YEA/FNF Press Release
January 24, 2012
Amman -
“Entrepreneurship means taking great risks to realize dreams. And there has never been a better time to become an entrepreneur in Jordan than now”, said Mr. William D. Cohan, award winning American business book author, journalist and former Wall Street banker.
He made the remarks during an event
hosted on Tuesday morning by the Young Entrepreneurs Association (YEA) and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Liberty (FNF) as part of their “Jordan Economic Breakfast Series”. Entitled “The Financial Crisis and the Occupy Wall Street Movement”, the lecture, which was organized in cooperation with the MEPI Alumni Network, was attended by more than 75 persons from entrepreneurship, academia, politics, diplomacy, and civil society.
Mr. Cohan spoke about the environment in which entrepreneurship can thrive, saying: “There are three things an entrepreneur needs: a working legal environment, favorable capital markets – and his own, sustained drive and will to succeed.” A former Managing Director at the US investment bank JP Morgan Chase, Mr. Cohan underlined how important it is for entrepreneurs to be allowed to make mistakes and even fail, calling this the “power of failure”: “You have to believe that you are going to be successful and cannot be afraid of failure, although most entrepreneurs do fail most of the time. Failure is an important part of success. You need bankruptcy laws and courts that work. And no stigma must be attached to failure!”
Added Mr. Cohan: “Jordan’s strength is the power of its people, the combination of brain power and drive. If you run into institutional road blocks, you can take your ideas elsewhere nowadays to get in touch with investors world-wide.” He concluded that though there might not be a direct connection between the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street Movement, the rise of the internet had gone along with a global movement of dissatisfaction with the existing economic and political institutions.
For his part, Mr. Ralf Erbel, FNF Resident Representative in Jordan and for Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, emphasized: “The Casino-like behavior we have seen in some financial institutions globally weakens people’s trust in their market economies. It is therefore vital, in the interest of entrepreneurship and market economy, to create structures in which freedom and responsibility go hand in hand.“
