This Is Africa-The Need for Daily Input

The 2006 movie Blood Diamond is known for two things in its portrayal of the Sierra Leone civil war: one is Leonard Di Caprio’s horrendous accent, the other is a line he quotes to describe the reason for the situation he finds himself in “T.I.A This is Africa.” The phrase for many becomes the resigned excuse for any negative experience in dealing with the continent. Bribe requests and corruption, unnecessary delays in obtaining paperwork, powercuts in the sub-region can all be brushed away with ‘This is Africa’. I would love to see a situation where the phrase is turned about to be a positive one. ‘Here is your permit ahead of schedule Sir, of course it is early-This is Africa’. ‘This is Africa-we don’t take bribes here.’ Even if changing people’s perception of Africa seems a little far away; how about we just start with how people view Zimbabwe. If that seems too much, then just let us just start with ourselves; our businesses, our departments, our families, our lives.

Cinderella’s fairy tale gives us some insight here. Cinderella wants to go to the ball, her fairy godmother conjures up a carriage from a pumpkin for her to go in, she steals the heart of the price but has to flee at midnight when the magic runs out and she has to dive out her carriage as it turns back into a vegetable. Every day the ‘magic’-the input, the effort that you have put into creating something amazing in your business- is going to run out at midnight. There is a need for new input in the morning. In the same way that a marriage needs daily commitment and daily winning of your spouse’s heart to flourish so does your business.

You can dream of the day that you can leave your business to run itself and you just reap a profit at the end. Keep dreaming. At some level you and your staff will need to fight the natural tendency of entropy that has systems breakdown and causes relationships to degenerate. It takes effort to keep inventory in stock, to chase debtors that are letting you down, to hold a creative and positive environment at work. Realise that at that moment when you reach a point where you could step back and hand over your business that you face the opportunity to get bigger, to provide more, to work even harder, and produce even better work.

Your life and your work will not get better because of one magical day that changes it all. It will get better as you embrace the daily discipline of working, of building, of making each day magical.

Today pick one thing that you can do to improve your work or someone else’s life. Perhaps it is buying a round of coffee for your staff who are working later than normal. Maybe it is reviewing your customer contact policy or drafting your top client a letter of gratitude. Pointing out where your client relations are not up to standard and encouraging your staff to maintain or go beyond the set standard. There is always something you can do. Then tomorrow do something else.

We can dream of a better future. We can dream of a better nation. Our dreams need to motivate us to action every day. Every day that we put effort into our lives and businesses, every day that we fight the pull of second-rate and corruption, every day that we spend not settling for the excuse of ‘This is Africa’ is one day closer to seeing that dream come true.

Why Cecil the Lion's story works so well-what we can learn

It has been brought to the (largely deaf) attention of a world preoccupied with a story as to why Cecil the Lion's story is receiving more attention than other issues that result in human death/disappearance. Check here and here for examples from Zimbabwe and the rest of the world. Not withstanding the use of media to promote a story that times well with a UN resolution on illegal wildlife trafficking there are a few reasons why Cecil the Lion resonates with us so strongly. Firstly the story has a clearly identified protagonist- the martyred, innocent lion Cecil who has no voice for himself; any other lion without a name and I doubt people would care as much. There are clearly identified antagonists who we can vilify, antagonists who have admitted to their part in the killing. And there is a clear violation of moral principle being told in the story-the taking of a collared Cecil from somewhere he was safe and luring him to an area where, without him realising it, he was a suitable candidate for a hunt. It is the clarity of the elements of the story that make it so powerful. Add to it a couple of horror details like bleeding for 40 hours before death and you have what is clearly a best seller. There is also created in the mind of the reader an identifiable pressing problem to be filled-that of justice-justice ably dispensed by the internet community on any platform associated with the 'villains'.


Unfortunately a dreadful and shocking abduction without a clearly identified antagonist is unlikely to grab our attention as much. Likewise a unnamed, dead, migrant we cannot identify with does not make a good protagonist in our minds as readers.


The best story wins.


(Please note that this post is not a commentary on the relative morality of these topics, rather it is simply pointing out what make the elements of a great story. Any story we tell; be it as a business about our product, in the news, or as individuals needs to have similar clear parts for it to resonate as well with the hearers.)

The Desirable Difficulty

I have a love/hate relationship with Malcolm Gladwell and I have never even met the man. For those of you not in the know, Mr Gladwell is an author and is probably one of the best around. He tends to take things you and I take for granted and completely blow them out the water.
I love his work, I love the controversy. The hate part of the relationship is that I don’t always agree with him.
Take for example his premise that it takes 10 000 hours to become an expert in a field.
I would argue that 10 000 hours is an average and that more likely some people get in 8 000 and some poor suckers are at it for an extra two years.
With his work you always have great material that you can use in debates. I bought myself a New Year’s present, his latest offering “David and Goliath” deals with the idea of the underdog.
He ploughs through examples of underdog success and failure in business and in life to hound out a few principles that work in the favour of the “less fortunate”.
One of those that resonate well is the concept of the “Desirable Difficulty”.
What if there were certain traits that the world would generally regard as undesirable that have an ultimate positive effect if worked through.
In the book, he highlights the idea of dyslexics who invent coping mechanisms that enable them to succeed as businessmen.
Richard Branson, Jetblue founder David Neeleman are a couple of names on the list of dyslexics who have made it big.
Now some would look at doing business in Zimbabwe as the biggest difficulty in the world.
We have been through hell and back economically. What if doing business was really easy here?
What if anyone could push through the bureaucracy required to start-up?
What if sourcing goods was as simple as a phone call and didn’t require dealing with crazy transport logistics, sanctions and the odd corrupt official?
What if we could obtain all we needed to run our business locally at a price cheaper than the rest of the world?
Sounds wonderful doesn’t it. I’m just not so sure that it would be.

You see the challenges we face require us to be innovative. It requires a tenacity and creativity to bootstrap a business when loans are not readily available.
It requires a certain amount of disagreement with the status quo and as George Bernard Shaw put it — a degree of unreasonableness.
He said “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
“Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Unreasonable here does not mean impolite, it just means an ability to not take no for an answer and to find a solution that works, even if that solution if out of the ordinary or breaks a few social norms along the way.
Ecocash is unreasonable for example. The norm for years has been that you go to a bank, stand in a queue to do a transaction.
Even in a world of internet banking there are still some things you need to go to the bank for.
Bank charges mean that transactions need to be meaningful to make them work. Wait, now your phone is your bank.
Transaction size is less of a limit. Of course the normal banking world is going to be upset.
A difficult world teaches us the meaning of failure. I had a friend at high school. He was an A grade student, he was beyond A grade.
He passed everything with over 90 percent. He complained if he fell out of the top five percent of the school.
Then one day he failed a test. His world ended. This was Armageddon, how would he ever recover from this.
Compare his reaction to someone who was more “average”, who failed maybe one in 10 tests.
They fail and their reaction is “oh look there is failure, yeah I met it before and I know you can recover from it so I’m going to recover.”
They move on to the next task and do better at it. Failure is never pleasant, but it is the tenacity that recovery from failure brings is what you want.
Imagine a country filled with people who have a mentality that says we recovered from the worst inflation figures in history.
We started, fought for and built businesses in the most desperate economic environment. We turned that economy around. People like that, a country like that will change the world.

Expand your business by being an access point

Africa is poised to grow at a rate of 5% per year. The World Economic Forum discussed it in great length in Cape-town, where I was honoured to be one of the moderators. “Can Africa live up to it’s promise?’ It’s the question in the room at the moment. What does this boil down to; lots and lots of opportunity needs lots and lots of cooperation and trust. Many times at the WEF the talks were about spring board platforms for talent and new ideas. Such platforms need cooperation and trust. Does politics or economics drive Africa?

In the past Africa has had a reputation of being “difficult.” I’m not just talking about local laws or government policies but the overall supportive culture of BIG ideas.

Are there opportunities in Africa? Yes massive ones and it’s no secret, but the better question is “Where are the access points?”

There are opportunities in China right now that will blow your mind. There are opportunities in Tete, Mozambique, the fastest growing city in the world. There are opportunities in Ethiopia, the Sudan, and Bolivia-and you probably know of a few more. We’ve had the conversations and they go like this… “You know what city is absolutely booming with opportunity…” Then it goes into a long story that you heard from some guy, that CNN picked up and did a short story on and so on. The only problem is you have no idea how to get involved or how to reach there.

We all know there’s opportunity, but not all of us have the access. You might be someone that has an “access point’ and not even know it? Do you have a good reputation in your city, a positive stream of endorsements, and do you trust yourself with people and introductions? Do you relate well with people, are you trustworthy, can you keep a secret if you need? If the answer is yes you could very well be an owner of an “access point.” If you don’t have a good reputation then you might want to start mending the bridges, repaying your debts, and start being this link for people who know there’s opportunity but can’t get to them.

How to be an access point:

People will pay a lot for trust - be honest and trustworthy.

Trust is earned over time. If you are willing to breach contracts, sell out to a higher bidder when you already gave your word, or just blatantly lie, then forget being trusted, and do not expect to be an access point.

Be accessible.

Nothing is worse then having an access point that you can’t access. Answer your phone, answer emails, create a good reputation when it comes to communication.

Connect people up even when you don’t get paid.

It’ll add to your reputation which will in the end lead you to more opportunities. Be a networker of ideas. Think about how you heard about your current mechanic, your current doctor, your accountant, your lawyer. Chances are it was through word of mouth. Someone connected you with them. Now take that concept and expand it beyond the sharing of professional services to connecting people in different spheres, different parts of the world.

Open up your world.

There might not be an immediate opportunity but if you’ve met someone with confidence and high values then finding a connection point might be around the corner. Be attentive to conversation. It will be in the seeming random, non-formal communication that you can pick up people are looking for. Some of the greatest opportunities may lie waiting at the office coffee dispenser. Many times we focus on where we are at and what we’re doing and by default only see opportunities where we are looking. Lift up your head from your desk and look around you. See what is available.

Churchill said 'You make a living by what you get, but you create a life by what you give'.

Being an access point often means being a giver. Connecting people is at its core an act of giving, you are giving away an opportunity that you may not be able to take advantage of on your own. But the result is so much bigger than anything that you could do individually that it is too good not to. Remember the hosepipe, that as it connects the tap to the plants, it too gets wet.