It is a beautiful thing when a personal brand lives out its own manifesto. It fills me with awe and wonder to watch someone else unleash the full force of their fabulosity on the world. In case you’re wondering, yes fabulosity is a real word, made famous by fashion mogul Kimora Lee Simmons.
By Thembe Khumalo
This week I spent many, many hours in Maputo with some of Africa’s brightest start ups. They are using technology to create innovations that solve social problems. Beyond the brilliance of their ideas and the incredible energy they exude, what struck me most is the overwhelming audacity of many of their endeavours. These are people who could literally change our world.
Here is a girl in Mozambique who provides a healthy, environmentally-friendly and socially-conscious menstrual hygiene solution that helps girls stay in school. More than this, she leads the development of a micro franchising model to support female entrepreneurship.
Only at the end of our conversation do I realise that she is not manufacturing her reusable pads in Mozambique, she is importing them from China. Does this attract a lot of criticism?
Undoubtedly! Should she care what the critics say? Perhaps, but more importantly she should focus on the fact that she is solving a number of serious problems for the local community; doing it affordably; and doing much more than most of the people who pass idle criticism.
Here is a 45-year-old accountant who has ventured into the tech space. Together with his younger business partner, they are developing an app to help small businesses manage their accounts — in Portuguese. Is he uncomfortable competing with 20-year-old digital natives? Yes of course, but he believes in his idea more than he cares about being an odd man out.
And then there is young Vusa, a delightful boy from Bulawayo who runs an outfit called My Runner.
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It’s a ticketing app that takes the agro out of booking and paying for your long haul bus tickets. By collaborating with bus operators, he dares to envision an improved quality experience for people travelling by bus — imagine a different Renkini, and a Roadport without the drama.
All of this got me thinking about the role and importance of audacity in entrepreneurship. It is the person who dares to think that he can do something which has not been done before, who makes the greatest impact.
Think of the Wright brothers daring to believe in controlled sustained flight for humans — it was so audacious that it was almost laughable. Think of Kwame Nkrumah daring to resist imperialism and to believe in pan-Africanism — an idea that remains almost inconceivable in its audacity. Think of Emeline Pankhurst and the suffragette movement, daring to demand that women should get the vote — audacious enough to be considered scandalous.
Audacity is a willingness to be bold, to take risks, and to do so in the face of social pressure. Audacious people typically face widespread resistance of some description, but they act on their beliefs anyway.
It is not only entrepreneurs who must carry a measure of audacity for success in their endeavours. It is all and any leaders who want to make an impact, and to do so with poise.
You may be familiar with the words of Malcolm X, who said: “Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you are a man, you take it.” That is audacity.
Can one train for audacity? I don’t know, but I tend to think not. While courage can be exercised, strengthened and eventually become part of a leader’s skill set, audacity demands a little more than that. Audacity carries an element of charisma, which I suspect you may have to be born with.
Former United States President Barack Obama demonstrated this beautifully, not only in the title of his famous second book,The Audacity of Hope, but also in this excerpt from an article he published in the New York Times in 2006: “I was familiar with the question, a variant on the questions asked of me years earlier, when I’d first arrived in Chicago to work in low-income neighbourhoods.
It signalled a cynicism not simply with politics but with the very notion of a public life, a cynicism that — at least in the South Side neighbourhoods I sought to represent – had been nourished by a generation of broken promises.
In response, I would usually smile and nod and say that I understood the skepticism, but that there was — and always had been — another tradition to politics, a tradition that stretched from the days of the country’s founding to the glory of the civil rights movement, a tradition based on the simple idea that we have a stake in one another, and that what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done.
It was a pretty convincing speech, I thought. And although I’m not sure that the people who heard me deliver it were similarly impressed, enough of them appreciated my earnestness and youthful swagger that I made it to the Illinois legislature.”
When he references youthful swagger you can begin to catch a sense of how audacity is a combination of courage and charisma.
So of course if I mention any Presidents, then I must surely mention my own. Audacity is a word I have heard arise a number of times in discussions about President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s first couple of moves — at least it was until his Cabinet was announced.
If you have watched the spectacular process by which he has lead the rebranding of Zanu PF, the military and his own personal brand, you have to hand it to the man for audacity — and in his audacity he carries the hope a nation.
Thembe Khumalo is a brand builder, storyteller and certified life coach
