down and one of the more successful methods in creating a culture of cost effectiveness is through the mounting use of trained personnel, not merely at the senior and middle management level but at the ground floor and supervisory levels as well.

Business in TT, as indeed in any other country, needs today to be increasingly competitive, and for a business not simply to survive but to expand and be profitable, its staff at the level of senior and middle management and even its foot soldiers must be trained.

And, if in Trinidad and Tobago in the past there were companies, owned and run by individuals and/or families, who had little or no training in business, which have been successful, the businesses dominating today’s economic landscape are publicly owned companies — many of them staffed at their various levels of responsibility by tertiary school graduates.

However, there is a specific need for business study graduates whose ideas will help push their companies yet further forward while at the same time contributing to the larger growth and development of the country.

Trinidad and Tobago, which is becoming increasingly under pressure from the developed countries as well as from developing nations such as China, India, Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia, among others, for a large slice of its domestic market and, in turn, that of the Caricom market has to develop strategies, and quickly, which will enable it to remain competitive at home and regionally, in addition to its traditional overseas export markets.

It has to move away from the relative inefficiency of untrained persons who have worked their way upward, all too often on the basis of ‘who you know’ and make a cultural shift to promotion based on the results of training and demonstrated competence.

Another shift will have to be from labour intensive industries to capital intensive and this will call for and require a degree of training, not only in the relevant disciplines but, specifically, in business management.

Lok Jack’s initiative recognises this and he deserves a place among the great names of business, both regionally and globally.