The 3 Sharpest Ideas for Your Day (Jan 22)
One of the advantages of working for my own company has been the increased amount of time I get to spend reading and reflecting. Most mornings now, I spend quality time with ideas: synthesizing whatever insights were ruminating in the back of my mind the day before. Months ago, I deleted my old LinkedIn account. (Created it as a student; never really needed to use it.) I want to use this new account to share the sharpest reflections I have, plus the sharpest ideas I encounter. Topics unlimited.
You might not have the luxury of time I have, so I will try to be useful, clear and succinct in bringing these ideas to the fore for you.
We will have:
1. One reflection of my own that morning
2. One article I’ve read in the recent past and found particularly insightful
3. One quote that made me go “hmmm!”
Future posts won’t have this lengthy introduction. Thinking of doing these in both English and Swahili. If you find this useful, please follow and share. Here we go.
-
1. Reflect: How are you recording and where are you sharing your Tanzanian brand story? Why are 90% of the examples we give when teaching business principles in Tanzania non-Tanzanian?
One of the most pressing but easy-to-miss needs in the Tanzanian business landscape is the need for contextualized examples. What do I mean? There is a void in the current Tanzanian business and education system of stories, studies and illustrative samples of the principles one learns being applied in this market. Why is it that most of the discussions around good branding here will invoke, say, Apple or McDonald’s but not, say, CRDB Bank or Samaki Samaki? Where is the detailed analysis of Samaki Samaki’s design and execution of a consistent brand experience that resonates with its youthful urban target audience? Where’s the illustrative look at the brand’s quirky yet effective digital media use? I’ve not seen it.
This stems from a lack of documenting and sharing our brand stories, our business strategies, and successful applications of principles to Tanzanian contexts. It also betrays an underlying (misinformed) attitude that there is little of worth to learn from ourselves and our businesses. The international ones are more worthy, somehow. But here’s the thing: I bet you will glean more useful information about how to set up your business for a successful multi-million dollar exit from Andron’s recent sale of Kopa Gas here than from studying Instagram’s sale to Facebook. (I don’t miss the irony of my idea 2 for today being about Instagram’s co-founder).
Andron Mendes, Tanzanian inventor of a pay-as-you-go clean gas technology with Safaricom and UK Government execs.
I recently trained a group of communications experts on producing mobile-first digital content. As I planned for the lesson, I noted that all of the examples I had jotted down for the class where of global (non-Tanzanian) brands. During the class, I challenged both myself and the attendees to give Tanzanian examples that are illustrative of the principles we were discussing. And the examples flowed plenty!
Doesn’t your brand have transmutable lessons others can learn from? Aren’t there ways your company applies illustrative business principles successfully in the Tanzanian context? What are you doing about it? Are you documenting and sharing Tanzania-centered insights from your business? How are you recording and where are you sharing your Tanzanian brand story?
2. Read: The Cut’s interview with Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom. He reflects on truth, scale and influencers in the hyper-connectedness of today that he helped create.
My favorite response is when he contrasts scaling your business now to scaling your business before the digital revolution:
We’ve entered a world where there’s basically zero marginal cost to expand.
- Kevin Systrom
“In the past, if you wanted to sell another car, you had to build another car.
It took a long time. It took an enormous amount of money. Then that car went out, and maybe you sold it, maybe you didn’t. Whereas Instagram’s kind of like — imagine you build an imaginary car. If it’s a good imaginary car, all of a sudden a billion people are using it. If you’re digital, it’s no longer hard to expand your business. The reason we’re in this moment is because there’s no capital cost to expansion.”
3. Consider: Acceptance and its link to you being less miserable and more productive.
“You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it, and not accepting it. It’s that struggle, that aversion, that is responsible for most of our misery. The phrase that I use the most to myself in my head is one word: accept.”
- Naval Ravikant
