Excerpted from Reuben Abraham's recent paper Learning by Doing: ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES:
Political Entrepreneurs have the remarkable vision to pull their countries and states in a completely different direction. I call them entrepreneurs because they perform an entrepreneurial function in terms of disrupting the existing equilibrium with innovative and bold new ideas. This holds true of Park Chung Hee in Korea, Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, Deng Xiaoping in China, or even Chandrababu Naidu/Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy or Nitish Kumar in the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Bihar respectively. One can also make the case that the 1991 reforms in India could not have happened without the astute political leadership of then prime minister Narasimha Rao, who provided the political backbone for tough reforms.More here
To illustrate further, while discussing the Asian growth miracle, one sees lines like “China adopted better institutions” or that “Singapore had better rules than Malaysia”, but what does that really mean? Who in China or Singapore adopted those rules and why? And why didn’t someone adopt them earlier? In my opinion, not paying serious attention to the efforts of political entrepreneurs who develop or adopt better rules is not helpful and distracts attention away from the most crucial ingredient, namely leadership.Despite the obvious importance of leadership and political entrepreneurs, we don’t really have a well-developed theory of political leadership, which is puzzling. Why don’t we have a proper handle on what it takes to create these leaders? For that matter, how do we ensure these leaders are ‘good’ rather than ‘bad’? In other words, how do we ensure we get Lee Kuan Yew and not Mao Tse Tung?