SUCCESS LIFE:Jonah Nyoni
TODAY, businesses operate in a complex, capricious, competitive, and technologically-driven environment. That alone takes a leader who is constantly eyeing the next bounce of the ball, and willing to unlearn old patterns to re-learn new competencies that will respond to the new needs. I had to engage the guru; Vusi Thembekwayo to help us with that. He is a venture capitalist, author, premium global business speaker and the CEO of MyGrowthFund.
This is part one of the interview I (JN) had with Thembekwayo (VT) in Sandton, South African. Today I give you two of the seven leadership intelligences that we talked about. Firstly, we delve into linear and non-linear thinking. Secondly, we deal with disruptive thinking in business leadership.
JN: John Quincy Adams once said a good and exceptional leader makes people grow, learn and become bigger and that’s what we have been seeing from you Vusi. As young Africans, we have been inspired by your works particularly as Zimbabweans who are in business.
VT: Thank you Jonah. Zimbabwe for me is fascinating. There is a great opportunity for one to produce a piece of literature about how to operate a business in an environment as complex as Zimbabwe because it presents a kind of macro-economic environment that is not often experienced. So, leaders in many of the developed economies talk about how to manage complexities, but for Zimbabwe, it’s a bit like running a business in Venezuela. For someone out there it is a fantastic opportunity to talk to business leaders and managers and talk about how are you delivering a consistently growing PNL (profit and loss) and value creation for shareholders in this kind of an economy. I will genuinely pick and read that (book).
JN: We better write (co-author) that book?
VT: (Laughs) I don’t have the insights. I am not exposed, but I know a few businesspeople who run some of the large businesses in Zim(babwe), I understand it, but being in it everyday is a very different story. If you look at the size of the informal market, the cannibalisation of the capital market, the lack of liquidity, almost the death of cash and whether or not there is a currency; all these present interesting case studies of how to build a business. At the end of the day, people need to live, people need to buy food, buy water and eat and the rest of it. So, there is still a social case of running a business but I am interested in the economic model.
JN: In your book, The Magna Carta of Exponentiality, you talk about linear and non-linear thinking for leaders? Tell us, what is that all about?
- Chamisa under fire over US$120K donation
- Mavhunga puts DeMbare into Chibuku quarterfinals
- Pension funds bet on Cabora Bassa oilfields
- Councils defy govt fire tender directive
Keep Reading
VT: We do come from a time, particularly I think in much of the 20th century where the modalities for growth have been incremental. So, if you look for instance at some, even as great business leaders like Warren Buffet, his hypothesis in business has been buy and hold because of the compounding effect. That’s based on the presumption of linearity. If you buy an asset today, and it grows at a linear rate consistently, over time the rate of growth compounds. That has been much of structured thinking in business. So if you talk to a business leader; a CEO or a C-Suit executive in any of the large listed businesses you will usually hear them talking about single digit growth.
Many years ago I had the privilege of speaking at the largest brewer in the continent and they were having a management conference and for them the growth target was 2%. Admittedly, the volumes where huge because they were talking of thousands of kilo litres. Is 2% growth what the shareholders are paying for? I think you find a lot of that kind of linear thinking in many spaces. Through linear thinking you find a bit in results, which is the rate of growth which the leaders are looking for.
So if I want a 2% growth business, then in effect what I am saying to my people is; give me a 2% better effort; 2% better efficiencies. What we know for sure is that if you pursue a linear type of modality from a thinking perspective, you will likely generate a stable share growth.
If you just want to shoot the lights out, you are most definitely not going to disrupt.
Exponential thinking tends to be different. Exponential thinking will set the framework of operating and it says; how can we disrupt the way we run our business today, not only looking for efficiencies for running our businesses but for cannibalisation? In other ways, how can we destroy ourselves? Because what we know to be true is that if we destroy ourselves internally, we rob the market and the challenges of the opportunities (of) others doing that to us. We become the disrupters of our competitors and that is how we accumulate and gain exponential growth.
So these two thinking frameworks are very different. They can co-exist, it’s very rare, but they can co-exist. But it’s really about the courage of the business leader at the end of the day. Which of those do you want? And we live in a time today, where business leaders are just custodians. That’s what I call them. They are brought on a five-year contract as a CEO and their mandate is, don’t rock the boat. So, kind of what you do as a CEO is to look for linearity in growth, rather than truly disruptive platforms of how to rethink the way you do business.
JN: Disruptive thinking brings two things; it kills old systems and creates new ways and opportunities in doing business. Look at Blackberry, Nokia, Kodak, Xerox, Motorola, these were giants in the past, but they lost it somehow. What’s your advice to a leader today who wants to, not only stay afloat, but be competitive?
VT: I think the reminder to all of us is that disruptive thinking is an input, not an outcome. The mistake people make is the presumption that disruptive thinking is what results.
Disruptive thinking is what germinates. If you are disruptive in the way you think about the world, the outcome will be disruption. Let me take you back, the QWERTY Keyboard was not actually designed by any of the mobile telecommunications companies. It was designed by E Remington and Sons, the world’s first typewriter company. What Nokia and then many years later Blackberry did is they militarised the keyboard with the design philosophy that every thumb on the hand should reach every single key on the keyboard without moving the thumb away from the palm. That was the basic design philosophy and that design philosophy was disruptive because no one had done that before. Fast forward decades later, Steve Jobs insisted; why does the phone have a keyboard in the first place? So, the point I make here is what people think about as the input is actually the outcome. Disruption as a thinking model is the input. In other words you need a courageous leader who asks: Why don’t we do it differently?
All businesses die. You can read the Bible cover to cover, and you will not find anywhere in any of the holy scriptures where the creator of the heavens of the earth decrees all business to exist. What that means is there was a point in time when someone thought about your business. It was an idea. They took that idea and ran with it and built a business.
Now, if something can be created, it can and must be destroyed. This is the natural cycle of the world. Things come and go. There was a time the British were the most powerful empire in the world, there was a time when the Spaniards were. There was a time when Romans were. The point about it is that everything dies. What you have to look for as a business leader is to kill yourself. The reason you want to do that is you don’t want the market to do it. The answer to “Why?” is very simple. If the market destroys you, it’s brutal. It doesn’t ask for your participation and certainly doesn’t ask for your permission. But if you drive the process of disruption, you drive the process of change. You are in charge. You can dictate the rate at which that change should happen. You can dictate the rate at which that change is implemented and you can dictate what that change means to you. So, you want to be the one driving the disruption. If you are the one driving the disruption, trust me you have a far better seat in the cinema of life than being the one receiving the disruption happening in the market place.
