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Last week I was invited to be one of the speakers at the launch of Manu Chandaria’s biography, From Success to Significance, and what an amazing event it was, where over 600 people were gathered to celebrate the life of this extraordinary man.

I opened my talk by saying it’s nearly half a century since I first met Manu, who at the time was already half a century old. He then had none of his current six honorary degrees, I noted, and he had no OBE and no CBS or EBS. But he was already a highly successful industrialist and philanthropist, having even by then achieved significance beyond success. I met him when I joined the Rotary Club of Nairobi in 1978, I said, which he had been a member of since 1963, becoming its president in 1982 – four years before I led the Club.

Kalonzo Musyoka was with us at the launch, and I described how in the late seventies I interacted with ‘young Steve’ as we called him then, adding that it’s so hard to imagine he’s now approaching seventy! I explained that our Rotary Club awarded him a post-graduate scholarship in Cyprus, following which he joined our club and was employed first by Kaplan & Stratton and then as the Legal Manager at Manu’s Comcraft.

I talked about Manu’s support for two of our club’s signature projects, both of which I was part of in their early years: the Rally for the Handicapped, as it was then called, which launched in 1979 and is now known as the Sunshine Rally, and the Rural Blindness Eradication Project, that began in 1985. Manu continues to be very active in our club, both with providing funding for many initiatives and in contributing to our WhatsApp group.

I then turned to Manu’s support for Business Member Organisations, and particularly with KEPSA, whose founder chairman he was in 2003, where I too was one of the founder directors. Anyang Nyong’o was in the room, and I pointed him out as the man who provoked its formation, as Minister of Planning. It was in February 2003, at a conference in Mombasa where David Ndii and Harris Mule launched the Economic Recovery Strategy, that Anyang Nyong’o took the private sector people present aside and challenged us to speak with one voice. Manu remains active with KEPSA, including as chairman of the board nominating committee, where I am also a member.

Next I talked about Manu as an enabler of universities, funding major buildings and having two of them appoint him as Chancellor, USIU and the Technical University of Kenya. Finally I drew attention to the way he professionalised his companies, in appointing external independent directors at an early stage – like the late Hannington Awori, whose brother Moody was with us – and also non-family members as senior managers. Plus the early establishment of the Chandaria Foundation, despite his father’s initial resistance.

I concluded by praising Manu as a family man, and by appreciating the child within him still being alive. He is what everyone sees: a low-key gentleman, an open listener, and – as Margaret Kenyatta writes in her foreword to the book – humble, kind and generous.

Kalonzo Musyoka was next to speak, and he described Manu as being like a father to him. At Comcraft he learned so much, about the art of negotiating, about putting people together, and so much more. And through Manu and Rotary he was introduced to “service above self”.

Musyoka then introduced Namgya Khampa, the Indian High Commissioner, who told us she has come to love Manu and leans on him for counsel as an elder, as he is also a good friend of India. “You are a hero, and we need more heroes,” she concluded.

Manu’s grand-daughter Nahema told us that Manu is one who rather than adding days to his life adds life to his days. He is everything to everyone when they are most in need, and does it with so much style. And Daystar University VC Prof Laban Ayiro informed us that Manu has been a great supporter of the Global Peace Foundation initiatives at Daystar. Prof. Ayiro was deeply involved in the preparation of the book, which he told us reveals the man behind the accolades.

I’ll end by describing that Manu talked about how to leave a legacy, by giving rather than receiving – which is what takes one from success to significance. He won’t be around forever, he readily admitted, but the Chandaria Foundation will remain, continuing to look after the community. Have I written enough to encourage you to read the book? I think so.

I recently logged in to a webinar hosted by the London Business School, where I listened to entrepreneurship professor John Mullins talk about his new book, Break the Rules!: The Six Counter-Conventional Mindsets of Entrepreneurs That Can Help Anyone Change the World.

I got to know Prof Mullins many years ago when he was the adviser to USIU on case studies they were developing.

I worked on one of these, about an IT company whose CEO I was, and I have kept in touch with him ever since.

In 2014 I also wrote an article about an earlier book of his on entrepreneurship, Getting to Plan B, in which he revealed that we would never have heard of some of the most successful business founders if they would have stuck to their original Plan As.

For over 20 years Prof Mullins has been exploring what sets successful entrepreneurs apart from other business people and from those who fail to reach their goals.

In the webinar, he took us through what he has found – including through having been an entrepreneur himself before entering academia.

It is that successful entrepreneurs exhibit one or more of the six break-the-rules mindsets through which entrepreneurs challenge assumptions, overcome obstacles and mitigate risks.

Here they are:

1. When you’re tempted to say “No”, instead say “Yes we can”. Then figure it out.

2. It’s the customer’s problem that matters, not your solution. Problem-first, not product-first.

3. “Moving the needle” doesn’t matter much to entrepreneurs. Think narrow, not broad.

4. Entrepreneurs get things done with almost no money. Ask for the cash, and ride the float.

5. Make the future winnings yours. Beg, borrow, but don’t steal.

6. Don’t ask for permission. Beg forgiveness later.

Each of these six mindsets can be learned, he has seen, by anyone, in any business setting large or small, old or new, create thriving sustainable businesses that grow and prosper.

And during the webinar, he quoted examples from entrepreneurs we are all familiar with, who practised at least one of them.

He referred to Dell PC founder Michael Dell, who in harmony with Mindset two ensured the company made products that were trusted to solve the problems of their customers; to Nike founder Phil Knight, who aligned with Mindset three when he started, narrowly focusing on products for elite athletes; to Tesla founder Elon Musk, who followed Mindset five by obtaining deposits from customers even before the car was launched that financed their production; and to Uber founder Travis Kalanick, who in keeping with Mindset six didn’t ask for permission before challenging the modus operandi of traditional taxis.

He might also have mentioned Virgin Atlantic founder Richard Branson, who saw the need for more customer-friendly flights and despite lacking experience in the domain just went for providing what no other airline did, in the firm belief that he could and that customers would be attracted to his offering.

In his book, Prof Mullins describes strategies for overcoming the daunting obstacles that stand in every innovator’s way.

He shows how to challenge assumptions and mitigate (not avoid!) risk – often by externalising it – in order to take advantage of opportunities. And he takes us through the steps we can take to make one or more of these mindsets our own.

He ended his webinar by asking which of the mindsets are already embodied within us personally, and which others can we learn to apply to a challenge we are currently facing.

In my last article, I started writing about the lessons from David McCourt’s book Total Rethink – Why Entrepreneurs Should Act Like Revolutionaries. There I focused on what he saw as the personal attributes of successful entrepreneurs, and in this one, I will be reporting on McCourt’s experience regarding the business side of entrepreneurship.

McCourt, himself a highly successful serial entrepreneur in the field of telecommunications – a self-professed “revolutionary” in that domain – tells us that while in business and in life generally, everything is changing so fast, with the problems we need to solve entirely different from how they used to be, the ways we think and how we make decisions have changed little since the times of agricultural and industrial societies.

The traditional wisdom, he observes, has been that improvements are best introduced incrementally, with large established corporations planning to increase their turnovers and profits incrementally, and governments changing their laws incrementally. However everything is moving too fast for that to be an effective solution any longer, and we must all revolutionise the way we think and the way we behave in order to be more entrepreneurial.

In an article he published in The Irish Times around the time his book appeared in 2019, McCourt relished the thought that because revolutionaries threaten the status quo – and for many their comfortable way of life – they are often very unpopular. But he strongly believes that upheaval is essential if we are to cope with the challenges the rest of this century is bound to throw at us as the alternative could well be even worse.

Technology is progressing so fast that many are getting left behind, forced to “stand back and watch as the future shoots by”. So if we are to succeed we must “take a risk and ruffle the surface”

Today’s technology goes beyond previous linear approaches, he observes, with algorithms sorting through billions of pieces of data to find patterns and connections unrecognisable to humans. It is also cutting out the middle man, as crowdsourcing is taking the place of bank managers; Airbnb, Expedia and Booking.com replacing the travel agent; and Amazon having thrown the world of retail into upheaval.

The combination of technology, social media and the way people now absorb information – particularly the younger generations – means that the top-down centralised way we have been running the world for the last couple of centuries is no longer a viable model to follow, he warns, adding that the enormous opportunities available could easily slip through our fingers “due to the greed and conservatism of the establishments that dominate the economy”. Ouch.

In the book, he also complains about how too many corporates stifle inconvenient smaller competitors, and about the short-term thinking of too many companies. To make matters worse we suffer from the over-regulation of the business environment by government, seriously inhibiting innovation and entrepreneurship.

(Including and not least here in Kenya – with the notable exception of how the Central Bank allowed the introduction of the disruptive Mpesa system… plus now watch out for swift moves by the Capital Markets Authority.)

McCourt is not just focused on beating his competitors or maximising his wealth. He is equally concerned about the many who are left behind, and here he is looking way beyond revolutionary business entrepreneurs for solutions.

“A revolutionary entrepreneur,” he states in his article, “is anyone who wants to make a difference in the world. After all, change isn’t confined to business. Today’s healthcare is being transformed by advances such as 3D printing, remote diagnoses and electronic health trackers, education is being rebuilt by e-learning and video classrooms.”

McCourt is aware that lots of changes are needed beyond those brought about by technology. “There are so many structures in our lives that need reinventing – and I mean total rebuilding: the political system, diplomacy, taxation, wealth distribution, the refugee crisis, to name but a few,” he challenges.

“I became an entrepreneur for the joy of doing things differently, to rethink the model and to change things in ways that would eventually bring benefits to everyone,” his article concludes.

I’m sure that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos would applaud that, as his recently launched Courage and Civility Award indicate.

The question I leave you with is whether you are simply an incrementalist… or whether there’s something of the revolutionary in you.