Teaching Business in the Extreme
The short story below, Road to Pyongyang, belongs to the initial drafts we intend to include in our forthcoming book Adventures in Startupland. The book is co-authored with Professor Simon Down. His kick-off piece on our adventures, The Bar on Sungri Street, is available here.
Teaching Business in the the Extreme
Pyongyang, 2014
It’s 7am and the alarm bell wakes me up to a still November morning. Its cold in the room when I put the electric heater on and open the curtains of my second-floor room. This stint, out of many, is soon entering its third month. The winter arrival feels as depressing as in Finland during November, but the view from window is interestingly different: I see endless Lego block buildings standing abstractly on dull, brown, cold-scorched grass.
The planet’s most closed country has suddenly become my second home. How did it come to this? Why do you go that evil place is a question I hear often in Europe. Not sure how evil international business and entrepreneurship modules are, but teaching those, on a voluntary basis, is the reason why I am here. Daytime teaching, with occasional evenings spent in Pyongyang downtown.
I notice I have been staring some minutes the view from the window, what day is it? How many days left? Although I enjoy the simple life without no consuming or being bombed with 24/7 advertising, the surveillance-boosted reality can often feel strained and inverted. Especially when I am spending my time explaining to students how Western capitalism functions, in a world officially wedded to socialism and the national self-reliance teachings of Juche. Extreme ends of our governance systems meet in the classroom.
Realities upside down
I am standing on front of the ten students who are learning how, in theory, how business is conducted in a non-socialist setting. Today we are looking at the different operating models of multinational companies from my laptop. Powerpoint slides are screened to the wall with a battery-backed projector. It gives a bit of insurance to continue teaching in case of electricity blackout. Students discuss how to do business with companies outside North Korea, should the sanctions ease up, and debate among themselves whether the products they plan to produce are good enough for global sale.
After a break we continue the work on a business plan, and it is in these moments, when they imagine their business enterprises that I feel most privileged to teach here. At the beginning of the course I asked what they want to learn:
“Professor, we want to learn everything”.
Talking about motivation.
Despite or because of the austere campus conditions, students work hard and compete fiercely over grades. Cooped-up on campus for months, they don’t have much else to do other than study and dream for the better future. In extreme, the communication is also extremely direct to a foreigner.
Recently I was told that I have no skills teach and that do I understand that I totally betray them when I forget something?
Not making too many promises around here.
A few weeks ago I forgot to show a promised picture of my Finnish summerhouse. It has no running water or electricity, and the students were very puzzled as to why I would want to spend time there?
I have no idea.
Last week when I finally got around to showing it, the first comment was that I have a cannon at the shore waiting to blast intruders. I explained that this was a fish-smoking oven — not a cannon to hunt imperialists. Everyone laughed.
Enter entrepreneurship extreme
We spend afternoon studying entrepreneurship. I am so excited on this, its like entering another universe. Today we talk about Chinese “hybrid” state-guided capitalism. I ask what they would do differently in North Korea? Around these corners of Juche, capitalism is hostile to the people and to the nation, and students strongly support a socialist foundation for business.
This class is open to the ideas from the capitalist torch carrier, the entrepreneur, but definitely not without critique. It seems to be a common view that entrepreneurialism needs to protect the people and it needs to be based on a very strong government regulation. Recently a front row student was adamant that ‘the most important thing in society and economy is to level off social inequalities. Everyone should be equal, and everyone should become rich equally. So as an entrepreneur, I will focus on equality of people and I will consider the benefits of the majority of people first’.
Another student put it this way, ‘in a market economy, the purpose of entrepreneurship is individual welfare. For me, it’s unfair. The purpose of entrepreneurship must be social welfare. In the social economic system, the government, the profits, are distributed equally to all people in society.’
The question is not simply academic. Although the future of North Korea is never openly discussed, and I am never really sure if these responses are simply the naïve product of state indoctrination or wise reticence in the face of the ever-present possibility of being overheard, the people I teach fully understand their elite status and expect to go on to manage enterprises of one sort or another.
I close the session with a discussion of how corporate business is conducted in Finland. Students were horrified to learn that Nokia has been bought by Microsoft. How could national pride be sold to American imperialists?
I didn’t really have an answer.
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The future content in my Medium includes selected short stories from our forthcoming book and I intend to publish openings on impact-driven co-creations and other slightly wild experiments with handy lists.
The authors assert their copyright of this work © 2022
Down, S. and Heikkila, J.P. (2022) Adventures in Startupland. Unpublished manuscript.