5 Entrepreneurship Lessons from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

By Black Men In America.com Staff

On this day where the nation honors Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. with a national holiday, we ran across an article in Forbes.com magazine written by Joseph Steinberg.  Steinberg is noted for writing about entrepreneurship and cybersecurity.  He’s done a great job of connecting Dr. King’s message to what is relevant to us 45 years after his death.  In his article, Steinberg writes that entrepreneurs should take note of five important business lessons that can be learned from Dr. King, and his role in the Civil Rights movement.  The 5 lessons are:

1. Make Your Dream A Reality

The phrase people most often associate with Dr. King – excerpted from his landmark 1963 speech — is “I have a dream.” Of course, many people have dreams. Some even have great dreams. But most people don’t work to make their dreams a reality as did Dr. King. Great ideas for new products, businesses, and works of science and art die every day with their inventors. To be an entrepreneur is to dream – but is even more to do.

2. The Way It Was Is Not The Way It Has To Be

At the time that Dr. King gave his famous speech at the Mall in Washington, racism had been entrenched in American culture for centuries. Dr. King challenged the status quo, and raised awareness of a different and better future that could be built from positive change. Likewise, businesses often are averse to changing long-held positions, or denying that major changes for the better can take place, with or without them. Only a few years ago, “experts” were saying that people would reject keyboard-less smartphones like the iPhone, and Blackberry would continue to dominate the smartphone market for many years to come. We know how that turned out.

3. Change Can Happen Fast

The vast majority of the members of my generation – born not that many years after it took a struggle to get the Civil Rights Act passed – consider the notion that people should be segregated based on the color of their skin to be both morally repugnant and downright ridiculous. Attitudes change quickly – especially after positive developments occur and everyone sees the correctness of the change. This is true vis-à-vis business as well. Consider how quickly Blackberry went from market leader to having less than 4% of market share, or how fast Kodak was transformed from having its film products bought by nearly every family in America to filing for bankruptcy as a firm many teenagers “had never heard of.”

4. Build A Large Following

Dr. King was an amazing speaker who inspired millions of people with his words. But, ultimately, it was those large numbers of people who organized, marched, or otherwise influenced legislators and the public. There is little doubt that the grassroots nature of the civil rights movement – and the resulting far reach of its leaders – was a key ingredient in its success. In the Internet era it is much easier than the 1960s to reach large numbers of people; if you have a great message – spread it widely.

 5. Success Takes A Lot Of Work

The civil rights struggle did not achieve its aims overnight, and its success was built upon the hard work and sacrifice of many; Dr. King and various others even lost their lives. Thankfully, entrepreneurs do not need to make such giant sacrifices, but, effectuating change and achieving success does not usually happen without hard work. Yes, there are some businesses that skyrocket to the top, and there are some people who get rich quickly. But, the vast majority of businesses are built with a lot of time and effort. Don’t expect to succeed without working hard.

Joseph Steinberg is the C.E.O. of Green Armor Solutions, a vendor of cybersecurity technologies which he co-invented, and which specializes in applying knowledge of human dynamics so as to ensure that maximum security can be delivered with maximum convenience.  You can follow Joseph and learn more about him on Twitter at @JosephSteinberg.  Click here to visit Forbes.com.

The Bridge: In Honor of Malcolm X

 

By Darryl James 

May 19th is the birth date of El Haaj Malik El-Shabazz, known to us as Malcolm X.

Who was Malcolm X?

Malcolm X was a number of things to a number of people.

To white racists, he was the physical manifestation of the chickens coming home to roost—the sins of the father being visited upon the sons. He was committed to the respect and protection of the Black community and unwavering in the extent to which he was willing to go and to which he was willing to influence millions to go to oppose and stamp out oppression.

His mission? In his own words, it was “to bring about the complete independence of people of African descent here in the western hemisphere…and bring about the freedom of these people by any means necessary.”

Those means included violent retaliation, of course, but those means also included economic revolution. Malcolm X advocated Black self-reliance as a means to freedom.

“If you can’t do for yourself what the white man is doing for himself, don’t say you’re equal with the white man,” Malcolm chided.” If you can’t set up a factory like he sets up a factory, don’t talk that old equality talk.”

Brother Malcolm became the universal symbol for Black Manhood as he challenged white superiority and privilege in a way that frightened America and made conscious Black people proud.

He also challenged the foundation and purpose of the Civil Rights Movement, which did not make him an enemy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as many people today believe.

 It is ignorant to detract from one man to glorify the other. Brother Malcolm was as crucial and relevant as Brother Martin, but a fearful nation would not embrace him the same because he represented the fiery response to violence—a divergent option to Brother Martin, but certainly not an opposite option.

In a 2005 installment of his column for the New York Daily News, Stanley Crouch, a self-hating Negro, claimed that Malcolm X was a “heckler of the Civil Rights Movement” and a “minor figure,” calling the Nation of Islam a “cult,” and a “cartoon version of Islam.”

Boot-licking House Negro bitches like the “writer” Stanley Crouch can deride Malcolm X from the comfort of the twenty-first century, but in his weak little heart which pumps lemonade, Crouch knows damned well that he would never have had the testicular fortitude to be one tenth of what Malcolm X was to America—a proud Black man unafraid to tell the world what was wrong with this nation and unafraid to face it, sacrificing his life for the people he loved.

Crouch, a revisionist idiot, has no real concept of history, particularly where Black people are concerned. Malcolm and Martin had two different movements, which were moving closer to each other before they were assassinated. To call Malcolm a “heckler of the Civil Rights Movement,” is ignorant and demonstrates self-hatred.

Malcolm’s critical challenge of the foundation and purpose of the Civil Rights Movement is very different from being a “heckler,” which is someone who sits inactively on the sidelines tossing negativity.

Certainly, Martin was and is larger than Malcolm, but that has more to do with who he had following him and the times to come. Malcolm was about hate the way Martin was a racist—both false assumptions made only by idiots.

The reality is that Martin was safer than Malcolm—for whites and for scared Negroes who didn’t want anyone to make too much noise and piss off the white establishment they feared and revered.

But Martin also had detractors, many of whom hated him as they hated Malcolm. Some Negroes were afraid that Martin, too, would upset the apple cart and make it harder for them to kiss white people’s collective asses.

Malcolm X, much like Dr. King, was evolving from fighting a domestic fight on the home front for civil rights into waging a war on the world stage for human rights.

And they were both taking an economic revolution to the bottom of society.

At the end of the day, there is never a reason to choose and no one should be asked to.

But there is a reason to celebrate. To celebrate the birth of a beautiful, strong human being who changed the way Black men thought of themselves and frankly, the way the world thought of Black men.

The late Ossie Davis, who delivered the eulogy for Malcolm X in the Spike Lee film and in life at the funeral, said it best:  “Malcolm was our manhood. Our living Black manhood.”

(Malcolm was) “Our own Black shining prince who didn’t hesitate to die, because he loved us so.”

And those of us who understood him, love him as well.

Happy Birthday Brother Malcolm.

 Darryl James is an award-winning author of the powerful new anthology “Notes From The Edge.”  James’ stage play, “Love In A Day,” opened in Los Angeles in 2001 and will become a feature film in 2012. View previous installments of this column at http://www.bridgecolumn.proboards36.com. Reach James at djames@theblackgendergap.com.