What does the number 7 smell like? If knowledge is a new asset class, why do we still feel poor? “The answer is the question,” was the consensus that came out of a recent wide-ranging interview with Canadian psychologist and author with tech titan Elon Musk.
To win, do market leaders follow the route of convergence, or diverge off the beaten well-worn path?
Perhaps it is not what you know, but more of how you think about what you know. “Being able to connect two previously unconnected ideas” is how Jamil Qureshi defines success.
“Nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.” Ideas are linked into networks of connectivity.
Does it make sense to try and be a ‘lone ranger’ and go it alone – in the unforgiving business wilderness?
When one looks more carefully, it is not Kenyan companies competing with each other, but each company with its network, challenging other business networks.
Most successful companies have built up a spider’s web of alliances, and [tangible and non-tangible] resources they can draw on.
This may make it sound like it is only the giants of commerce, tech and finance that will survive.
In practice: networks where anyone can connect with anyone, create a level playing field.
In reality, competing on networks allows for asymmetric competition, with a tiny and sharp cluster of aligned individuals, able to outsmart the fat and complacent incumbents.
It is not what you know
Knowledge has become just about free. Everyone will tell you they have the magic secret sauce to business success.
Perhaps if everyone has the answer, no one really has the answer?
If success was as easy as attending a few courses, reading a sample of bestselling books, watching a range of YouTube clips everyone would be thriving, adding a string of zeros to their bank accounts.
In world of AI and programmes like ChatGPT: It is not what you know – it is how you think about what you know – that sets the trajectory.
“It’s not change that is the problem, but more the pace of change,” notes Qureshi, a performance coach to six athletes who reached a number 1 ranking.
In each case, he observed that these elite athletes were very self-aware. Perhaps that is a clue?
East African businesses are generally quite good at getting a little better. But they are bad at evolving to being different.
In the last 30 years plus, for instance, in the Kenyan banking sector there are only three banks that were really different.
Trade Bank in the early 1990’s with drive-in evening tellers, Equity focusing on the previously unbanked, and NIC when it rebranded with 8 am to 8pm ‘banking lounge’ style service.
With time, companies all converge in sector. All competing to look very much like the other.
Take the case of the ‘big 4’ global audit firms, and their second-tier rivals, they are virtually indistinguishable -- looking and acting the same.
Not taking imaginative risks, all quite compliant. Strange thing is when you look at market leaders in the stratosphere; they got there not by convergence, but by divergence.
What is to be learned from the ' Magnificent Seven'?
Now called the ‘Magnificent Seven’ these [mostly] tech-oriented companies: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla – all got there by divergent thinking.
Looking at the consumers and the wider market differently. Seeing what everyone saw, in plain sight, yet were blind to the possibilities.
“A superpower: an integrated set of people, processes, and technology that creates value by helping the company do something better than its competitors” is how McKinsey partners describe these seven.
Awareness is everything. Which business leader do you think will be the most successful in long run?
Bob, full of bravado and hype touting the virtues of the ‘same old’. Or reflective Sarah, who realises ‘as within, so without’ and is able to focus on meditative self-awareness, for 15 minutes in a frantic workday?
American poet Robert Frost said it best in his poem The road not taken. “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference”.
