Launch a site based on search, keywords, and no banner ads.

OK, sure, zag when they zig
The thing is, you might go for it. Get off your lazy bum and stop scribbling on beer mats and start up your company. Optimism is what you need. Frameworks. Business models. Adaptability. Entrepreneurial mindset. Zagging vs. zigging. Optimism.

Optimism is great, critical, important. But it’s not just what you need.

Healthy skepticism
This is your ability to look at yourself, your business, your product, with the outside perspective of the skeptic, and see it clearly. Then to turn to the market and proceed with healthy optimism. It’s the difference between blind faith and reasonable optimism. Cultivate it. Then proceed forward as though you’ve already succeeded.

Current status: I’ve stopped consulting… and have a job
I’ve been working the past few months with the lovely and talented team at Social Innovation Camp around growing the business that they’ve started and bootstrapped over the past three years. A few things we’ve worked on together have come together, so I’m joining as a full-time member of the team.

Which is, actually, pretty bloody awesome. What’s SICamp? It is:

A Launchpad for tech-based social ventures

An accellerator for tech-based social ventures which are sligthly further along

An innovation consultancy around technology and innovation for the social enterprise, public, and third sector

A trainer and enabler of global launchpads & accellerators

This is pretty much what I’d do if I had £20M in the bank and didn’t have to work. So that’s not so bad.

Cross-posting with SICamp stuff
I’ll be writing, hopefully much more often, for SICamp’s blog and most likely cross-posting here, on things like entrepreneurship, social enterprise, innovation, and musings and findings of each. I look forward to getting back into the swing of writing again… In fact, I feel a musing coming on.

What do you want to measure?
Sure, of course, you want to know how much online buzz equates to rankings, but what does that really tell you of true value? I don’t think that your advertisers (who pay for all those shows) really care about the number of eyeballs watching your show (whether real or on your PVR).

What they care about is people buying their stuff. This is what google figured out so well ten years ago.

What they care about is showing the right ads to the right people. Like P&G and Unilever sponsoring soap operas back in the 50s.

Market fragmentation
We’ve hit this point where everyone’s got 50+ channels of TV to watch. On top of that, they’ve got 4OD, IPlayer, Hulu, and others. People aren’t watching TV the same way. Media and advertising companies need to pay more attention to the engagement they can have with smaller, stronger audiences rather than beaming out to loads of eyeballs.

Landscape changes
Advertising’s gotta change, and I think it’s a bigger change than using the product placement ideas stuck into this article. The iPad, the web, smartphones, films, and Television create an ecosystem in which you can engage with people and build brands that last.

Go do it.

Flickr : , social media, strategy, television
Zooomr : , social media, strategy, television
Del.icio.us : , social media, strategy, television
Technorati : , social media, strategy, television

That being said, they’ve always delivered in a closed ecosystem. Fair enough. They were niche players. I’ve owned macs at all levels– from 8″ black and white jobs right through G4 iMacs. I’ve always had slight niggles with them– having to load a command line for development from a dozen floppies, often and ongoing issues with build quality, and Apple’s poor response to these problems has made them some enemies– people seem to fall through the cracks of Apple customer service from time to time.

On the flip side, they’ve been building a litany of awesome stuff. I think even the much-maligned iPad has some legs in it, though no one’s quite sure why they want one– it’s made me reconsider the iPod Touch as an interesting platform– a pocketable iPad.

Signs of distress
The last three months, though, has seen an accellerating litany of un-Apple-like behaviour. Here’s the thing: Apple is an underdog. Apple is an innovator. Apple positions themselves outside the mainstream, but they’ve been using dominant market position, patent law, and arbitrary bullying techniques to get ahead.

This isn’t what Apple is good at. I say stick to the knitting. Stop alienating your developers. That $40 billion could be spent on far cooler things like innovative music distribution models that don’t annoy customers instead of legal fees.

Technorati : Apple, design strategy, innovation, innovation strategy
Del.icio.us : Apple, design strategy, innovation, innovation strategy
Zooomr : Apple, design strategy, innovation, innovation strategy
Flickr : Apple, design strategy, innovation, innovation strategy

An excellent post by Valeria Maltoni discusses the importance of realising when you’ve lost sight of your customers’ interests and feelings. This reminded me of an ongoing struggle I’ve had with United Airlines, and how they’ve shifted significantly over the last ten years– to their employees as well as to their end users.

The United Experience – 1990s
To be fair, it’s hard running an airline. I wouldn’t do it, but someone does. I flew United a lot in the 1990s, and the experience was as I recall a pretty good experience out of a series of terrible alternatives– the difference seemed to be in the individual pride and power of United employees– they answered the phone as “employee-owners” and would often go the extra mile for you, particularly if something had gone wrong that was clearly their fault.

United in the 2000s
The Noughties brought some slippage– and, to be fair, we had an enormous overall price hike in oil, the troubled aftermath of 9/11, and the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Depending on when and what desk you called, you were likely to be handed over to an outsourced call centre which would have mixed rates of effectiveness. I had a couple of really miserable experiences when I missed flights, but– and here’s the interesting bit– the employees at the gate still had the visibility and ability to make the right changes and sort things out. If you got a bad agent on the phone, you could turn up at the airport 30 minutes or so early and get things sorted.

That, unfortunately, is no longer the case.

United at the start of 2010
I recently flew United from London to Sydney via LAX, four flights in all. I booked upgrades on three of them, and was re-downgraded on two of those. Two of the four flights had bad entertainment systems, and the flights had different baggage allowances (I had 2 bags from Sydney to LAX, but then had to pay USD$50 for my second bag from LAX to London).

Now, there was a terrorist attack. I am 6’3″, so flying in regular coach is a bit of a nightmare, but it’s not the end of the world. I spoke to everyone I could– the boarding agent, the gate agent, the ticket desk, the reservations desk, and the phone-in reservation system, spending, all in all, several hours trying to figure out how to simply get the upgrade difference refunded.

Several of the older United employees were very nice and understanding, but they had neither the time nor the ability to effect the refund. The general feeling was rushed and overworked, and in every United queue I’ve been in there’s been low staffing levels, so everyone is a bit overwhelmed. The only interface to refund this money is a web portal, which promises a 7-10 day working time (at this point, it’s been six weeks for two different requests with no return contact. I’ve contacted my credit card company to request a refund from them).

The dangerous side of customer aversion
1) You alienate your customers — you make it less likely to keep customers coming back. I have a lot of miles on United and generally would book through them on US-based flights. Keeping customers should be easy, unless you kick them out.

2) You undervalue (and devalue) your employees — I’m sure that each anti-customer decision made economic sense when doing it– outsourcing, driving customers to the web, etc.– but the employees– especially the ones who are on the front lines– are the ones who your customers think of you as. When they don’t have the tools to do the right thing, are disempowered, and are the ones that the angry customer will shout at (something I try really hard to do, as I know what it’s like to be an exposed cog).

3) You stop being able to hear your customers — The biggest danger of becoming customer tolerant (rather than customer seeking), is that you cannot engage your customers in a conversation and you stop knowing what’s going on. Once you route calls through an external call centre, you have to spend more time, money, and energy to understand your customers, and you lose some organisational memory and networks which inform you about how your customers feel towards you. You’re probably going to forget to do it (as outsourcing is often cost-driven rather than customer-focus-driven).

If you’re an airline, you’re likely one of the few games in town, and you’ll still get customers. It’s funny, however, how Southwest, JetBlue, and Virgin America can come up from nowhere and gain so many customers so quickly– mostly by listening to customers and treating their employees well.

Technorati : airlines, customer service, service, strategy, united, united airlines
Del.icio.us : airlines, customer service, service, strategy, united, united airlines
Zooomr : airlines, customer service, service, strategy, united, united airlines
Flickr : airlines, customer service, service, strategy, united, united airlines

There were a number of emerging themes through the conference, and not necessarily the ones you might think– access to finance, more capital, education.

Nope. What came up again and again was:

TIA
This is Africa. Sometimes problems can seem overwhelming. I have talked about this before, but it bears repeating. My take on it: Break the problems down, solve what you can. Innovate around what you can’t.

Open Source/Open Platforms
FrontlineSMS, Android, Ubuntu Linux– these give you the tools and abilities to build cost-effective, replicable platforms that won’t break the bank. For all the thrill of open source technology in Silicon Valley, the true innovation may come in Africa, where stuff like Microsoft’s failing ability to register its software (due, admittedly, to fighting rampant software piracy) may mean that the sotware is unusable.

Open platforms create frameworks and fertile ground for new innovations. Enough said.

Turn up and do something… and listen when you get there.
The power of doing something, getting over your own inhibitions, going, turning up, is far more important than your ability to make a big, great plan.

On the other hand, the developing world works differently than it does in the developed world. Teddy Ruge of Project Diaspora.suggests getting a member of the diaspora on your team. In whatever case, however, listening is critical. Go. Take a risk. See what works. Give yourself permission to fail, early and often, and learn from your mistakes.

Africans have the solutions to African problems.
You know a lot, but you don’t know the context. Africans can solve African problems– this is the difference between Busines Incubation projects around entrepreneurship and NGO projects– Incubators should offer mentorship rather than direction. The essential difference is that mentorship offers assistance to someone to help them do what they want to do, rather than demanding that they do what you think they should do.

The flip side to the TIA problem is that it’s important to believe that things get better, that the creative, innovative entrepreneur inside can find a solution to the problem. The flip side to mentorship is the encouragement, so that when your entrepreneur finds a wall, he figures out how to go under, around, or through it– or to turn that wall to her own advantage.

Myself and many of my peers, however, don’t really mind. The average Gen-X-er, it is thought, will have 3-5 careers (not jobs) in his or her lifetime (at last! Somewhere where I’m right on target– my third career in my mid-30s). We were called slackers and told we had ADD in high school and in our 20s, but in all actuality (or at least from my perspective), we are the first wave of constant learning and constantly changing what we do.

The old way
My grandmother was born in 1907. She was one of eighteen children because it was the tail-end of an agrarian economy where children’s lives were often too short. There weren’t cars. If my grandmother were in the UK, she’d have been using shillings and guineas.

The people of my grandmother’s time have had to deal with decimalisation, the shift to the metric system, world wars, an end to protectionism, the rise of a globalised economy (twice), the great depression, the end of banking hours, the introduction of ATMs, credit cards, chip-and-pin systems, push-button phones, mobile phones, computers, the Internet (my grandmother stopped here– mobile phones were enough) and more.

…And now
You may notice on this list that, as these new introductions have come closer to the present day, they have gotten closer and closer. Disruptive innovations are a huge driver in the economy, from google to facebook to email to twitter to openid to SOAP to java, we have to deal with new things all the time– new modes of interaction, new tools that we love to joke how they “simplify” our lives (we have to email, blog, and tweet)

How many things have you had to learn in your job? Word. Excel. Powerpoint. (and the new interfaces) Salesforce. Gmail. SharePoint. Your VPN. Your SecureID fob. IM. Skype. The new phone system. The fiddly expense form. The new reporting system on the Intranet. The TPS report forms.

Not only that, but the rules are changing faster and faster. In accounting, there’s XRBL, new and changing IFRS, and new laws coming in every market due to the financial crisis.

In software development, there are always new frameworks and companies are reinventing themselves so quickly that much software is released as “beta” these days. Gmail has just come out of beta after five years.

Modes of charity, development, and giving are changing constantly– almost too fast for us to keep up.

Your job
You have a single job: this job, if you are broadly a professional, is to learn. Constantly. Not necessarily in school, although we do see more people going to school later in life and schools like the Open University reporting increased enrollment.

Economist subscriptions are up, even as newspaper subscriptions are down. Chart-topping books include social psychology by Malcolm Gladwell, economists like Steven D. Levitt, and statistics books like Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

What opportunities does this open up? How does this change the game? Branding? How you prepare for your career? What you want from life?

On the way, we had a stopover in Milan. And they had an interesting thing there (as we were transferring from international to internal flights we had to pass through the baggage claim area). And this is what I noticed on the way out

You can see when your flight arrived and when the bags should be out.

This was an incredible revelation to me– sometimes it takes 5 minutes for bags to start rolling out while other times it’s more along the lines of 20 minutes. Someone at the Milan airport noticed this and did something about it. Now you can decide if you want to run to the restroom or queue right at the conveyor belt for your bag. If you want to get a coffee from the vending machine or sit down and wait.

Alitalia bag handling at Heathrow
On the other hand, when I returned to Heathrow, Alitalia’s ground crew (they were handling the bags as well as the flight in this case), notified us the bags would be delayed 15 minutes.

After 15 minutes, they said 20-30 minutes.

After 25 minutes, they said another 20-30 minutes. At which point I went to the counter to inquire. I got the most amazing story.

What had happened was this: The computer indicated that there were about 20 bags missing from the flight. As the baggage barcodes are read automatically in a baggage sort centre, someone was poking at the computer (probably without the appropriate permissions or something) trying to figure out which bags were missing and which weren’t. Meanwhile, no one was taking the bags off of the aircraft– the plane and passengers sat for over an hour before they got the crew together to unload the bags.

Of course, if they’d done this in the first place, then they would have avoided annoying the 120 or so passengers whose bags weren’t lost. And focussed on fixing it for the 20 people whose bags were lost.

Because of this inability to handle the situation at the time, the ground crew was off unloading another flight and they coudln’t unload the bags for the longest time. Me? My bag was fine. The delay, however, made me the last train from Victoria and had to decide to take three buses home or a £25 taxi.

Terrible handling of expectations, Alitalia.

Zeitgeist, biker bar, San Francisco
This is a bar that probably has the worst customer experience ever– if you use typical views of service. There’s a sign saying that regulars (friends of the bar staff) get preferential service. The hamburger counter is open at odd times, and when they have too many orders they shut down– and they’ll shout at you if you hang out waiting for it to reopen.

Why? They pour great vats of beer and cook a damn good $5 burger. It screws them up to have too many orders pile up, get lost, get greasy. The only can make so many burgers, and their back garden ensures that they’re packed 180 days a year.

They provide pitchers of a wide variety of great beer at decent prices, amazing bloody marys, and good burgers and home fries. They provide a great environment to hang out, drink, and meet people. The experience is what matters. If you’re rude or slow, they’ll shout at you.

Experience and expectations and brands
The Zeitgeist experience is what you want, though. They know who they are and provide exactly that.

Alitalia, of course, doesn’t care. Air ticket purchases are based on price. Once you’re receiving your baggage you’re locked in. Still, though, this is the level of screw-up that puts people off of airlines. Almost every frequent traveller I know has one or two airlines they just won’t fly. Alitalia’s on mine until I see how they respond to my note.

*update* To top it off, the customer service emails they gave me three days ago all bounce.

Technorati : branding, customer experience, customer service, expectations, managing expectations
Del.icio.us : branding, customer experience, customer service, expectations, managing expectations
Ice Rocket : branding, customer experience, customer service, expectations, managing expectations
Flickr : branding, customer experience, customer service, expectations, managing expectations
Zooomr : branding, customer experience, customer service, expectations, managing expectations
Buzznet : branding, customer experience, customer service, expectations, managing expectations
Riya : branding, customer experience, customer service, expectations, managing expectations
43 Things : branding, customer experience, customer service, expectations, managing expectations

The difference in Zimbabwe from the last time I was here six month ago is palpable. And the country is, quite simply, beautiful. It’s not the water world that Uganda is, but it’s well-appointed with water and could quite easily take its place back as the Breadbasket of Africa.

Why on earth was I tempting cholera and fuel shortages in order to go to Harare now, in the middle of winter (without even a proper jacket– it was about 8 degrees Centigrade)? Mobile Transactions has been developing a electronic voucher product that could be of huge use in agricultural subsidies, which can help support and grow markets rather than undercutting local businesses with subsidised imports. The problem with vouchers is the liquidity issue– shops need to purchase inputs and then collect vouchers to get paid for them– which may take months. With an electronic account, distributors can be credited instantly– and the voucher scheme operators get to monitor the usage of their vouchers in real-time, adapting the program as they see fit and as needs are required, including running different types of vouchers in different areas.

The trip
TIA did rear its head, a bit. Our assistant didn’t get the proper paperwork to export our vehicle in time, so we couldn’t drive across the border (we were a bit concerned as the fuel in the tank was *probably* just enough to get us to Harare and back to the border. Loads of people sell fuel– potentially cut with water, cooking oil, or whatever– near the border but we would only risk it if required.

We decided to go ahead and cross “by foot” as they say, and hire a taxi on the Zim side. The only issue– no taxis. Busses would leave from Lusaka but wouldn’t stop at the border. We were advised that hitching was our only option.

The very nice official, however, who issued us our visas told us to talk to his friend the guard at the exit gate, who hooked us up with a truck (labeled of course “no unauthorised passengers”) who took us to Harare for $10US, getting us there just in time for our meeting.

Dollarisation
Zim’s been switched to US Dollars, although South African Rands, British Pounds, Euros, and Botswanan Pula are widely accepted. Prices are quoted in dollars and change (if any) will be given in Rands or Pula.

Prices have actually stabilised a bit– The latest inflation figures I’ve seen put it at -1%.

Things aren’t all rosy, however. Huge settling has happened in the economy which is good, but the outlook is bleak, if tinged with a bit of hope. Just a bit, though. The general sense is that things are going to get better, but not after they get a bit worse.

Stores are closed. Fuel lines are common (though less so a couple of months ago)– Americans who remember the fuel crisis in the 70s may recognise this:

That’s a filling station on the left, and a huge queue for a minibus in front.

What next?
We exited the country after a single 2 hour meeting, twenty-nine and one half hours after entering. Even for me an dmy ridiculous amount of travel, this is a new record (the previous was about 50 hours in Kenya).

Mobile Transactions thinks that there’s huge potential in Zimbabwe: It’s got smart, driven people, and a desperate need for liquidity. It’ll be a while before Mobile Transactions can perform its core business, but MT are keen on and hopeful that they may be able to run their voucher programme and reduce transaction costs rather significantly.

Technorati : africa, entrepreneurship, zimbabwe
Del.icio.us : africa, entrepreneurship, zimbabwe
Ice Rocket : africa, entrepreneurship, zimbabwe
Flickr : africa, entrepreneurship, zimbabwe
Zooomr : africa, entrepreneurship, zimbabwe
Buzznet : africa, entrepreneurship, zimbabwe
Riya : africa, entrepreneurship, zimbabwe
43 Things : africa, entrepreneurship, zimbabwe

I’m working with Mike on his pitch for SBSVC. He don’t exactly need capital, but it’d make AEP move faster, further, and achieve profitability sooner.

The early-stage companies that I’m working with, has got me thinking, as I always do, about the market and landscape here in sub-Saharan Africa, most of the same problems and issues that entrepreneurs face back in Silicon Valley, London, New York, or Asia– they are just magnified here.

Venture capital
There are a lot of misconceptions around venture capital and angel investing. Most entrepreneurs go out looking for the largest possible cash flow at the lowest valuation, without considering what else the VC might bring to the table, i.e.

Experience
Contacts
Networks
Advice
Business
Modeling

These are just a few of the things. Most VCs (the only ones I’d want investing in me) have experience as entrepreneurs and at running businesses. Most of what I see as the big failures in VC from the past– I lived & worked through the heart of the dot.com and the Web 2.0 bubbles– have been, broadly, the fault of having the wrong investors. Kozmo.com being the prime example– some guy with an Excel spreadsheet thought they should take this FMCG service company and sell Palm Pilots at a huge markup.

The VC should be the person who, once they’ve picked you as an investee, will do the right things to make the pie bigger. It doens’t matter so much if you give her huge equity slices; she should work to make the pie big enough so that all parties have more actual cash.

Partner
One of the women I’m pre-screening as a p0tential investee is a fascinating woman. She’s lived and worked all over the world, but is here in Uganda and has invested heavily in a fish farm. Fish farming is controversial worldwide, but here in Uganda the fish that are typically farmed are catfish and tilapia– two of the “OK” fish to farm (low resource usage, high tolerance for variable conditions, etc).

She is excited about the opportunity to work together on an equity basis, in partnership.

Mentor
Mike had originally been using the term “Venture Search” for our model, but it has a fairly specific meaning that is tangential to, rather than describing exactly, his business model.

I like the term “Mentor Capitalist”: Provide many of the benefits of a traditional VC, but in a more hands-on fashion. Provide network breadth while the VCs provide depth.

Building markets
The market for angel investing and venture capital has to spring from the fertile ground of entrepreneurship; entrepreneurs, however often need start-up capital. In some cases– in the cases where AEP is trying to work– tilling that entrepreneurial soil to attract interested investment capital and a new network of angel investors, setting up a virtuous cycle.

Technorati : Angel investing, africa, african entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship, investing, strategy, technical assistance, venture capital
Del.icio.us : Angel investing, africa, african entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship, investing, strategy, technical assistance, venture capital
Ice Rocket : Angel investing, africa, african entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship, investing, strategy, technical assistance, venture capital
Flickr : Angel investing, africa, african entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship, investing, strategy, technical assistance, venture capital
Zooomr : Angel investing, africa, african entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship, investing, strategy, technical assistance, venture capital
Buzznet : Angel investing, africa, african entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship, investing, strategy, technical assistance, venture capital
Riya : Angel investing, africa, african entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship, investing, strategy, technical assistance, venture capital
43 Things : Angel investing, africa, african entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship, investing, strategy, technical assistance, venture capital