LACK OF SELF-CONFIDENCE

LACK OF SELF-CONFIDENCE

The first time I came to Macedonia, I found two things that disturbed me. First and most important: I couldn’t find a single Macedonian book or newspaper sold in the stores. The places were drowning in Serbian and Croatian books, newspapers and other reading material. This situation lasted for a long time but eventually Macedonian books and newspapers began to slowly surface. Now, 40 years later, there is new situation developing and it’s not positive. The Serbian and Croatian material has been replaced with English material. You can’t even find a single Macedonian book in some bookstores. But when you do find a Macedonian book, you will want read it and read it again because it left you with deep impressions. How can we explain what is happening? It seems to me that some of us think foreign books are more valuable and we expect to get more out of them than out of our own books. But it’s not like that. We first need to read our books and then read the foreign books in order to do a comparative analysis and reach our own conclusions. But, how do we do that if no Macedonian books are available for us to purchase and if we can’t read the foreign books because we don’t speak the languages in which they are written?

I am a chemical engineering technologist and the second thing I found that disturbed me had to do with how some things were done at my job. The people in the paint and varnish factory where I worked had become dependent for everything on the Croatians and Slovenians in terms of solving technical problems. The machinery for making formalin and resin were unused. The adhesive plant produced only one type of urea adhesive. When I was appointed head of these synthetic plants, I was advised that my first job was to hire 5 apprentice trainees, not experienced engineers. We spent two hours every day listening to a Croatian or Slovenian engineer telling us what to do instead of referring us to the documentary material that was supposed to be collected from technical literature on the technologies which we could have applied in our plants ourselves. After a lot of discussion we went to the plants to see if it was possible for us to produce the same products.

The resin boiler was put to work with technology from Color Medvode, Slovenia. The team of young engineers and technicians

quickly learned the technology and put the paint and varnish plant to work producing about 200 tons of resin during the first year. The same team of engineers and technicians produced about 1,000 tons of resin the second year. Despite the volume there were no complaints from quality control. After that the adhesive plant began to deliver adhesives all throughout Yugoslavia.

What happened? Not much really! Our team of technicians and engineers took the initiative to do everything themselves without any outside help. Our crew did not study in Cambridge University or have any practice in Slovenia or Germany; it developed the know-how here in Macedonia. The entire crew was educated in a faculty or technical school here in Macedonia. Toshko, one of those engineers, became a top engineer in a well-known Dutch company. Pero, the other engineer went to work for a large German company.

The question here is “should we place confidence in our Macedonian people to do the hard jobs or should we seek the help of outsiders who we think are ‘better’…”?

Like the American businessman and my guest from California said: “…you need to raise your sleeves up a little higher…” I hope by now everyone understands what he meant by that…

Here we have proven that with some initiative many things are possible. Our team from the synthetic plants achieved great successes by investing in the right people and by thinking that anything was possible… even things deemed impossible…

But not all of our innovations went as smooth as I described them. We did not always have the necessary confidence from our managerial factors. But, in spite of all that, there was almost no international fair, from which Macedonians returned without a gold or a silver medal in their hands. Were these awards awarded to them because these people loved the Macedonians?

No! The Macedonians genuinely earned them!

Macedonian innovations have ranked among the top innovations in Europe. An example of this was the exhibition organized by

Ambassador Fouere at the European Centre in Skopje on the occasion of Innovators of Europe Day. Here 16 innovations were selected and exhibited. When I asked one of the organizers for his opinion on how the quality of the Macedonian innovations compared to the others, he said they were as good quality as any other European innovation, even those prepared by large teams of engineers. I talked with most inventors there and asked why their innovations were not implemented. Almost all of them said because they were waiting for help from the government. This is where everything stops. It is truly a sin not to implement successful inventions!

My personal experience tells me that there is still a need for constructing and experimenting with prototypes.