Kumbaya

Immanuel Kant and Business Strategy: why you need to be a critical thinker in business

2013-08-24T01:23:00.003-07:00

Of recent I took up an interest in a German philosopher of the late 18th century: Immanuel Kant. His much acclaimed paper; "what is enligthenment?" is a beautiful piece encouraging readers to think for themselves. I found this particular excerpt beautiful and pertinent:

"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity
is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another.
This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but
lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The
motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own
understanding!"

I had a lively discussion with an acquaintance on critique yesterday. It was actually about whether we need critique at all? And I believe "yes" and a big one at that. We need critique everywhere. Critique is what makes the world a better place. Critique makes new and better products and critique is definitely a key component of business success. Critique provides you with great questions and makes you:

A better business thinker: what if?
A better innovator: how about?
And a better designer: why not?

I think as I explain below you need those question to build great companies, products and services.

Customer-centricity: How understanding and solving the specific problems of your customers will gradually turn you into a market leader

2013-08-17T04:26:00.000-07:00

By Patrick Mayoh

You should stop thinking about your company in terms of the product or service you sell. Rather your company serves specific customers' needs or problems. I think company that are customer centric rather than product-centric have more competitive edge. You don't want to be perceived as an organization that tries to get people to buy your stuffs but as a problem solver or a place where people's problems are truly understood and solved.

I have thought about a matrix that you can use as a starting point to develop, improve or bring new products to your market. It is applicable to all business settings and all types of customers. It helps you:

Define a problem (what are your customers facing: how, when, where)
Identify current solutions to the problem (who is helping them or what are they doing themselves already)
And bring in your solutions (what is not right with what they are doing and how are you helping them)

I have been working as a chief strategy officer for Auracameroon a water-solutions company in Cameroon. Developping and using this framework has been very instrumental for the job I have to do.

By 2040 most African Countries will be middle class: Five things you can do from today to successfully establish your business by 2040 on the continent

2013-07-27T04:21:00.000-07:00

By Patrick Mayoh

Carlos Lopez, current UN under-secretary-general and executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), believes most African nations will be middle-class by 2040. Assuming this is true, and I don't have any reason to believe it is not. I think there are 5 things you can start doing today as a multinational or local comapny or as an entrepreneur to make sure you succeed in Africa.

Target the youth

Half of the youth population by 2040 will be from Africa. So think about the different ways you can learn about the youth population, namely their tastes, aspirations and needs. Think about products or services that will tap into their wishes and connect with them. Sponsor youth-related events and causes and make yourself visible, get to be known among them. Many of them today might not actually have the money to buy what you sell but by being visible, I am sure they will remember you when they have some money to spend.

Build Brand Loyalty

This sounds a bit similar to the first point. But what I mean here is, as a company still appealing to customers and consumers from other geographies, think about how you can appeal to African customers. Tailor your products, services and offerings to their context. Be customer-centric rather than product centric, if you don't understand the difference, read this article. Some brands are thinking along this line. This article on Heinekenn's strategy for Africa is a good example of what I am talking about here (sorry it is in french).

Plan your market-entry

Africa is not a country. It is a collection of diverse nations and consumers, so although culturally you might find many similarities you will also be faced with a lot of differences. People in Lagos in Nigeria and Douala in Cameroon have different needs. So in planning to enter the African market be careful not to focus on the whole continent but think in terms of cities or neighborhoods in cities. Income levels vary from one country to another. You have many entry strategies. You can either commit by investing in R&D or reconfigure the value chain for your products, or do some judo economics or niche strategy, depending on the size of your firm.

Get to know the African Consumer

Reinaldo Fiorini and Safroadu Yeboah-Amankwah from Mc Kinsey and Company believe Africans are hopeful and aspirational. Armed with this kind of information, there is a lot you can do to capitalize on the optimism of Africa. For example think about products and services that reflect that state of mind and do some more research to deepen your understanding of the customer segment you aim to serve in Africa.

Buy a stake or work for a company with operations in Africa

If you are truly serious about building a successful business in Africa, then work in a company with operations in Africa. This will increase your understanding of how to succeed there and will provide you with some idea about the African consumer. If you have some money buy a stake in an African Company that you can plan to buy later depending on your plans.

Do you know other ways to plan for the African market?

Patrick Mayoh is a chief strategy officer at Aura Cameroon.

Building Brand Loyalty: Authenticity Marketing!

2013-07-20T04:33:00.000-07:00

By Patrick Mayoh

I watched a fascinating ted talk a couple of days ago by Joseph Pine, author of the Experience Economy and Authenticity: what consumers really want. The economy according to him has gone through three stages. Starting as a commodity-based system, the world with the industrial revolution moved to a goods-based economy and later on to a service-based economy. What we are now going through is the age of authenticity. An age of mass-customization where consumers want to be treated uniquely.

Companies that want to sell in the 21st century have to be true to themselves and true to customers. This has always seemed to be the case, but I feel this is even truer today than never before in history. As Jeff Bezos famously said:

“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.”

In an age of global digitalisation, customers everywhere want more, expect more and look for more honest companies...more authentic ones.

Being true to yourself

This is all about what you stand for. You don't want your business to be out there just to make sales, but you want to be identifiable, to be associated with certain values and principles. Think "connectedness" and facebook comes to mind or "innovation" and all you think of is Apple or "fantasy" for Disney. All your products and services are built around your identity, your customers relate to your identity and expect you to stay true to what you proclaim to be as an organization. So in case you still find yourself floundering not actually sure why you are in market, think again!

Being true to customers

I came across this article about companies that engage in predatory marketing activities to stop mothers from breastfeeding their children in order to buy their formula. The World Health Organization strongly recommends mothers breastfeed new infants for 6 months, arguing this is beneficial for the I.Q and the brain development of a new born; that some companies would have none of this, and invest tons of money in marketing to persuade mothers to buy their baby formular is a case of companies not being true to customers. What happens when the mothers actually find out?

Or think about this campaign launched by one skin care company with offices in Cameroon and Gabon, marketing a lotion that can turn dark skin into a fairer type as if to stay dark African skin is not attractive. Those are just a few examples of companies that are out to sell products and services.

But this is not enough today. Companies that want to sell today will have to be honest and mindful of what consumers truly want to experience and how they can fulfill that need without having to lie about what they can do.

Be it in Africa or elsewhere, I think it is time to tailor our offerings, products and services to the identities of our respective organisations and the aspirations of our consumer-segments all in an honest and authentic brand strategy.

Patrick Mayoh is a chief strategy officer at Aura Cameroon

Nigeria: A vivid picture of what African Countries should do to achieve full economic prosperity

2013-07-08T09:02:00.000-07:00

By Patrick Mayoh

I really struggled to find this title and I am sure I could have come up with a better one. What exactly do I mean by full economic prosperity? The fastest growing economies are in Africa and some African nations are expected to grow by 7% or higher as they have done over most of the past decade. But GDP growth is not enough. As long as people do not feel the benefits of a growing economy, GDP growth by itself does not make much of a difference, except on paper. The Boston Consulting Group recently unveiled a very interesting framework for measuring well-being in a nation. Bhutan relies on a gross national hapiness index as a better way to gauge the economic well-being of its citizens.

Nigeria is a good case in point for that matter. It has a fast growing GDP, 44% of the population are under 15 (auguring a good population dividend) and it has abundant oil reserves. Nigeria is expected to have a GDP growth of 7% this year and draws a lot of interest from investors and foreign multinationals. Yet according to this article from the financial times the poverty rate is still 63% and youth unemployment stands at 37% while unemployment overall stands at 24%. As with many African nations there is great potential and numerous opportunities, but people are yet to benefit.

I believe leaders should think about educating our young people. This should not just be about building more schools, or increasing the literacy rates, but more about providing the skills that are needed for our economies to compete in the 21st century. Moreover I think our Governments should invest in the kind of infrastructure that will attract and retain investors. Power cuts are prevalent in Nigeria as in most of Africa, how do we hope to attract FDIs with that? Lastly we need our Governments to be staffed with people of integrity, corruption is reportedly endemic in the Nigerian society as in many African countries. I hope the elections in 2015 in Nigeria will provide leaders with vision, and leaders that will tackle the boko haram, the poverty and the education issues efficiently. And I hope this will be an inspiration for other African countries.

Patrick Mayoh is a chief strategy officer at aura cameroon

We all know Africa is changing and so what?

2013-07-02T07:35:00.000-07:00

By Patrick Mayoh

I just read another one of those typical articles on Africa. By typical, I mean one article praising the growing economy, potentials and positive outlook of the continent. Many of those are being written nowadays and you can hardly spend a day without reading about another piece on the prowesses of the continent.

I used to enjoy reading those ( I actually created this blog to highlight the many changes happening on the African Continent) and I still do, but I feel we need to change the nature of the conversation on Africa. It is all exciting to know the Economist does not refer to Africa as the hopeless continent anymore, but as a continent that is rising. It is flattering to witness how Wall Street and other stock markets are all getting excited about Africa. Now that Growth figures have reached a tipping point in Asia, it feels good to know that investors are now turning to Africa for economic opportunities.

Still one has to be cautious here. I am very optimistic about the prospects of Africa, but I know many Africans are yet to enjoy the fruits of economic growth in their respective economies. I know we lack basic infrastructure on a massive scale, I am aware of the fact that we need more educated leaders and I know poverty despite the rising middle class is still rampant. Therefore I believe in changing the nature of our conversation.

Let us look at the countries that are doing extremely well economically like Ghana, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Angola and to a certain extent Nigeria and as thinkers let us write on how we can replicate what they are doing elsewhere on the continent. Let us not highlight only success stories but let us think about how these success stories can benefit other countries that are still lagging behind economically. I actually wrote an article on how other African Countries could replicate the success story of Rwanda.

Let us write about educating our leaders and about providing the right skills to our graduates. Let us write about how we can stop the brain drain and why we should get our best brains back from wherever they are so the can help develop the continent.

I am excited things are improving on the continent and I can see that, but I would like the conversation on Africa to shift on how we can make this happen even quicker and on a more massive scale. Africa is still the poorest continent anyway, so getting all excited about changes is good but thinking on how we can accelerate this is even much better.

Patrick Mayoh is a chief strategy officer at aura cameroon

Content is everything nowadays

2013-06-29T02:55:00.001-07:00

By Patrick Mayoh

Slideshare is a great tool for learning about trendy subjects, be it marketing, business or economics to name just a few of these. I happened to have gone through a series of presentations on content marketing. Traditional ways of advertising products and services are fading out and creating engaging and relevant content for your target audience is the new way of generating leads and eventually getting people really interested in what you sell.

As it is the case with technology, the effects are pervasive, affecting companies all over the world. Whether you are a marketing manager in a developed or emerging economy there are statistics you can't just afford to overlook. In this post I am going to share three things (although there are many more things to say on the topic) I have learned so far from reading about content marketing and how it will change the way we advertise and market our products in the coming years.

9 out of 10 Organisations market with content

This is a data from the content marketing institute, and I am not sure the study is representative of marketing strategies worldwide. Still, what the data tells is, more and more Marketing managers are increasingly rejecting old marketing tactics to focus on content marketing instead. The content marketing institute define content marketing as:

"Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action."

It is in a nutshell the art of selling without giving that impression. Traditional marketing techniques including tv and magazine ads and billboards or Internet pop-ups pitch information about products and most of the times this is annoying for you and me. Who does not switch between channels to avoid sitting through commercials? With content marketing your aim is to create a video, write a blogpost or share a link that inform your customers and help them make clever decisions about their purchases or the kind of producs or services they should buy.

Blogs are 63% more likely to influence purchase decisions

Your company should have a blog. Blogposts about your products or services indicate you know about your area of expertise. Blogposts tell your customers you want to make them more intelligent and blogposts tell your clients you are interested not so much about selling but about truly helping your customers understand how your company as a whole makes a difference. Blogposts finally are an indication you are a customer-centric organisation (you should better be) rather than a product-centric one, because you write about how your product or service help customers improve their lives

Customers who receive email marketing spend 83% more when shopping

It is time for your marketing department to formulate an email marketing strategy. Make it a goal to send an email to customers about an issue your organisation cares about or a problem you are solving. If you are a health care company send an email about the need to exercise and to remain fit for example. Let your customers know you know your stuff and interact with them on a regular basis to showcase your expertise and knowledge of your business sector.

Again as I said in the beginning, new analytics emerge everyday about content marketing and marketers are only beginning to realise the key to effectively using content marketing. For more information on the topic I recommend these two slideshare presentations:

1. http://fr.slideshare.net/BlogGrowth/18-useful-internet-marketing-statistics-that-you-cant-ignore

2. http://fr.slideshare.net/NewsCred/50-best-stats-presentation

Patrick Mayoh is a chief strategy officer at Aura Cameroon

La nouvelle application "graph search" vue du Cameroun: Révolution marketing?

2013-03-09T01:54:00.000-08:00

By Patrick Mayoh and Mikael Luntchap

Trouver des informations précises sur vos contacts Facebook semble pour le moment fournir des résultats intéressants mais pas aussi fascinants que la nouvelle application «graph search ». Celle-ci est progressivement en train d’être déployée pour les utilisateurs parlant ou utilisant le réseau social en anglais.

Nul doute que la fonctionnalité sera bientôt accessible en d’autres langues. Avant que cela ne soit le cas, nous avons voulu dans ce papier nous intéresser à « graph search » mais surtout aux implications de cette nouvelle fonctionnalité pour la segmentation des clients et l’optimisation des données dans le cadre de l’inbound ou de l’outbound marketing.

Graph Search c’est quoi ?

Vous vous demandez lesquels de vos amis vivent à Yaoundé, aiment la page de la boisson « fanta »? Vous voulez savoir qui de vos ami(e)s vivant au Cameroun aiment une page dédiée au Mbongo Tchobi ? Ou encore vous voulez retrouver toutes les photos que vos ami(e)s ont postées sur Facebook pour votre dernier anniversaire ? Graph Search devraient vous permettre d’obtenir des informations de cette nature, et ceci n’est peut-être que la partie immergée de l’iceberg.

En gros au travers de Graph Search, Facebook met à la disposition de ses utilisateurs un outil inédit d’agrégation de données selon les requêtes envoyées par ces derniers. Les implications pour la vie privée sont réelles pour les utilisateurs qui ne prennent pas la peine de protéger leurs informations ; mais pour les départements marketing, Graph Search est peut être une grosse aubaine.

Des implications pour le Marketing ?

La plupart des réseaux sociaux ne propose qu’une interface de statistiques permettant de récupérer un niveau très agrégé de l’information.

Il convient de rappeler que Graph Search permet de faire des recherches croisées sur l'ensemble des données renseignées par les utilisateurs de Facebook (les pages "aimées", les lieux "visités", les entreprises dans lesquelles ils ont travaillé...).[1] Ainsi, le croisement de toutes ces données fait désormais de Facebook un formidable outil de compilation, qui peut être utilisé à des fins très diverses en fonction des motivations des personnes employant ce nouveau moteur de recherche.

Les réseaux sociaux sont devenus des axes incontournables de développement pour les entreprises au Cameroun car ils offrent des avantages importants : présence et visibilité, notoriété et popularité, ventes et profits. 58% des Camerounais déclarent être présents sur les réseaux sociaux, le plus populaire d’entre eux étant Facebook.

Celui-ci comptabilise près de 11 millions d’utilisateurs actifs rien qu’au Cameroun, soit plus de 33% de la population.[2] Bien exploités, les réseaux sociaux contribueront à valoriser votre image de marque et à accroître votre trafic et vos ventes. La présence et surtout la popularité d’une marque sur les réseaux sociaux est également un critère de classement pour les moteurs de recherche, en particulier Google, utilisé par plus de 70 % des internautes Camerounais.

Enfin, il est aujourd’hui possible pour une entreprise camerounaise d’avoir une boutique en ligne et de vendre ses produits directement sur sa page Facebook, via certaines applications gratuites et proposer une offre adaptée pour un groupe précis de « likeurs ». Ceci implique de segmenter, hiérarchiser leur clientèle et concentrer leurs efforts sur les clients les plus fidèles. Il faut construire une relation durable entre l’entreprise et le client identifié individuellement.

Ce nouvel outil permettra aux entreprises camerounaises d’identifier les clients, de proposer à ceux-ci des services et valeurs différentes, d’obtenir plus d’interactivité avec leurs clients, en dépensant moins, et de répondre précisément aux demandes de ces clients. Exemple : quels sont les lieux que vos amis aiment à Yaoundé ? Le moteur affiche alors une liste de lieux que vos amis ont "aimés", depuis qu'ils sont inscrits sur Facebook... s'ils n'ont pas précisé que ces résultats devraient rester privés.

S’il s’est toujours avéré difficile de segmenter sur les réseaux sociaux, les entreprises pourront désormais s’approprier les informations relatives à leurs fans pour toucher un maximum de gens intéressés. Définir des profils parmi vos amis : ce qu’ils aiment, les lieux qu’ils fréquentent etc. Dans ce contexte le ciblage deviendra très aisé sur ce réseau social.

Visez juste !!!

Luntchap Mikael is Chief Communications and Marketing Officer at Aura Cameroon where Patrick Mayoh is Chief Strategy Officer

[1] http://rezonances.blog.lemonde.fr/2013/02/09/nous-avons-teste-graph-search-le-nouveau-moteur-de-recherche-sur-facebook/

[2] http://www.clinkast.com/v2/Reseaux-sociaux.html

Making Africans benefit from the resource boom through Sovereign Wealth Funds

2012-12-29T02:21:00.000-08:00

By Patrick Mayoh

Mother Africa is actually a resource-rich place. That, many Africans are aware of. Nigeria alone produces 2.09m barrels of oil a day, not to mention Angola which is experiencing an unprecedented oil boom. But mismanagement of revenues has always been the issue with resource-rich nations of Africa. The money goes into the hands of unscrupulous leaders and the people never benefit. It is no wonder oil and other resources in Africa have been considered as a curse for Africa. In most cases instead of improving living conditions resources have shown just how much Africa is corrupted with leaders unwilling to do anything to share the bounty with people.

But that might be changing. Take Ghana for example, now an oil producer since 2009, which embarked on a series of measures designed to better manage revenues and leading to the revenue management act. Or Angola and Nigeria having respectively set up sovereign wealth funds designed in both cases to save and invest oil revenues. With new oil discoveries being made across African Nations including Cameroon, Gabon and Sierra Leone just to mention these ones they are at least three reasons why resource-rich nations should have Sovereign Wealth Funds including:

To boost domestic growth
To improve sovereign credit rating
To invest in future generations

Boosting domestic growth

Instead of keeping the money in foreign accounts in Switzerland and other fiscal havens, a better idea would be to form an independent board made up of investment experts to harness the wealth in order to grow the economy. It is time for money made in Africa to stay in Africa and circulate within Africa. Oil money could be kept within states to fund projects, initiatives and small business. This would be much better than keeping it in a Western account so it can generate meager interests. Setting up a fund with strong accountability requirements to better use the money within the resource-rich nation is definitely the way.

Improving sovereign credit rating

Nigeria received its first Moody rating, a Ba3 thanks to the establishment of it sovereign wealth funds. Angola’s outlook moved from positive to stable on Moody’s rating thanks to the establishment of its Funde Soberano de Angola. Credit rating agencies usually deem nations with Sovereign wealth funds to be financially secure and stable. Financially stable and secure nations easily borrow from financial markets.

Investing in future generations

Most importantly funds should be designed to help future generations. Through various schemes the money made from oil and other resources from mining examples could be used through a combination of schemes for investing in education or consolidating the financial position of a nation so future generations can benefit. This is what I call sustainable economics. Managing a country’s wealth with the future generations in mind is how things should be done. Planning for the long term and encouraging initiatives that will benefit the youth is the kind of mindset we now need in Africa.

To guarantee accountability it might be wise like in Ghana to have members from the civil society. The Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC) in Ghana is in charge of making sure the Government abides by the standards set in place for the management of oil revenues in the nation. So time for other nations; Cameroon, Sierra Leone and Chad to follow the bandwagon

When will Sub-Saharan Africa think like Rwanda?

2012-10-31T04:56:00.000-07:00

By Patrick Mayoh

And I mean all of Sub-Saharan Africa including South Africa (Take a look at this article). A week ago the World Bank released its most awaited “doing business 2013” entitled “smarter regulations for small and medium-sized enterprises”. The “doing business” report is the equivalent of a class report at the end of a school year outlining the best students and those who need to make substantial improvements in their courses. So Singapore is the best student for the 7^th year running and there is no reason to think it won’t happen again.

I am mostly concerned about Africa. And this blog is about Africa by the way. Obviously North-African countries show the strongest signs of improvement on the continent. Tunisia was ranked 50^th and the first African country; but I would like in this post to turn my attention to Rwanda.

Do you remember the Genocide and its one million dead? I can hardly, such is Rwanda's improvements across the board that someone might ask why is Sub-Saharan African not embracing the Rwanda bandwagon? Ranked 52^nd and improving by more than 26% on business regulations since 2005 Rwanda is on the road to becoming an emerging economy before many Sub-Saharan economies with more advantages and natural conditions like Nigeria, Cameroon or the DRC to name just a few.

The “Doing Business 2013” report devoted a whole section to Rwanda outlining the reasons why the country has transformed itself from a hopeless nation following the aftermath of the genocide in 1994 to a strong and dynamic country. From what I have gathered I believe African countries should enact the following if they want to attain the same level of improvement as Rwanda:

Ø Get rid of unnecessary slogans and formulate clear strategies

Ø Make investors (domestic and foreign) love your country (and I mean love not like)

Ø Get leaders (and I mean the tops one like Presidents, Kings and Prime Ministers) to become business reforms evangelists

Ø Keep the civil society close and the private society even closer

Getting rid of unnecessary slogans

Slogans rarely make things happen in business. They are useless especially when they are not complemented with clear strategies. African leaders are very good at formulating them. Few possess a vision for the future and many of those few have yet to formulate strategies for achieving those visions. In 2000 the Rwandan Government after a 2-year consultation process formulated a vision for 2020. One of the key tenets of the vision was the raising of the income per capita from $290 to $900. This was not all. The government went on to identify the key challenges to address in order to achieve their vision like: the past civil war, poor governance, weak infrastructure, underdeveloped financial and private sectors, unemployment, overwhelming publi debt, a poorly developed education system, HIV and the rapid growth of the population.

Having identified these hurdles the authorities went on to set initiatives and projects to address each of these including: the competitiveness and enterprise development project, the Rwandan investment climate reform program and the “doing business” unit. Those organizations under the umbrella of the Government have an annual reform plan; no wonder Rwanda is improving. In a nutshell formulating a clear strategy revolves around two things:

Ø Identifying key challenges to your vision as a business or a country

Ø And formulating clear steps and actions and guidelines to meet each of the challenges identified

Making investors love your country

Rwanda is a landlocked country and natural resources are scarce unlike in many other African countries. The Government found a smart way to offset these disadvantages with attractive business regulations. It is commonsensical, if investors can easily open a business, can be guaranteed their assets will be protected, can have access to infrastructure (electricity being a key one), can easily make a profit and so on and so forth why would they resist falling in love with your country? Rwanda quickly understood this by setting up the “doing business” unit. The World Bank assesses countries’ business attractiveness on 11criteria including: starting a business, getting credit, protecting investors and registering property to name just a few[1].

The “doing business” unit in Rwanda is tasked with improving the business climate of the country alongside the criteria used by the World Bank. The results speak for themselves. Since 2005 Rwanda has introduced 26 new business regulations, improved its credit report system, appointed new notaries to make it easier to start a business (there had just been one notart up to 2006) , reduced the number of days to start a business from18 days to just 3, reduced the number of days it takes to transfer property from 346 days to less than 30 days and reduced the number of days and official documents necessary to export goods from 14 official documents and 60 days to 8 documents and 29 days. No wonder the very pessimistic (especially about Africa) “the Economist” called Rwanda the “new Singapore” in 2012. In a nutshell like Rwanda:

Ø Set up a “doing business” unit in your country

Ø Base reform and improvement initiatives on the criteria of the" doing business" reports

Getting your top leaders to evangelize about business reform initiatives

Paul Kagame is a very energetic type. He regularly flies to Europe to meet with the Diaspora. I know a friend from Rwanda who has met him in many occasions; I can hardly say the same about my own President. But you need many leaders like Paul Kagame. Energetic and determined to make things happen. You need leaders who motivate their teams, their ministers to think about business reforms, about improving the business climate. The Competitiveness and Enterprise Development project, the Rwandan Investment Climate Reform Program and the “Doing Business” unit and many other key development initiatives bring together representatives from different ministries. The idea of confining the economy or the development of a nation to a ministerial unit is actually a mistake. Instead the Presidents of Africa themselves should be at the top of development initiatives and encourage their ministers to think like themselves. Therefore like Rwanda all African countries should have:

Ø Energetic leaders that are fully nay entirely committed to the development of their respective nations

Ø Those leaders should in turn inculcate their vision to their ministers

Ø Government practice should be organized around a vision and a clear strategy to make development truly happen

Collaborating with the civil society and the private sector

Nothing happens without them (the people). Actually everything that happens does with them. Therefore the people, most particularly those who represent them even at the smallest level should be considered when a country has a development vision. Development never happens in a vacuum, it needs its key stakeholders to work meaningfully for the benefit of all. The Competitiveness and Enterprise Development project, the Rwandan Investment Climate Reform Program and the “Doing Business” unit and many other key development initiatives not only bring representatives from the public sector but representatives from the private sector as well. The combination of inputs from both sectors clearly explains why Rwanda is ahead and in road to becoming an emerging economy by 2020 as its vision suggests. Like Rwanda, African countries should:

Ø Get the private and the public sector to have mutual rather than conflicting interests and goals

Ø Identify and engage with key actors of the civil society

Ø And have the well-being of the society as the priority of all development initiatives

This is why I believe Africa should embrace the Rwandan Bandwagon as soon as possible. Do you agree or disagree? Please leave a comment whatever your view is.

[1] The rest includes: Dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, employing workers, resolving insolvency, enforcing contracts, trading across borders and paying taxes.

New Product Development for Africa

2012-10-18T10:03:00.000-07:00

By Patrick Mayoh

A recent report by Mc Kinsey indicates that emerging markets will be worth $30 trillion by 2025 –the biggest growth opportunity in the history of capitalism they suggest--they are worth about $12 trillion nowadays. The report equally suggests that growth will come from second-tier cities people don’t hear much about nowadays like Ahmedabad, Huambo, medan or Douala. Interestingly leading companies of the world get about just 17% of their revenues in these markets when these represent 36% of global GDP.

African Economies are part of those emerging economies in some respect. And because the face of the continent with a fast-growing middle class is rapidly changing, there is room for growth for companies willing to create new market spaces and invest on the African Continent. In this blogpost I will talk about new product development for Africa. I believe western companies willing to gain a stronger position in Africa should:

--> Develop products and services suited to African consumers

· -->Invest in Research and Development Centres in and for Africa

· -->And source local talents to lead their offices in Africa

Products and Services for Africans

I think many western and foreign companies by extension; have gone out of their ways to create products and services that more or less reflect the needs of emerging markets. Unilever the Anglo-Dutch consumer goods giant recently released a new brand of shampoo for the South-African market. Currently it aims to create more products that are reflective of local tastes. I think this is an example that should be followed by many other western companies truly willing to invest on the continent. More Africans have money to spend and more Africans will spend on products that appeal to their needs. As such, businesses have an imperative to rethink their business models as well; that is the way they make and distribute products to customers. A successful example of this is Nestlé spaza shops; a scheme that makes it easier for the company to reach shops in the remotest areas of Africa.

Investing in R&D facilities in Africa

China had about 57 R&D centres in 2007 with global giants like Google, Microsoft, Unilever, P&G and GSK to name just a few; India had about the same number of R&D centres in 2010, though many of the companies are mostly IT ones. No doubt these are high and fast growth economies. According to a recent HSBC report China and India will be the first and third world economies respectively in 2050, so it only makes sense to invest in these countries in light of all the positive implications. However Africa will have a strong middle class and it is happening anyway already, plus it will be home to the largest workforce in the world more than China and India combined by 2040 with 52 African cities having a population of at least 1 million each according to another Mc Kinsey report. I believe companies that invest in R&D facilities in African countries are set to reap massive benefits in terms of larger market shares and widespread product adoption for their companies.

Get locals to lead in Africa

Many foreign companies still rely on expatriates to lead. But this does not have to be so. In a previous blogpost I spoke about Africans having all the top qualifications required to help Africa become a great continent economically. Africans have MBAs from top business schools in the world, many have PHDs from top institutions in the US and Western Europe. And therefore many Africans can and should be CEOs in African Subsidiaries of Western and Foreign organisation. There are many advantages to this. For one African CEOs are more likely to understand the needs of customers, consumers will perceive in African CEOs people that have more things in common than others and African CEOs will take more initiatives to expand and grow their companies in Africa because they have a vested interest in that in terms of job creation for example.

This is why I believe foreign companies should think NPD for Africa. See you soon!

And if you have enjoyed reading this please leave a comment to let me know.

Business Leaders making Africa Proud

2012-08-08T06:09:00.002-07:00

By Patrick Mayoh

Hi

One of my readers this week was appalled at the fact that I said there were virtually no inspiring leaders in Africa at the moment. I believe she was right. Although what I did mean was that we needed more Africans who achieve top education abroad to come and live in Africa to inspire the young people around them. However I have decided to share this good article from Mfonobong Nsehe of Forbes Magazine talking about Africa's premier business leaders including people like: Mo Ibrahim and Aliko Dangote. Enjoy! And see you next monday hopefully.

Africa needs its brains

2012-08-06T12:22:00.004-07:00

Patrick Mayoh

Dr James Mayinka is from Zimbabwe. After achieving a First Class in Electrical Engineering from the University of Zimbabwe, he moved to Oxford University in the UK to pursue a Dphil, an Msc and an MA in Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science. Today, in addition to working as a Director in the states for the Mc Kinsey Global Research Instute--probably one of if not the best business research institute in the world—he is also a Faculty Exchange Follow at MIT not to mention his role as a visiting scientist to the NASA. It sounds too good to be true does not it?

Yet alarmingly he might not be the only African out there in the West doing amazing work for a global company. There are probably Thousands other Africans boasting impressive academic track record and working for the benefit of successful Western Companies. It would seem the majority of those Africans are actually happy to do that and why would they not be? The quality of life, the incentives not to mention the career opportunities are more alluring than anywhere else in the West. Few like Patrick Awuah [1] do decide to come back and do good work for Africa. And I believe Africa needs its brains at least for the three following reasons:

èThe continent is changing ( not just economically, but socio-politically and demographically)

è Young Africans need role models

è African great minds can change our education system

The continent is evolving

You can hardly spend a week browsing the Internet without stumbling on a new story about Africa’s great economic advances and its potentials to be a major economic powerhouse. The truth is that; it is true. Only this morning again I stumbled on this piece about Africa’s latest promising and positive figures, and I bet you can find all kinds of stories on the same subject. Most interestingly is that even great publications like the Economist, Wall Street Journal and the Guardian just to mention these, seem to come to terms with the fact that things are changing in Africa and for the better. I will not spend my time here discussing about the main drivers, but what is certain is Africa is not what it used to be a decade ago. And I think it is great time Africans seize this moment to achieve economic growth and prosperity for its citizenries. And I do feel our Academic Elite in the West can and should play a great part in that. We need our own economists, strategists and policy experts to come back and lay the ground rules for our success story. Socio-politically our civil societies have greater access to the Internet and can tell the world what is happening here which means our leaders are under watch and although there is still widespread corruption, the likelihood of this lasting is weak. Demographically Africa will have more than 1 billion workers by 2030 more than China and India so there is great room for productivity improvement across the continent with so many workers.

Young Africans need inspiration

Few Africans like Patrick Awuah actually decide to abandon lucrative careers in lieu of coming back home to change the continent. But we need more of those at least to inspire young Africans. Africa does have its share of heroes, Nelson Mandela, the late Wangari Mathaii, Samuel Eto’o and Didier Drogba to name just a few. But We need more diversity especially in the kind of heroes we need. We need those leaders that will make Africans think about starting businesses that will inspire them to achieve high in academia and to be more entrepreneurial and more creative.

Africans can change their education system

The Financial Times’ list of top business schools does not include any school from Africa. However we do have the minds to create top business schools and provide Africans with top-notch education. Why do Africans have to fly out of the continent to achieve their dreams of gaining an MBA when our African PHDs can create those chances for our African youth?

What Can African Governments do?

African Governments can and should play a great role in encouraging our stars to come back and do good work at here. For one through their policies they create the economic climate likely to lure their citizens back home. Given the right approach we could witness a mass exodus back to the continent. Firstly scouting talents that are being on the lookout for those Africans making things happen elsewhere can be a good start. How many Governments have put in place strategies to spot and scout their talents out of home? What happens when stories emerge about those Africans changing the world elsewhere? Do their Governments take notice? Do they get in touch with them?

Secondly and most importantly the African Elite will choose to come back only if they have a good reason. At least if they can have the same opportunities back home. And Governments can just create those opportunities and commit to work with the African Elite in bringing about economic growth in addition to providing the right incentives for Africans to come back, settle and work here.

The combination of these mean Africa will benefits from its elite and increase its chances of being the next economic powerhouse of this millennium.

[1] In this Ted Talk Patrick Awuah why he made the choice to get back to Africa in spite of a lucrative career in Microsoft

Kumbaya

2012-01-20T11:15:00.000-08:00

By Patrick Mayoh

Kumbaya is an Afro-American spiritual song from the 1930s. In gullah a language which is a mixture of Western and Central African dialects including Ibo, wolof, bambara to name just a few, kumbaya litteraly means “come by here”. A sort of invitation, maybe an altar call since it is meant to be spiritual hymn.

I have done a lot of soul searching recently. Inasmuch as I like to write about business and marketing, I realise I am not alone and there is a plethora of blogs and publications on the World Wide Web on these issues. I am not implying I will not write about those issues anymore because of saturation; I am just unveiling what this blog is going to be all about from now on. Many of you would have noticed my passion for Africa, I hail from there and I hate to observe all the stereotypes blindly attributed to us. True just like in this article of the Economist, Africa at the turn of the new century was still a hopeless continent plagued with all sorts of woes. But check this out,, 11 years later the same magazine published a cover story on the great economic prospects of the continent.

So much is happening on this continent and I have changed the name of this blog, “kumbaya” to invite investors, decision makers and the world in general to see through this blog how the continent is becoming the next economic powerhouse. Kumbaya to show that Africa is the next best investment destination in the world; kumbaya so business decision makers will begin to see in Africa the next best place for great IRRs.

This blog will be mainly reflective of my opinion but I will supplement my publications with references from other publications just to further convince you of the reasons why I believe Africa is taking a turn for the better. Each week I pledge to provide you with information regarding the agriculture, the burgeoning middle class and the rising labour force of the continent (just like here). I will equally provide my own opinions on the best investment strategies and destinations for Business Leaders wishing to reap the great rewards associated with investing in Africa.

Join me in this new adventure, this new journey and let us show the world why Africa is definitely the hopeful continent.

Are you a strategic or wishful thinker?/or why you should guard against visioning!

2011-11-02T09:30:00.000-07:00

By Patrick Mayoh

There is so much to read nowadays; even more to write about. I am just about to finish a newly released master piece by Richard Rumelt, Havard Doctor and Chair at the Anderson School of Management UCLA, on “Good and Bad Strategy[1]”. The book as the titles suggests initiates managers to the art of successful strategising.

Richard Rumelt himself has been dubbed the “Strategy’s strategist” by the Mc Kinsey Quarterly. He has consulted with the big names in the world and his book is actually very deep and deals with key questions on strategic building for organization. Much could actually be said about strategy but for this post I will just focus on visioning and why this is bad for your organization when it is done recklessly. Here I am going to share what I learned about the dangers of visioning.

Pop unto the website of any organization and go to the “about us” section where you are almost always likely to find:

· A Vision
· The Mission statement and
· Values

While there is nothing wrong with those concepts, do you not actually feel that sometimes they can be devoid of meaning? Not just for outsiders but even more for insiders. Most of the time what people call “strategy” is usually a combination of those three elements. Visioning has nothing to do with strategy.

Visioning is actually a brainchild of the “new thought movement” advocated by such managers as Jack Wech with quotes such as “ reaching for what appears to be the impossible”, or more recently with people like Peter Senge with his concept of “shared vision”. In a nutshell mobilizing people around a common goal unleashes tremendous potentials that will likely propel the organization to success in its industry. There is actually nothing with that; this can be confusing, unspecific and fluffy.

Confusing because making grand statements like “we will be the best company in the world” is actually useless, virtually everyone thinks the same. Those statements will never tell your workforce what you are aiming at. The big picture is actually a series of details that build up to give an organization a concrete image of where the company is headed. When you cannot as a manager or a leader offer a clearer path than visioning, you run the danger of making it difficult for your employees to understand your philosophy.

Unspecific because visioning does not actually tell your employees what you are trying to do, how you plan to beat your competitors, what avenue you want to follow to be the best or how you plan to achieve profit. Visioning only states goals or intentions without actually demonstrating how your organizations will meet the targets. Visioning is often as well a list of things to do but this does not amount to strategy either. Presenting a bullet point series of slides on a nicely designed power point document will not clarify what you plan to do as a business.

Lastly visioning can be quite fluffy. By that I mean those organizations that usually state the obvious as strategies. Take the example of this bank whose strategy is” our fundamental strategy is one of customer-centric intermediation”. Ok let us stop there a moment. Intermediation actually means receiving deposits from customers to lend them to borrowers; do you not think this is pretty much what all banks do? Fancy words on a document do not amount to a strategy. In a nutshell according to Richard Rumelt bad strategy is either one of those following:

· Fluff
· Failure to face the challenge
· Mistaking goals for strategy
· Bad strategic objectives

Which brings us to the next question; what is good strategy or how can you lay down a successful one? See you next week for that. I cannot wait to read your comments.

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Strategy-Bad-difference-matters/dp/1846684803/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320246419&sr=8-1

Aurevoir L’artiste: A tribute to Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T10:10:00.000-07:00

By Patrick Mayoh

On my table next to the laptop sits a copy of Richard Rumelt’s acclaimed Good strategy/bad strategy[1]. The book embarks on a journey to explain readers what a good strategy is and is not. It was just released this year but I can tell it has all the potential of a classics in Business and strategy literature. Ok back to my table! I read the first case study about successful turn-around strategies and unsurprisingly Steve Jobs’ turnaround of Apple is the first case. Ominous!

Tributes keep pouring in on my facebook page, I click on one link from HBR[2] (havard Business review) and there is a PDF file on sales about him. Oh my! I just cannot keep from reading pages after pages of tributes from major publications and other great world changers like Bill gates. And I wonder how a few lines from this blog can actually capture what this unique person means to the world today. But I want this to be a personal but open letter to the world about what Steve Jobs represents to an MBA and a potential entrepreneur.

Thanks for showing me how being successful in business is all about:

· Being Unique
· Being Resilient
· Seeing the big picture
· Pursuing excellence
· Great design

Unique

When you made your come back into Apple in the late 1990s the world held a breath, wondering how you could turn around a company on the brink of collapsing. But you actually performed one of your magic tricks that was quite obvious on second thought but to which the corporate board was inexplicably oblivious to. You chose to ditch all underperforming apple products and focussed on just a few ones creating. You were a true Blue Ocean thinkers not satisfied with more but little and simple. I wish your Apple remains true to that philosophy. Simplicity is better than variety. I got that.

Being Resilient

It is not just the way you fought your battle with cancer or how even after being evicted of your own company you still went on to create the most successful animation company in the world and ended up racking 7 billion in sales to Walt Disney and sit on their corporate board (talk about a rebirth). “I am going to wait for the next big thing”. This is actually what you told Richard Rumelt[3] eager to know about your strategy to upset the WINTEL[4] monster. And true to your word you fought a fierce battle to convince the music industry to help them combat piracy and revolutionize the way we access music nowadays.

Seeing the big picture

Michael Porter rightly lamented the fact that American corporate board were too much focussed on quarterly and annual profits. It is annoying how a nonsensical market fluctuation can send CEOs scrambling for small gimmicks to try and re-establish their images. But you were never drawn into that kind of silliness always choosing to pursue your dreams of what the world should be like and you succeeded. The IPHONES and IPADS have changed forever the way we interact with technology. No wonder people would run to buy your latest gadgets at unbelievably high prices and in the worst recession in human history. Thanks to you I know that focussing on the big picture is the recipe to changing the world and achieving greatness.

Excellence

People like you taught me that excellence is not just a goal but a culture. Is it any wonder that you were a hand-on manager always assessing all the details of your product designing process to make sure people like us get the most amazing gadgets? How you would carefully prepare each of your slides, how you would cultivate respect from your colleagues how you would oversee just about everything on your Apple planet should be a benchmark for any CEO or Entrepreneur.

Design

You once famously said that design “is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But, of course, if you dig deeper, it's how it really works. You have to grok what it is all about”. AMEN.

I have to meet a friend tonight. I wonder if I should wear a turtleneck polo and a pair of blue jeans, where are my snickers? Thank you Steve and good bye.

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Strategy-Bad-difference-matters/dp/1846684803/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317914884&sr=8-1

[2] http://hbr.org/product/decoding-steve-jobs-select-commentary-from-hbr-org/an/10973-PDF-ENG

[3] Remember the book i told you about in the beginning

[4] Windows and Intel in the mid-late 1990s

Crisis management made easy

2011-09-16T04:58:00.000-07:00

By Patrick Mayoh

Whatever the title suggests to you, a crisis is never easy to resolve, actually mishandling one could prove to be fatal to your team and your career as a manager. Recently read through an article from the Wall Street Journal about handling corporate crisis, and although the tips seem to apply only to senior executives, I reckon they could be useful for any manager or team leader.

You will surely go through a crisis, no matter how prepared you are or in spite of all the precautions you take as a manager, you will have to deal with one. Some are quite minor, like all staff turning up late at work or major like a 50% profit loss due to hefty competition. As a manager I think the guidelines provided by the WSJ might well apply to you; this is nothing new by the way, the tips contained here are surely contained in countless management books and journals around the world but this is still worth a read they include:

· Resisting the temptation to resign

· Coping with anxiety and scant sleep

· Building esprit de corps within your team

· Seeking outside help (from your informal network for example)

· Always keeping records of what goes on

Do not resign yet

The circumstances never determine the end of a story. Just because it starts catastrophically never means it is going to finish this way. Even a dive in your market value or the loss of your major customer need not mean you are doomed to fold up as a company. There should always be a solution to ANY type of problem; therefore a crisis might actually be the opportunity you need to show your senior manager your unique problem-solving abilities while on a personal level reveal qualities you were unaware of as a manager or a person. Great leader usually emerge in times of crisis, they (crises) provide the ideal opportunity to actually showcase all what you are worth as a manager.

Anxiety and sleep management

Do not neglect your sleeping time WSJ suggests. Anxiety usually precludes insomnia and a sleep deficiency could have tremendous consequences on your productivity as a manager during a crisis. So it is well worth making sure you actually take time to rest. A study carried out by Harvard[1] Education actually shows the negative effects of sleep including how it (helps) consolidate learning and memory; “Sleep helps the brain commit new information to memory through a process called memory consolidation. In studies, people who’d slept after learning a task did better on tests later.” So the best way to actually find the “waouh” idea or solution is to get some sleep. People usually suggest to “sleep” on problems that could probably be the only way to make things happen.

Esprit de corps is the key

Isolation is suicidal. The last thing to do in a crisis is to hibernate to your own world to try and find solution there. That is surely the reason we have teams. As a manager your team’s unity might be the only difference between success and failure. Isolation is equally contagious and usually breeds suspicion, gossip and fear (you get the picture right?); by bringing your staff together you can actually share the burden and find the solutions you need to make things happen for your team. John Wooden once famously said that “the main ingredient to stardom is the rest of the team”. The danger when solving the crisis is to put too much focus on who get the credit rather than who gets the job done, individual might get the credit but team always get the job done.

Outside-in help

You probably have an informal network of colleagues and alumni, if not friends and family could actually provide the vital equilibrium you need between work and life. Of course you do not want everyone in your network to know about what you are facing. But it is still worthwhile to open to two or more friends that will listen and say one or two kind words to boost your morale. Did someone say there was wisdom in many counsellors[2]?

Records make all the difference

Ethan M. Rasiel and Paul N. Friga in the Mc Kinsey[3] mind actually recommend writing a note at the end of each working day to record anything new you learned in a particular day. The key to crisis management in this sense is to chart the progress while keeping notes of the things you are learning and how they are changing you as a manager. This will serve as future references for yourself but your team as well. Memos, minutes and decision-making processes have to be carefully documented and serve as reminder of what should not happen or what needs to be done in the future.

I will be writing something on perceptual mapping next week, let me know what you think about this one in the meantime.

[1] http://www.health.harvard.edu/press_releases/importance_of_sleep_and_health

[2] Solomon in the book of proverbs in the bible

[3] http://ebookee.org/The-McKinsey-Mind_102118.html

Africa needs many Muhammad Yunuses: The need for social entrepreneurs

2011-08-14T09:15:00.000-07:00

By Patrick Mayoh

I had an epiphany! It sounds a bit strange to begin my post like this, but this is actually how I felt when I turned the last page of Muhammad Yunuses’ book on “creating a world without poverty: social business and the future of Capitalism”. It was undoubtedly a great summer read and I totally espouse the vision of Muhammad Yunus on a world without poverty and on rethinking capitalism. Before we get into that, let me say a quick word about Muhammad Yunus.

Muhammad Yunus is generally considered the father of microfinance[1]; he founded Grameen bank a giant microcredit organization in Bangladesh, offering financial products (loans, insurances, and pension savings) to the poor. This all started when Yunus realised how the financial system of his country had no regard for the poor in the society, he came across some ladies who actually sold themselves into slavery just to borrow the equivalent of $1 to make products they had to sell at a price fixed by the borrowers. This prompted him to donate $27 to get these ladies out of the vicious circle. Today the Grameen foundation has gone beyond banking to other industries like healthcare, telecommunications, education and recycling to name just a few[2]. Muhammud Yunus and the Grameen bank in 2006 were awarded the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize for their work in combating poverty. Most importantly Muhammad Yunus (like me) believes social businesses could revolutionize the world and create an era without poverty. The concept itself (social business) is fairly new but I hope to briefly explain 1) what it is 2) how it works 3) how Africa and the whole world in general could fit into the picture.

What is Social Entrepreneurship?

Let us be honest! Capitalism, as we know it today is a failure. There is nothing wrong with the idea of free and open markets all over the world. But the basic assumption that profit maximization is/should be the raison d’être of every business is totally untrue. Like Muhammad Yunus advocates we are “multi-dimensional” beings and have therefore different needs. The logic of uncontrolled growth pursued by organization is detrimental to the Environment and responsible for the over-utilization of resources the world over. The recent/current financial turmoils are just the tip of the iceberg. In reality our way of life articulated around excessive consumerism is unsustainable. If development is all about making underdeveloped nations like Western ones then we might need five planets earth to sustain our way of life[3].

Muhammud Yunus far from discouraging economic activities or entrepreneurship proposes a different approach: “Social-consciousness driven enterprise aims for full cost recovery, or even more, even as it concentrates on creating products or services that provide a social benefit. It pursues this goal by charging a price or fee for the products or services it creates”. The Skoll foundation in Oxford University goes further to define Social Entrepreneurship as business ventures that “exploit a range of organizational forms – often unique hybrids- from charity to not-for-profit to commercial venture to maximise social value creation”.

In a nutshell the goal of a social business is not just profit maximization but social value creation through products (services) that tackle specific social problems ranging from access to healthcare, nutrition (food and water), recycling (environmental degradation), to discrimination, unemployment and access to new technologies. The possibilities are endless, and the Skoll foundation seems to suggest we are just scratching the surface of this new phenomenon.

The Grameen foundation’s portfolio of businesses is a good example with more than 25 ventures in Bangladesh, spawning healthcare, telecommunications, fisheries and livestock, Internet access, Agriculture and management consulting to name a few. The Grameen foundation actually entered into a partnership with DANONE to develop Yoghurt to aid the nutrition of children from poor areas in Bangladesh[4]. Now you know the basic fact, let us see how it works.

Social entrepreneurship: Modus Operandi

Multi pricing is the way for social businesses. The idea is to sell a product at the normal rate for say customers who can afford it and at a cheaper one (rate) to customers that cannot afford it. This is the success story behind Grameen foundation’s many business ventures. Products are sold at a premium say in the city but then are offered at a very symbolic price and sometimes for free in rural areas. The companies are still able to make a profit and extend their operations to other locations. The Grameen’s eye care hospitals for example provide eye care services at a regular market price to patients who have no difficulty in paying the fee while offering the same service to the poor at a token fee.

Also a social business is scalable not only in terms of new locations but especially in terms of social value creation. The Youth Industries Inc. In the USA specialises in food production, recycling and fashion. The project builds a series of shops that train and employ homeless people with the profits reinvested for mentoring and reinsertion programmes for homeless back into society. Likewise the furniture resource centre in Liverpool began as a furniture removal and employment training social business and later diversified to waste collection and recycling, retailing and then into a social business management consultancy.

The premise is to reinvest profits into other social ventures and gradually tackle the problems faced by a community. Investors will not focus on profit maximization but will assess the success of a business first in terms of the social impact created and then in terms of efficiency (use of resources) and profitability.

While charity and other not-for-profit organizations have to continuously rely on donations to survive and achieve their social impact, a social business is self-sustainable and does not have to depend on donors to achieve its impact. It can move from a stage where it depends on donations to a stage where it makes a profit and steady revenues therefore removing the need for continuous donations. Think of it, would you rather commit to £15 a month to Action Aid or invest say £300 in a social business that makes sweet that are priced according to locations to provide healthcare to children in Africa. Not only that, but the social business promises to give your money back after 5 years (like a bond). Don’t you think this could be an attractive idea for philanthropists? The possibility of investing and getting back money that actually change lives somewhere in the world? This is why I so believe Social Businesses/Entrepreneurs could be the solution to the world’s problems. Let us talk about Africa.

How does Africa fit into the picture

Not just Africa but the whole world, even the US with one of the worst healthcare system in the world[5]. By nature we are creative beings. We have created planes, we have gone to the moon, and we have created Internet, I phones, and Facebook to name just the most common. We can create a system that eradicates poverty in Africa through sound revolutionary business and entrepreneurial thinking. Because at the heart of the whole notion of social entrepreneurships is not the eradication of conventional business principle, it is instead the application of these to solve social problems thereby creating social impacts for the stakeholders upstream and downstream.

What if the money allocated every year by the UN and its agencies, Governments and other NGOs; what if part of the money could be allocated for the creation of an investment fund serving as a pool for social entrepreneurs?

The Investment fund will also serve as a rating agency, will standardize terminologies, definitions, impact measurement tools, reporting formats and yardsticks along which social entrepreneurs will have to perform. Success will be measured in terms of the social impact within a particular location.

Financial aid as we know it could be more dynamic with budding African Social Entrepreneurs implementing business principles within a social framework and tackling key problems ranging from healthcare to nutrition and education to name just a few. What if this was one of the ways to get Africa out of poverty like Muhammad Yunus did for Bangladesh, gradually and steadily on the road to achieving a middle income status country.

Although Africa does not have many social ventures, there are a few stories like the one of Veronica Khosa in South Africa which should inspire and drive us to do the same. She started Nguni (affection) to react to the insufficiency of support of victims to HIV by creating a home care service to complement the existing support system while offering an alternative through community based training and action in healthcare provision. The project made 200,000 home visits between 1995 and 1999 and trained 1000 home carers.[6]

We need more Ngunis in Africa and the world I believe.

[1] See social entrepreneurship: new models of sustainable social change published by Oxford University

[2] More details in Muhammad Yunuses’ Creating a world without poverty: social business and the future of capitalism

[3] See Jane Goodall’s reason for hope

[4] You should definitely get a copy of the book.

[5] 1/6^th of the population lacks basic access to healthcare

[6] See social entrepreneurship: new models of sustainable social change published by Oxford University

N.O.W saga: four things Businesses should never fail to learn about customers

2011-07-20T08:59:00.000-07:00

By Patrick Mayoh

I have had to take a break from writing and I was thinking about posting again from August. But then everyone is talking about what I call the News of the World saga. To the point that one of my friends actually suggested I should write a post about this. Once I studied Journalism and needless to say from an ethical point of view that the hacking scandal is indeed well...a scandal.

It really never got my attention to be honest. I was wondering what the media and the public furore about N.O.W was all about. After all, phone hacking allegations have been around for well over 2 years. But then it began (the scandal) to get my attention when I read about SKY, Virgin and other big giants withdrawing commercials from the paper. And then there were shocking revelations about 7/7 victims’ families’ phone conversations listened to. I read with great dismay how Miley Dowler’s phone was also hacked and how even her parents’ private conversations with friends were monitored by N.O.W staff. From then on the phone hacking scandal just got uglier every single headline. Her majesty, Gordon Brown (other victims) and then the death of the whistleblower Sean hoare just a few days ago.

I believe this is what happens when an organization fails to adopt an outside-in perspective. Reflecting on the unfolding of this catastrophe I cannot help but draw lessons for all businesses in light of what we are witnessing in N.O.W. Organizations when it comes to the public (customers) should never fail to:

· Lose touch with reality

· Listen

· Fulfil expectations

· Realise people are in charge not CEOs

Organizations should never lose touch with the reality

I think what has happened is clearly a case of that. A paper that can go as far as listening to people’s private conversations just to get the big scoops has lost a sense of reality. Likewise organizations have to operate within clearly defined frameworks that protect them and the people they serve is that why we have codes of ethics? I honestly believe people should go into business because they want to help others meet their specific needs. I do not believe in the “profit first” culture. I genuinely believe you have to achieve a margin if you sell a product but when this is done at the expense of others reality always catches up and the N.O.W should serve as a stark warning. Like Muhammad Yunus I believe businesses’ goal to make profit is only one part of the story; much more has to be paid attention to.

Organisations should never fail to listen

N.O.W should have proactively reacted in 2009 when rumours about phone hacking of celebrities began to emerge. Foresight would have dictated the editors and the management to adopt a more ethical approach. Businesses will inevitably make mistakes sometimes big ones. But before mistakes move from minor to major ones there is always an opportunity to repair, amend and improve those aspects the public is not happy about. Actually the customers will always be useful in terms of reminding you as a business of what you need to be wary about before things get too ugly. When in 2005 Dell noticed that many of its customers were furious about the quality of their products; the CEO reacted by creating a blog: Direct2DellBlog entirely dedicated to answer queries customers had as well notifying them of all the measures being taken to provide an outstanding service to users. Dell even allowed like Amazon, customers to directly rate products on their website. According to Dick Hunter head of Customer service at Dell, measurements show satisfaction among customers at about 77%[1].

Fulfil expectations

Customers want good products; full stop. Meeting this need in a meaningful way is what companies should strive to do. A customer wants to buy a paper that reads well but also that excels on accuracy of facts, equilibrium and respect of privacy especially those that infringe on vulnerable sources’ basic rights for tranquillity like victims or distressed parents. In the same vein, organizations have a crucial responsibility to meet our needs without resorting to indecent means.

People are in charge not CEOs

This is probably the biggest lesson from the N.O.W saga. People are always in charge. It was not Rupert Murdoch who decided to close the paper. The advertisers did because they knew people would not buy the paper. What company would genuinely desire to be associated with a media outlet people resent?

No doubt Rupert Murdoch is a genius and a revolutionary in the true sense of the terms. However he is what he is because somehow people like what he brings to the media world and approves of his style and management. But the recent reactions to the hacking scandal have sent a clear message. People make and unmake, therefore organizations should be mindful of that and always adapt to changes outside the organizations.

I have always been a big proponent of the outside-in perspective. Although the inside-out approach can be best suited for some companies like Apple, the majority of organizations cannot afford to function without ascertaining what people outside think, what their concerns and interests are and how they can be met adequately. This is what we expect of media outlets and businesses in general

See you next week!

[1] See Understanding digital marketing by Damian Ryan and Calvin Jones

Time to create your blue ocean: a quick guide to strategic rethinking

2011-06-15T14:15:00.000-07:00

By Patrick Mayoh

It has been a quite while, I am fully aware of it. I recently went on a shopping spree on my best market place (Amazon) to order books with big hypes in the business community. One of those is “Blue ocean Strategy » of INSEAD BUSINESS SCHOOL’s professors W.Chan Ki and Renee Mauborgne. The book was so applauded that the two authors were duly rewarded with an academic unit within the prestigious business school bearing of course the same name as the title of the book: the Blue Ocean Strategy Institute”.

Well I read the book as well and I tell you what, this is probably the best one I have read on strategic thinking. Mostly because the authors espouse my idea that strategic thinking should adopt a reconstructionist rather than a structuralist approach to markets, industries and the competition, more on that a bit later.

Blue oceans make competitors useless

What is your perspective when it comes to your business environment? Are you and your strategic team always thinking about better ways to beat competitors, slice markets shares, differentiate, and focus? Sounds a bit like the Potter idea of competition doesn’t it?

There is nothing wrong with thinking about the competition and about ways to beat your competitors. But as long as your focus remains on them, you end up losing sight of what really matters to customers and how you could actually reinvent your industry or business sector.

This has been termed a “red ocean” where a “market gets crowded” because “prospects for profits and growth are reduced. Products become commodities, and cutthroat competition turns the red ocean bloody”. The book pontificates that no industry or company is permanent, there is always a way to turn your business environment around and the best way to do that is to make the competition useless or irrelevant by going around it.

The strategy canvas

This is what the book all comes down to. Creating a blue ocean will require you to four activities:

· Identify the key common factors of your industry/sector

· Eliminating those that do not really matter to customers

· Raising those that do matter to customers but are downplayed by your industry

· Create new ones (factors) to enhance your value proposition to an unprecedented level within your industry

1) Identify

Individual organizations might differ from one another but industries are usually associated with key commonalities. It is therefore your responsibility to find out which factors most characterize your industry and its relationship with customers. Such factors obviously will vary from one industry to another. Also most industries are usually very complex in their structures and although you might deliver the same products or services to customer, it is worthwhile to know where you stand in your industry. Take the automobile industry for example, a huge sector; you have those who compete for luxury like BMW, Mercedes and Chrysler to name just those few. And then you have those that compete on affordability like Ford, Honda and to some extent Toyota. So although these organizations belong to the same industry, they still operate in different strata. It is therefore critical to identify first your stratum within your industry and then list the factors that are common in that particular stratum before you embark on your blue ocean creation.

2) Eliminate

Once you know for sure the key factors that characterize your industry or the stratum along which you operate in your business sector it is important to spot the factors that do not matter to customers. Business leaders that are not willing to challenge existing boundaries within their industry are more likely to fail than those who question status quo.

This is how Ford became the leader in the Automobile industry in the early 1900s. While other hundreds automakers thought cars were meant to be luxuries and inaccessible to the common masses, Henry Ford built a car that was easy to drive, reliable and durable. As it indicated in a 1909 brochure “Watch the Ford go by. High priced quality in a Low priced car”. So it is time for you to challenge the existing boundaries within your sector and proceed to eliminate those that do not matter. Henry Ford eliminated the fact that cars were meant to be luxuries for the elite. What do you need to eliminate? What are those things or factors your customers do not really care about?

3) Raise

Once you have eliminated the factors that do not matter at all to your customers it is time find those that really matter. As the authors rightly suggest, innovation is not always linked to technology but to those elements your customers “value”. Once you raise the factors that really matter to them you win! This is what Dell actually did. True customers value impressive features and software applications on newly bought computers. But many even value more computers that are delivered faster to individuals’ specifications and wishes. So the purchasing and delivering experiences although greatly neglected by other manufacturers actually mattered to customers and Dell was quick to spot that, reducing the purchasing and delivery time to 4 days as opposed to 10 weeks for competitors.

4) Create

This is probably the gist of the blue ocean school of thought. Once you have identified, eliminated and raised factors that do not or do matter in your industry stratum, you can think of introducing factors that will make your competitors irrelevant and set you apart from the rest.

A word of caution, innovation is not only or always about technology but about introducing factors that add value to your overall customer satisfaction. Enhancing your value proposition will very much depend on those factors you add to your customers’ experience of your products/services and organisation.

Kinepolis just did that by adding a childcare service to its value proposition. Most people enjoy a good night out to the cinema but many parents find it difficult especially when the last minute baby-sitter is not available. So Kinepolis a chain of movie theaters in Belgium added childcare facilities to its cinemas allowing parents not to worry about children on a good night out, and was able to make competitors irrelevant.

Something of relevance here is also the fact that a blue ocean strategic thinking provides your organization with Focus, Divergence and a powerful Tagline. In a red ocean, companies compete along the same factors making it difficult for your organization to make profit/margins. With the creation of a blue ocean, the company sets itself apart by simultaneously eliminating/reducing, raising and creating new factors.

References

W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne (2005) Blue Ocean Strategy: how to create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant Havard Business Review Press Boston Massachussetts

Africa Agriculture’s potential-enough is enough (PART 2)

2011-05-25T10:08:00.000-07:00

By Patrick Mayoh

Frankly, I was delighted to have so many feedbacks on PART 1 of this post. And I am humbled by the many remarks and criticisms I received from this article. Some feedbacks came as very challenging questions that required very deep and tough answers[1].

Having said that, I would equally like to talk about a video link a friend sent me on Facebook. This was a documentary (je mange donc je suis[2] is the title) about the difficulties faced by Africans trying to practice Agriculture as a trade. It is a shame the content is in FRENCH but for those who can understand the language I have put the link below[3].

But the bottom-line of the documentary is that as long as Africans are disfavoured by the stock markets in favour of other countries like Brazil, they will never be able to fully reap the economic benefits of doing Agriculture[4]. So how is it possible to ensure that Africans fully benefit from their trade is a very tough question and I hope you can start providing some answers that will hopefully benefit us all. This article is just beginning to scratch the surface about this and probably in its own way help shape our discussion on this crucial topic for the African Continent.

Meanwhile I strongly believe that Agriculture should be the main focus for Economic Development and prosperity for Africans despite all the present hurdles. Last week I suggested this could be done through the following four ways:

1) Technology to boost productivity and optimise information among key stakeholders

2) Benchmarking of China’s agricultural revolution

3) Perceiving the big picture

4) Adopting a market-based approach

The first two were discussed in part 1[5] of this post and I will set about discussing the remaining two in this last post.

Perceiving the big Picture

Maybe African leaders would be more enthused about heavily investing in Agriculture if they were informed about the enormous benefits at hand. Figures from MC KINSEY actually provide a very strong case for making agriculture a priority on the African continent.

Research by MC KINSEY shows that:

v A green revolution in Africa means the continent’s economies could raise their collective output to $500 billion in 2020 and $880 billion by 2030 from $280 billion now

v Sub-Saharan Africa alone could increase the value of its agricultural production by $235 billion annually if it could increase its yield of major crops

v Brazil between the late 1980s and mid 1960s expanded its land under cultivation by 1 million annually. MC KINSEY predicts that if Africa could increase its Agricultural Production by $225 billion annually by 2030 if it could expand its area of cultivable areas by half the same portion as Brazil

Those three facts in themselves are compelling enough to get African Leaders thinking about the prospects of stimulating growth on the continent through stronger regulatory (economic, legal) frameworks that will boost the Agricultural productivity of the continent.

Not only that but real investments in Agriculture through the building infrastructure will surely provide jobs for millions of unemployed young Africans (see my article entitled: Africa could be the next economic success story[6]).

Adopting a market-based approach

Lastly because we live in a globalised economy, products and services are no more produced from a local perspective only. From the outset a business of the 21^st century usually thinks in terms of a region, a continent or the world. Bananas from Africa are consumed virtually everywhere in the world and British rely on the flowers from Kenya on Mother’s day to cite just a few examples.

My point is, instead of producing low value crops like beans or soya for example, Africa’s vast areas of uncultivated lands should be dedicated to producing high value crops (fruits and vegetables[7]) meaning those that easily sell globally especially in the developed world.

Kenya just mentioned earlier tripled its exports in horticulture to 700 million annually by focussing more on market rather than local needs. MC KINSEY posits that if high value crops replaced low value ones in Africa, the Agricultural output could rise by $140 billion a year from 2030.

The “breadbasket approach” for example is a good example of how to encourage the production of high value crops only. A given country for example decides to concentrate investment for a particular high value crops within a specific region/province. Mali is for example considering a similar approach in the Sikasso region which will hopefully raise cereal production by 60% in the country. In the 1970s for example Brazil concentrated investment in the Cerrado region around Infrastructure development, Agricultural research and soil recuperation. Such a system would mean that a country that has highly areas like Cameroon (Central Africa) could identify 5 key regions where investment could be concentrated for the development of highly value crops like fruits and other delicacies enjoyed in the developed world.

In a nutshell the focus should be on the demand rather than the supply side of the spectrum. Crops should be produced to reflect the real needs of the market or what people actually want to buy. Unless this approach is adopted Africans will continue to waste its vast agricultural potentials to the detriment of farmers and the population at large.

Interestingly nearly three quarters of the increase in Agricultural output could come from 11 countries which include: Angola, Cameroon, Cote dIvoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania.

Conclusively because so much has already been said about the vast potentials of the African continent; the Continent will need a combination of visionary leadership, strategic and creative decision-making regarding investment (in physical infrastructure especially) and strong regulatory frameworks to create the necessary conditions for reaping the full benefits of its large uncultivated lands.

References

Acha Leke, Jens Riese and Sunil Sanghvi (2011) Sizing Africa’s Agricultural Opportunity MC KINSEY Quarterly

Steve Davis and Jonathan Woetzel (2011) Chinese Agriculture: a model for Africa MC KINSEY Quarterly

https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Public_Sector/Management/Four_lessons_for_transforming_African_agriculture_2785

[1] One reader from Nigeria for example, asked me: “No doubt this is very educative and revealing. You have really opened up the reason why agriculture should be the number one priority of the African governments. My question is how best can we make funding available to the real farmers (Bearing in mind the level of corruption)? {...} Lastly, how do we ensure a price control in an unstable economy like ours?”

Or what about another reader that observed that: “What feeds Agricultural development is investment. Like everything you absolutely reap what you sow If you invest in seed improvement, access to credit facilities for real farmers, supply chain to get crops to market and processing of those crops to a finished good, then by all means hunger will be a figment of our imagination in Africa. Until that happens, let's keep donating our $20 to Oxfam to solve Africa's problem.” Regarding China the same reader observed that: “China is united!!! This means you have no idea about China. China is a vast country with many races and different languages. The China that many people see, The Hans, oppress most other Chinese such as the Uiygurs, Mongols and the Tibetans. “I fully agree with this last observation. By no means is China a fully integrated society. Much still has to be done in terms of bringing all the different groups together, but one has to recognize that China’s rise to economic prosperity is in a sense down to the commitment by the Central Government to unite and organize the nation towards the same goal which: economic prosperity through a more productive agricultural system.

[2] I eat so I am

[3] http://vimeo.com/7893617

[4] The WTO (World Trade Organization) determines the rules of the game and in principle demands that all countries sell their crops at the market price which is usually the lowest. How low the price is much depends on individual countries and the cost associated with production in those. So an American Corporation that bought very cheap land in Brazil spends $30 producing a ton of corn using strong “Economy of Scale” techniques while a farmer in Africa spends about $230 to produce the same amount of corn. So in the end not only does the market buy from the American corporation in Brazil but it also demands that Africans sell their tons of maize or corn at the same price. So what happens is many Africans (50 million each year) give up farming as a trade and flock to cities in search of more lucrative trades.

[5] http://patrickmayoh.blogspot.com/2011/05/africa-agricultures-potential-enough-is.html?spref=fb

[6] http://patrickmayoh.blogspot.com/2010/10/africa-might-just-be-next-economic.html

[7] From MC KINSEY ARTICLE

Africa Agriculture’s potential-enough is enough (PART 1)

2011-05-03T06:41:00.000-07:00

By Patrick Mayoh

The chocolate bar you had for your snack was probably made with Cocoa cultivated in Ivory Coast. The Flowers you offered your mum on mother’s day were possibly shipped over from Kenya to the UK. Africa accounts for 60% of the total world area of cultivable and fertile lands. So why is it that the continent is yet to have a green revolution on the scale of Asia and China in particular? Having read a well researched and thoroughly written article from MC KINSEY Quarterly I believe Africa’s Green revolution should depend on the combination of the four following key factors:

· Technology to boost productivity and optimise information among key stakeholders

· Benchmarking of China’s agricultural revolution

· Perceiving the big picture

· Adopting a market-based approach

All of these factors as I will briefly explain below will boost productivity, provide jobs and take millions of rural farmers out of poverty while expanding GDP growth for the continent.

Technology

The Kenyan stock exchange in partnership with Safaricom a mobile phone network operator in the country have allowed rural farmers in the country to exchange key pieces of information about market trends and the prices of different agricultural commodities through SMS (short message services).

In Uganda the European Union have supported an initiative designed to help rural farmers (women to be more specific) to exchange information through text messages about market updates on different goods.

Similar initiatives ranging from translation of market information into local languages to web applications designed to help farmers make meaningful decisions about their crops are taking place across the continent.

The bottom-line is, technology does play a great role when it comes to boosting productivity while providing key facts to farmers regarding crops and their prices. Governments’ efforts to reap the full benefits of the agricultural potentials of Africa, should take into account the positive impact technology could have in this sense.

Exchanging information through SMS is a good start in addition educating rural farmers as well as making new technologies available to them is a priority. This is all about making sure African rural farmers have at their disposal the technological tools to create the long awaited green revolution through availability of data and information about their work and the possibility to exchange information between with other peers across the sector.

Benchmarking China’s Model

In many ways Africa Differs from China. China is united, has a well organized central government, and boasts very strong infrastructure. Africa on the other hand is plagued with political instability, a blatant lack of adequate infrastructure (transportation and warehousing facilities for example) and in dire need of knowledge and experts in the field of agriculture.

However Africa could still implement (with success) some of the underlying principles behind China’s green revolution.

Firstly one of the reasons why China’s GDP keeps soaring dates back to the 1980s when the Government decided to prioritize agriculture as a means to boost the economy. The agricultural reform was not a peripheral objective but a key issue that had wide support from the Central Government. This in part explains why China decided to “open up” to the rest of the world. So the message is clear, Africa’s economic development is very dependent on a greater support from individual Governments of Agriculture. Bearing in mind the vast agricultural potentials of Africa (60% of the world cultivable area) there is a great incentive and rationale for making this a priority.

Barack Obama said in his speech Dakar that Africa does not need strong men but stronger institutions (paraphrasing). China has put in place excellent institutional capabilities at all levels; R&D, Micro-credit organizations and other organizations in charge of advising farmers on key issues ranging from irrigation to export and productivity issues. Africa does have the CAADP (Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme) which has been put in place by the AU (African’s union) to advise member countries on key Agricultural issues like market trends and other related factors. More institutions like these with specific roles linked to specific aspects pertaining to Agriculture on the continent could make a major difference in boosting the agricultural productivity of the continent.

Lastly given the massive potentials Africa boasts in terms of cultivable/arable lands, investments should be directed towards building R&D facilities that could improve research and new developments in the sector within the continent. The field of Agronomics in China flourished as a desire to develop the best conditions to improve the Agriculture sector in the country. Africa should take notice and Universities should devote resources to build research centres and institutes that will prioritize the development of Agronomics as a key academic discipline on the continent. Germany’s universities have the best industrial and technical facilities because Germany by essence manufactures a lot of machinery and is one of the leading exporters in the world in that field. Likewise Africa has the potential to specialise in Agronomics and set the pace in Agricultural Research. Thus becoming the World’s basket for all kinds of Food, this is becoming the case in a sense but the possibilities are even bigger than one can think of.

Part 2 of my article will discuss the two remaining factors in my roadmap for changing and benefiting from Africa’s Agricultural potentials.

References

Acha Leke, Jens Riese and Sunil Sanghvi (2011) Sizing Africa’s Agricultural Opportunity MC KINSEY Quarterly

Steve Davis and Jonathan Woetzel (2011) Chinese Agriculture: a model for Africa MC KINSEY Quarterly

https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Public_Sector/Management/Four_lessons_for_transforming_African_agriculture_2785

New Technologies for African Agriculture (2011) Afrique Avenir

http://www.afriqueavenir.org/en/2011/04/07/new-technologies-for-african-agriculture/

Brainsteering: An alternative way to conduct your brainstorming session

2011-04-15T05:17:00.000-07:00

By Patrick Mayoh

First of all can I just observe I prefer the term Brainsteering to brainstorming? Think of it; what comes to your mind when you consider brainstorming is where/when people in a group blurt out all kinds of ideas and propositions sometimes with a serious lack of focus or perspective. When it comes to Brainsteering you can think of the steering wheel in your car providing a clear sense of direction and leading you exactly to where you want to go.

Well Brainsteering is still a very new term out there; actually my Google search yielded very scanty information. However this is worth talking about for my post this week. And I came across the concept a couple of days ago in the MC Kinsey Quarterly. Simply put Brainsteering is a refined or an improved way of brainstorming. In a traditional brainstorming session, people sit around a table (with tea or coffee, pens and papers) and have to think “out of the box” to come up with the latest ideas on issues ranging from cost reduction, pricing, market entry strategies and all the rest.

While this has been greatly lauded in organizations and by virtue of the fact it has often yielded great results, MC Kinsey believes it could be done much better. So do me. They have therefore identified seven ways of completely turning your brainstorming session upside down. It is a combination of very commonsensical principles and details managers have to take into account when they meet up with their teams.

Bearing in mind that the cardinal rule for great products and services is to have great ideas Brainsteering therefore revolves around the followings even steps:

1. Knowing your organization’s decision-making criteria

2. Asking the right questions

3. Choosing the right people

4. Dividing and conquering

5. On your mark, get set, go

6. Wrapping it up

7. Following up quickly

Assessing your decision-making criteria

This pretty much makes sense doesn’t it? Before you get your team to think about your market entry strategy for South Asia, you should as a coordinator check and ensure which decisions your team can or not make. The old cliché according to which brainstorming is all about “thinking out of the box” is very misguided. Because like it or not you operate in a specific context governed by particular rules and regulations pertaining to your organizations. So although going into China for example (everyone wants to) would be a fantastic idea for your business do you have the means as a team to make such a decision? The point here is Brainsteering strategically and wisely delineates the confines of an idea generation process. Members suggest ideas based on their collective decision-making power. Good ideas not matter how good they are, are discouraged if they cannot be implemented by the group.

Asking the right Questions

Quality is definitely better than Quantity. It is not about the number of ideas but about the pertinence of those in a given context. Therefore the ideal Brainsteering session manager carefully identifies a problem, pattern or issue and then articulates specific question built around finding key answers to the problem. This is about saving time; frankly going into a brainstorming session where the manager says “any idea?” is catastrophic. Rather the “any idea?” could be replaced with something like “any suggestions about providing better customer service for new mums that come to our store”.

Choosing the right mix of people

This does not need much explaining does it? Ideally when it comes to decision-making you should have a mix of people working within all the layers of the organization. This is even when the decision to implement for example is just affecting the operational layer. The idea is to obtain perspectives from key sectors of the organization. Say your Brainsteering session decides you should upgrade your computers. Sounds great; but what if unbeknownst to you, the top management has decided to freeze capital investments in IT. So the idea is to ideally have a Vice-President, Middle managers and Customer service reps for example. Ideas are guaranteed within such a context to flow better and to be generated in a more coherent way.

Dividing and Conquering

Sounds like a line from the Iliad or the Lord of the Rings. But this is probably one of the very important and attractive aspects of Brainsteering. It is common wisdom that when you have a large group of people three things happen. You have those who never run out of ideas and keep on suggesting off the wall perspectives. Then you have those that enjoy contradicting those who have the good ideas without suggesting anything of value. And then you have the stone faced, those who never say anything and that are hardly noticed in the course of the brainstorming session. This is usually a waste of time, ideas and resources. Because that quiet member could surely contribute something given the right context/atmosphere; and it is up to the manager to acknowledge that. An ideal Brainsteering session means you have to divide a large group say of 8 into small groups of 3 or 2 members. The tendency is to talk more when there is smaller group. The taciturn colleague will undoubtedly contribute something if he finds herself or himself in a smaller group. Conquering is then about assigning each group the task of finding specific answers to pre-articulated question (before the meeting).

On your marks, get set and go

This is most likely to be at the beginning of your meeting having prepared already (the four steps above). Here your participants will have to briefed on what you are up to (as the manager) many of these might find your paradigm shift very strange. Ideally you will set out the problem, the pattern or the issue and then proceed to lay out the key questions to be answered and therefore assign people to their various groups.

Wrapping it up

There is still the likelihood that your participants will come up with many ideas although they are in sub-groups (you can’t help it can you?). Wrapping it up is the stage where you get your team to summarize their main points. It could be done in two steps. First each group indicates how many ideas they have regarding a specific question assigned to them. Say 4 ideas per group about 16 for the whole group; the next step will be then to get them to narrow down their points to 2 or just 1 depending on your context and end up with 8 top ideas.

Following up quickly

Once you have generated ideas you should with a decision-making team (CFO or COO) tick in or out the best ideas. Informing the members even those whose ideas have not been implemented is critical at this stage. You need to thank everyone and clarify the fact that decision making based on capabilities is actually the reason why one idea gets rejected or accepted.

You are ready! Find it very useful actually. Hope you do as well. I am still thinking about my article on Phone applications. See you next week.

The Branding era or how your branding strategy can attract and retain faithfuls

2011-04-01T08:44:00.000-07:00

Patrick Mayoh

It is a reasoning I recently read in a book that prompted me to write something about branding this week (after a long break). The book itself is about youth culture and its ramifications within the field of business in general and marketing in particular[1]. The author made an observation which got me thinking about the whole idea of branding and how it was affecting our choices or even emotions today. Jason Gardner (that is the author of the book) hypothesised that today’s generation are the first to “have grown up within a brand culture”. Adding that “promoting brand isn’t a new idea, but the heavy emphasis on selling the image of a company, as opposed to promoting the quality of goods they sell is new”. In addition he reckons that “companies realised they could create a cheap product but sell it at a high price if the image of the company was right”. Although this needs may be to be substantially proved and empirically demonstrated, you cannot help but feel this series of statement is very reflective of what is going on today. Traditional marketing which consists of promoting goods and services is not as relevant as it was before for three keys reasons:

· Product/service lifecycles are shorter

· There are too many offerings (products and services) out there nowadays

· Product/service information are widely and easily available these days

Shorter lifecycles

Well think of it honestly, new Ipads come up every year, blackberries are released virtually every 3 or 6 months, phone apps every seconds and new car models every year as well and this is not just about the technology and automotive industries; all sectors in our current economy are constantly reinventing products and services be it in retail, groceries, fashion and sport industries to name just these. The product lifecycle model as we know it (birth- maturity- growth- decline) is outdated and irrelevant to the 21^st century business environment. The way it is today, is products and services are born and mature virtually within the same time while growth and decline occur so quickly that you do not have time to see when they actually happen—think of the last time you thought you needed a new phone after you had bought one just 3 weeks before—clearly the idea of positioning a product in a particular niche market is as complex as it has ever been for many years.

So many offerings

The reason why we have shorter lifecycles comes down to the fact that we seem to have more of the same everywhere. Just about 10 years ago Nokia was the leader of the mobile phone industry with just a few competitors like Motorola, Sony Ericsson and in a certain measure Samsung and LG. Today the picture is totally different. This is the same with the automotive industry, there used to be a time where only Volkswagen, BMW, Toyota and Ford were the only choices available when you thought of purchasing a car. Well you know this is totally different today. It even sounds ludicrous to observe that new products and services are produced virtually every second today, overshadowing the current ones, and conveying the feeling that what we have just bought from the store or over the Internet is so outdated we need to get something new. This is probably what Belden Menkus referred to when he talked about the age of discontinuity (his article is published on this blog) where everything that happens now seems to be so disconnected from what went on before.

Information overload

Information overload is just a consequence from the previous two. It is actually a term I read about the first time in a MC Kinsey article about coping with the vast amount of information available to CEOs and individuals nowadays. Traditional marketing methods with popular models like the 4Ps (product, price, promotion and place) aims to ensure that customers get the best information available about products. It is based on the premise that a customer that possesses all the good information will surely make the best choice when deciding which product or service to choose. Nowadays such information is widely available, not only that, but it is available in such a big amount that it becomes confusing to make a good decision. From websites, to consumer reports and blogs it is so easy to lose your head over what to believe when it comes to making the right decision about a product or service you wish to purchase.

Why branding

And this is where my point for branding comes into play. Because traditional marketing alone is no more necessary to attract and retain customers, your business will need to capitalize on branding to make a difference. I preferred to use the term faithfuls rather than customers because I reckon that nowadays you really want to retain people that will not only buy what you sell but will tell or keep telling others and spread the gospel (getting a bit religious here!) about your products/services and its various attributes. I believe branding in this sense has a big role to play for three reasons:

· Your identity

· What you stand for

· Why people can and should relate to your company

First of all branding “is the complete set of signals that surround a product, service or a company” according to Van Assen et al (2009) regarding the definition of a brand and how it affects a company’s image and reputation.

Your Identity

This is not just about your name or logo. It has to do with how you make sure you distinguish yourself from others in your sector or industry. It is a combination of the products/services you offer and what your organization understands/believes itself to be within the wider society and why. And this is the reason why you need to agree as an organization what you want to be passionate about especially in terms of improving and changing your environment(the wider society). There are actually so many causes and issues your organization could be passionate about. These will have to be incorporated within your identity statement.

Your values

What you stand for in your organization should not be secretive; rather you need to make sure your customers know about your values and those things that add flavour to your identity. This is the only way you start to connect to customers and their deepest needs. What people get/buy from your business, they can easily get from elsewhere, and not just that, chances are what you offer is available in many other locations and businesses. Your values will ensure customers connect to your organizations and will eventually make them want to stay and continue doing business with you. Integrity, honesty, customer-first, innovation, reinvention and agility are just some of the values out there you might want to emulate to make sure people stay with you and do not go elsewhere.

Create connections

I recently watched Comic Relief, a programme on the red nose day in Britain designed to attract funding from the public through a TV show hosted by popular comedians. The thing which most struck me about the programme was the level of support from the business sector. You would expect a TV show designed to attract financial aid for Africa to be supported by major charity organizations. However the level of support from the profit sector was even more than from the non-profit sector. Ernst and young (many people do not know about) as well as retail stores like Asda (Wal-mart), Tesco and Sainsbury featured in the TV programme.

The idea I believe is for those companies to connect with customers; something like “we are the good guys, we do not just sell the good products and services”. Increasingly customers will not just buy the best products and services, customers will equally put their favourite brands under scrutiny to understand whether those actually contribute to the common good of society. That sounds very utilitarian but it is a true picture of how things stand in the UK and the world over. Recent protests in Central London about cuts are a prime example of that. Big corporations were accused of tax evasion and therefore responsible for the current economic climate. I will not go into much detail about that, but think of those companies like Nike which recently came under the spotlight for allowing children in Asia to work under inhumane conditions in their factories.

If your branding strategy needs to be successful you need to make sure people can relate not only to your products or services but also to your actions and initiatives within your environment especially in terms of how they contribute to make a happier society.

Good...hope that makes sense for you and your business...see you next week with an article on phone apps

References

Jason Gardner (2010) Mend the Gap Inter Varsity Press

Baker, M. And Hart, S. (1999) Product Strategy and Management. Harlow: Pearson Education.

[1] Mend the Gap by Jason Gardner

Why your business should think about web 2.0 technologies/social media?

2011-03-04T09:08:00.000-08:00

Patrick Mayoh

Back to my geeky mood again! I have been reflecting about the impact of social media in our westernized societies, well not just the west but globally. I was thinking especially about the ways in which a business, say a start-up could fully reap the benefits of utilising those emerging means of communication to benefit a business/organization. Over the past two weeks my attention was caught by this article from MC Kinsey about a book by Stanford Marketing Profession Jennifer Aaker and marketing guru Andy Smith entitled “the dragon fly effect” on engaging customers or the general public through social media.

Interestingly, a couple of weeks ago I read about this research results from communications agency The Group, about twitter use by FTSE 100. According to findings almost half of those companies use twitter to engage with their publics and this is up from about 50% last year. If you add these figures to the 25% rise in Facebook use and 39% for YouTube, you start to get the big picture.

I believe your organization can benefit from social media use in the five following ways:

· There are a critical barometer of your company’s image and performance

· They will help you engage with customers in new ways

· It is probably one of the cheapest marketing strategies to implement

· They can bring organizational members closer

1) Another Barometer

Traditional ways of assessing whether people like or dislike your organization or are even aware or unaware of it is to monitor the press, the TV and Internet posts and articles. Embarking on social media use is also a critical and more refined way of doing the more of the same. As a starting point creating a Facebook or Twitter page will be a good way to know if your customers/fans have a good perception about your company and its activities in general. Although you cannot specifically tell if your company is liked from the number of Facebook or twitter followers you have, I think this is still a good starting point especially if you are a new start-up and you are still not getting enough coverage from mainstream media.

2) Engaging with Customers

Engaging with your customers goes beyond having numerous Facebook or Twitter fans. The big question is how your organizations use those followers to for example:

· Create new products/services

· Improve customer service

· Acquire new customers

· Expand to new markets

70% of executives interviewed by MC Kinsey in a global survey in 2007 have admitted to the fact that their organizations create more value for customers through web-based technologies. There are currently about more than 70 million bloggers (like myself) posting reviews about products and services according to MC Kinsey Quarterly (2010).

A couple of months ago Facebook freely marshalled 300,000 users to translate its website into 70 languages. The translation of the French version took just about....well a day. Procter and Gamble have set in place a social network of mums trying and reporting of their experience of using specific products for their babies. Like it or not the possibilities and opportunities are endless for your organization and it is time your PR team sat and thought about that.

3) It is very cheap to start with

Honestly the cost of setting a Facebook, twitter, Beebo or YouTube account is basically free. You will not have to convince your manager to spend more money. But you will have to highlight the specific objective of using such means of communication within your organization. The possibilities are endless especially for a new marketing campaign. Instead of paying a ridiculous amount of money to advertise your new insurance service on TV why not consider the possibility of using YouTube at a definitely lesser cost, virtually all companies have video messages of some sort ranging from interview preparation for university leavers to new products and services, so why should you not think likewise for your business?

4) What about starting a blog for your organization

Up to now we have just briefly looked at the external applications of Web 2.0 technologies. However corporate blogging is just another way to get people together within your company. It is all about creating a sense of community within your company, whereby people use your blog as a forum or a way to exchange perspective with your colleagues in a newer way. Therefore it could a good idea to set up one for your business and get your organization’s members to regroup for the benefit of your organization.

References

Steve Dinesen (February 2011) Almost half of FTSE 100 firms now use Twitter CITY AM 8 February 2011

Jacques Begin, Michael Chui and James Manyika (2010) Clouds, Big Data and smart assets: ten tech-enabled business trends to watch MC Kinsey Quarterly

Dan Singer (2010) The power of storytelling: What nonprofits can teach the private sector about social media Interview with Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith on the Dragonfly effect MC Kinsey Quarterly