Recent OpEd: Congo Leadership Initiative
CLI Co-founder Nathaniel Houghton recently penned the OpEd below, which appeared in The Buffalo News on June 18.
Capitalism that’s more inclusive is more effective
In the US and around the world, the first 5% of the decade has started about as poorly as anyone could have predicted. People are worried for their future - young people in particular. Indeed, only half of America’s Generation Z hold a positive view of capitalism, the basis of unprecedented global prosperity.
Especially in light of the upheaval of 2020, this is understandable: After all, my generation does not remember the Cold War. We came of age during the financial crisis. Even before a global pandemic and racial strife matching or exceeding 1968’s high-water mark, millennials were making reasonable arguments that capitalism needs reforming. But should we tear it down entirely?
In January of 2009, I first visited the Democratic Republic of the Congo with little more than conversational French and a deep curiosity. The next year, my Congolese partners and I staged a five-day leadership training program for 16 youth. What happened then changed my view of human creativity in a profound way.
After my return to the US, the youth not only continued to meet and learn about leadership, but started to exercise their skills in order to create value in a place that many had written off. Two launched a Kinshasa law firm together. Another became a child psychologist. Over time, thousands of the youth we eventually trained have become entrepreneurs. Their businesses are not repurposed Western constructions, but organic responses to local needs.
In my early career, I have had the chance to work with some of the world’s most talented founders and professionals. Eventually, I made my way to Harvard Business School. I have been fortunate in this sense to have been exposed to some of the most gifted and celebrated capitalists that our global economy has to offer.
Nevertheless, I have come to see that elite managers are trained to assume that we help people in Kinshasa while we do business with people in London, Berlin, New York, and Shanghai. Capitalism is by far the greatest wealth-creator that humanity has ever seen, but we need to open our view of who should be included in order to carry it into the next century.
More to the point, while people in the Congo and other oppressed individuals everywhere certainly deserve our compassion, it is hazardous to see them only as “beneficiaries” of our largesse. This perspective rests on an underlying assumption that there are people in the world equipped to participate in capitalism and people who are not.
My experience in the Congo has convinced me that this is wrong. Human ingenuity and entrepreneurial creativity are not location-dependent. This is a lesson we must head for capitalism to work - especially in 2020.
Nathaniel Houghton is a native of Orchard Park and the Co-founder and President of the Congo Leadership Initiative.