We purchase feelings, not products or services. Watch what managers say they do – then see what they actually do. How do you feel about going from zero to one?
If you want to create an enterprise that stands out, that has [almost] no competitors – What are the seven questions you need to be able to answer?
Friday, after work, why does Sam order a cool White Cap and not a Red Bull, or a cup of tea? When you drive to work in your new top of the line Range Rover Vogue, how do you feel? Why not ride an eBike, walk, or grab a matatu?
We are driven by our emotions, with this desire to look and feel good. In boardroom discussions, the aim is often to be right, to come up with the one solution, that solves the management problem. But perhaps, an astute captain of industry would realise that it may be better to come up with solutions that are the least wrong, giving some room for flexibility.
Our management actions are powered by our hidden subconscious mind, that is real central processing unit controlling our behaviours.
That mind you are thinking about now is the equivalent of the screen on your phone, or laptop. It’s the part of your thinking that is most obvious at the surface.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate," advised the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung.
Do this before trying to scale
Desire to grow, to scale is one of the feelings that both tiny two person start-ups and large corporates have in common. Ask a young aspiring entrepreneur: What is stopping them from moving forward? Chances are that they will respond: a lack of funds, access to capital. But is that really the constraint, the limiting factor?
Likely that the real issue is: Does one have a product that works, that solves a customer’s pressing problem, and that they are ready to purchase? May be as a simple as selling one product to one customer for Sh1,000, and getting their feedback, and going from there.
Showing proof of concept, even if it is only on a tiny scale. As opposed to writing elaborate business plans, complaining about how no one wants to invest may be better to start small.
Doing the design thinking, going back to basics, using first principles thinking to figure out what are the truthful fundamentals, and working up from there – turn out to be tougher, than writing wishful plans.
This is where creativity comes in, which is really about observing what is happening. For the moment, seeing without judging. Noticing an insight that others miss, combined with a mindset of being able to take that bright idea, just one small step further up the value chain.
Scaling a business idea is great, but the first step is showing proof of concept with real customers. Both business people, NGOs and donors get carried away with the feeling that ‘this should work’ yet it doesn’t.
An entrepreneur notices something is wrong in days or weeks, for the NGO or donor that does have ‘skin in the game’ it may take years.
Going from zero to one
The next Sam Altman, founder of ChatGPT and OpenAI won’t be creating an AI application. It’s easy to copy what others are doing, in a quick ‘cut and paste’, focusing on what everyone already knows.
Difficult to make something new, that stands out in the marketplace, so unusual that it has no competitors. Investor and contrarian thinker Peter Thiel calls this going from ‘zero to one’ by being able to create a ‘monopoly’, by which he means, not what you think.
“By monopoly we mean the kind of company that’s so good at what it does that no other firm can offer a close substitute. Google is a good example of accompany that went from 0 to 1: it hasn’t competed in search since the early 2000s, when it definitely distanced itself from Microsoft and Yahoo,” writes Thiel.
Closer to home, a prime example of a ‘monopoly’ would be M-Pesa, with a roughly 91 percent market share.
“Americans mythologise competition and credit it with savings us from socialist breadlines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away. The lesson for entrepreneur’s is clear: if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business,” advises the co- founder of publicly traded Palantir, started in 2003 to provide software platforms for big data analytics, making one wonder, what do they really do in a ‘big brother is watching’ world.
