How-To Business Stories from Minnesota Immigrants: Green Card Entrepreneur Voices - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 099749607X ISBN 13: 9780997496079

Publisher: Green Card Voices, 2018

Synopsis

"Green Card Entrepreneur Voices: How-To Business Stories from Minnesota Immigrants" is a collection of essays and digital narratives from twenty immigrant and refugee entrepreneurs living in Minnesota. Written in the tellers’ own words, these stories offer insight into immigrant entrepreneur expertise: how they did it, why they did it, and what they learned in the process. These storytellers, who come from nineteen different countries, describe their childhoods, the reasons they left their homes, their first moments in a strange land, and the ways they’ve contributed to their new home. They've build multi-million-dollar companies, founded community arts organizations, developed products that support their home countries, and designed new organizations in the US based on their cultural traditions. They are social entrepreneurs, company founders, and everything in between. Immigrants are among the most entrepreneurial individuals in our nation. They create new companies, provide jobs, and contribute to the American ecnomoic landscape. This book, along with its accompanying video narratives, memorializes these contributions. "Green Card Entrepreneur Voices" is an inspirational resource and how-to guide for anyone who wants to know what it takes to succeed as an (immigrant) entrepreneur in our nation.

About this title

About the Author

AUTHORS- Tashitaa Tufaa: Ethiopia; Bo Thao-Urabe: Laos; Dario Mejia: Ecuador; Hassan Syed: Pakistan; Veronica Quillien: Cameroon ; Vikas Naurla: Canada; Tomme Beevas: Jamacia; Batul Walji: Democratic Republic of the Congo; Amara Kamara: Liberia; Ruhel Islam: Bangladesh; Mary Anne & Sergio Quiroz: The Phillipines/Mexico; Caterina Cenaro: Italy; Trung Pham: Vietnam; Marcia Malzahn: Nicaragua; Haji Yusuf: Kenya (Somali); Andrés A. Parra: Venezuela; Ameeta Jaiswal-Dale: India; Wanny Huynh: Vietnam; José Figueroa: Puerto Rico.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from chapter "Hassan Syed": My name is Hassan Syed. I was born in Pakistan in a city which used to be the third largest city, Hyderabad. I grew up in a middle class family. My dad was a teacher by profession and my mom was a teacher by profession so we had books all over our house; in every cabinet and under every chair and every sofa. That is how I grew up.

When I was about to get to high school, my dad ran for mayor and he became the first mayor of the city. That was the first election in our city for mayor. My dad also became a member of the National Assembly afterwards and then Federal Minister. That was a very good experience, but also it was very heartbreaking, because there are lots of people who have challenges and the government cannot not solve all the challenges. The corruption in the system on the one side was an opportunity to learn, but at the same time you also feel really, really bad about it. That experience helped me at some point in my life to understand why it matters to help other people. That has been the driving force for me ever since.

School was a really good opportunity for me to learn about what people were experiencing. You don't get exposed to a lot of that unless you see people coming and talking about their stories like they did at school. It was a great opportunity because a lot of people would come and talk about their problems.

After completing high school, I got a diploma in computer science; that was the very early days of computer science. In Pakistan, there was not a lot of really big opportunities. I got a good start over there, I started my career as a computer software developer, but to explore better opportunities, my sister - who was living in Bahrain - told me that there are good opportunities in the Middle East, maybe you want to come over here.

So I went to Bahrain on a visitor visa and got a job. I worked there for a couple of years--I was very lucky to find a job right away-- and then I changed my job to a multinational company. It was a Danish company and I had an opportunity to go to Denmark and do a lot of things with that company. But in 1993, I felt I knew the system over there in Bahrain; it was not a democratic system. You would feel everyday that something is not right. I am a person who loves his freedom so I decided to move somewhere and I looked at multiple places. I decided Canada was the destination where I could start my family.

I applied for a Canadian visa and got it in three months--they didn't even ask any questions--and I came to Canada in 1994. That is where I started my family. All my three kids were born in Canada. I started a company in 1995, but first I got a job at Kelloggs and then I started a company called Zentech Corporation, which was basically an ERP software company. I was running that company until 2002. In 2002, after the bubble burst and all the problems came for the technology companies, I went through a rough time. I thought, “Enough of doing this business... maybe I should do something more meaningful.”

I joined the Toronto Zoo as their manager for IT and Communication, which was an amazing experience. I really enjoyed learning there and in 2003, I came to the US for a conference on zoos and aquariums. There was this small organization here in Minnesota that was at the conference. They were talking about building this big system for all the zoos to be able to share their data worldwide. I thought it was amazing and I started participating in the project. Eventually they had an opening for somebody to lead that project and I applied for it and I got it. I came to the US to help zoos all over the world to get their act together from a technology perspective on how they share the knowledge among different zoos. That is how I got here and came to Minnesota. Minneapolis is the only city that I have lived in in the US and this is the city I love. This is the city my kids grew up in.

I’ve felt a huge culture shock over the years. Every place is different in reality, but human beings are the same. When I went from Pakistan to Bahrain, the biggest challenge was language. English is not a language that you speak everyday in Pakistan. I grew up speaking my language, Urdu, and then another language Sindhi. My dad was a teacher, an Arabic language teacher, and he taught me Arabic when I was a kid. I came to Bahrain with the idea that they speak Arabic and I knew Arabic. Instead I got there and realized that the language that I learnt is really not the language that is spoken, and how things were done was totally different in Bahrain.

The biggest challenge for me at that time was to learn English. I remember my first job: the general manager of the company, it was a software company, he said, “Hassan, I want you to go in front of the customers, but your English is not good.” He gave me three months to get better at English. So I used to watch the BBC, I would wake up at 5 o'clock in the morning and would start watching the BBC. During lunch in Bahrain, it was common to have a siesta in the afternoon; people would go back to their home and come back later. I would watch BBC then and would come back in the evening and would watch BBC again. It was just all day and night, and I started making friends who couldn't speak Urdu so I couldn't just take the easy road. That was quite interesting.

When I came to Canada, that was an interesting story too. I only had three job interviews and had gotten three job offers, it was just amazing. At my interview at Kelloggs, I sat there and thought about what I learned about the North American way of talking...I knew in our culture it is not a good thing to boast about yourself, to say, “yes I would do something,” and appear to be so confident. It is not lack of confidence, it is just considered not humble to say those things. So I sat in the interview, “Look, I am coming from a different background, it is very difficult for me when you ask me the question, "Hassan can you do that?" The cultural conditioning for me is to say, ‘I will try to do that’.” That was my first experience, it was good. The English that I spoke was a little different, people didn't understand my accent when I came to Canada for the first time. Then, again, I put myself to the test of making sure that I improved myself, and that was quite interesting.|My entrepreneurial journey began as a young boy when I told my father that I did not want to follow in his footsteps to become a civil service officer. Many generations, on both sides of my family, had served as senior civil servants during the British Raj and my father was the second officer in the whole of India to be commissioned in the newly independent country. Being a good student I would, very likely, qualify for such a prestigious profession. My mother’s admonishment was, and had often been since childhood, “You will do what settles down in your own mind”.

A business profession was also out. Businessmen, as depicted in popular cinema, were crooks and blood suckers and were to be despised, but a newly established engineering program seemed promising. After the final exam and before the final submission of the thesis, I recall sitting at night with a few classmates in the May heat crying that I had made a colossal mistake - I had no interest in Engineering! A steel foundry job led quickly to the position of Production Control Officer. Driven to improve the processes at the foundry, I came across the newly emerging field of Operations Research. Corresponding with some practitioners in the field led to their encouraging me to join a formal program.
I was about to be married and my fiancé was working on her own degree in linguistics. Both of us scrambled to apply for our respective disciplines at various Universities. My best bet was Stanford and her Columbia. When we looked up the map of the US it was clear that this was not going to work, thus the University Minnesota was our middle ground. We planned to come to Minnesota and then move somewhere else, but here we are after nearly 50 years.
I was the first graduate with a MS in Operations Research (OR) from the University of Minnesota. Since the objective was to apply these techniques to business and industry, I felt it important to formally study it by enrolling in a MBA program. Being a newly minted OR person I got the opportunity to teach an independent class in Production Management, which, through a connection with one of my students, led to a fifteen-year position at a leading company in the car rental industry.
When the company was sold, I used my severance pay to contemplate my next steps. What stood out was the fact that we had succeeded against stiff competition by doing many innovative things-I wanted to study more of how that could be bottled. Who does innovative things against all odds and stiff competition? An entrepreneur. I had finally arrived at my raison d'être.
Fast forward. I went back to school to write my Ph.D. dissertation on entrepreneurs, which became the basis of the very first University program in Entrepreneurship in the region. I was a tenured professor and after 10 years left academia to start a few companies. The last one was sold in 2013. Now I run the Institute for Innovators and Entrepreneurs, a non-profit advocacy organization that is an advocate for entrepreneurs in the state.
Entrepreneurs have to constantly reconcile new emerging norms with their previously set internal beliefs. For example, a common regret as an immigrant, is leaving your family and friends; people who need no explanation on who you are. We also see the normalization of the myth that America is always a land of opportunity. Resolutions of such tensions are the skills that lead to unimagined destinations.
The stories in “Green Card Entrepreneur Voices” are so important because they enumerate the numerous paths people have taken to settle in their new home. Some came here due to treachery of war as refugees; others were driven by personal circumstances for a better life and yet others seeking opportunities. All of them describe the series of coincidences, like mine, that seem random until, in hindsight, they fit into a pattern. Many are intuitive assumptions that paid off, like learning French because they thought the grammar was easier than the other languages. We all have a story inside of us which is much more interesting than what appears on the surface. Our words may be different but there is a continuity of refrain underneath them all.
I immediately resonated with Green Card Voices’ storytelling approach because stories are like lightly processed case studies in a university setting. The case method is a proven educational tool that presents a situation complete with challenges, constraints and incomplete information. It forces the reader to be in the role of the decision maker and helps them analyze their own issues, exercise judgment and make decisions.
The Achieving Society, a book by David McClelland, drew evidence from history and some 40 contemporary nations to show how one human motive, the need for Achievement (nAchievement), a desire to excel for its own sake, was a precursor to periods of entrepreneurship and rapid economic growth. The one powerful source of instilling nAchievement was communities that shared folk tales and stories that described success after overcoming adversity. The future economic prosperity of a society depends on such stories we tell the next generation. This particular volume is the latest collection that showcases those who chose the path of becoming an entrepreneur in Minnesota.
Immigrants have a long history of starting businesses in the United States. From Alexander Graham Bell to Sergey Brin, immigrants have created some of America's most iconic companies. Their stories are broadly available. Through this book, we now have a deeper view, otherwise unavailable, into Minnesota companies such as Alterations by Caterina, that is sustaining a unique service; Curio Dance that brings a Julliard-educated teacher to Stillwater; Gandhi Mahal Restaurant, an aquaponics restaurant in Minneapolis; Metropolitan Transportation Network, the provider of more than 300 school buses; Star Banners that made the advertising banners for the Superbowl; Panache, that has spiced up apple cider and several others.
This book is sure to energize both immigrant and American-born communities, to boost entrepreneurship and enable future economic prosperity to the state. Through stories, and through the empathy they cultivate, we are all able to reach across conceived borders to learn about one another, be inspired, and find the value in all of our contributions. (Dr. Rajiv Tandon)

About this edition

• Publisher: Green Card Voices
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 099749607X
• ISBN 13: 9780997496079
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192
• Editor: Rozman Clark Tea, Mueller Rachel Lauren