What the heck is it?
It’s an extension to Chrome and/or Firefox that replaces the sidebar where the google ads turn up with information about the sender– specifically, their blog, twitter, linkedin, etc. You can also extend the extensions with what they call “raplets”– plugins that add functionality to, currently, Crunchbase (useful for tech-geek entrepreneurs), a couple of CRM systems, a booking system, and more.

Why do I want it?
How else are you going to keep track of all those people? Ever get a speculative email from someone that looks good but maybe is spam? You can find out loads of information by looking at someone’s twit-stream, linkedin, etc. right off the bat. It’s super useful. And handy. And fills in the blanks that you get when someone emails you and says “we met at the X conference…” and you can’t remember who they are.

And, it allows you to take (private) notes on them. And they have a dead-simple privacy policy (they essentially respect it and don’t share anything, ever). And it uses OpenAuth, which means that they never see your gmail password, so no hackety hackness.

It only works with gmail.

Enjoy your new productivity

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Sorry this is late– I’ve just been indundated by the types of things that inundate your life at the end of five months on the road: I hadn’t slept in the same place (and mostly in the same country) for more than three weeks between April and September. A lot of laundry, email management, and general decompressing time needed to happen.

Metrics
MBA-ism is filled with metrics. In fact, there is some research on the impact of metric-heavy MBA thinking on entrepreneurship, and the basic idea is that the two schools of thought are are diametrically opposed.

Dr. Saras Sarasvathy from the Darden School of Business posts her findings at effectuation.org, which broadly suggest that for a certain type of entrepreneur, the whole idea of finding markets, estimating market sizes, and attempting to essentially pre-plan the value of a business is opposite to disruptive models of innovation where marekts are created– i.e., no MBA would have invested in an ice machine because the value of the harvested ice market was too big.

Metrics, Development-style
Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is a tricky, hard thing. It’s a nightmare for lots of international NGOs as the data collection is done from far away, sometimes by people who don’t understand the value of the information they are gathering (Appfrica may be on to something with their new approach to this…).

Now, add to the difficulty of collecting metrics the ability to compare several projects:

- A clean water project
- A new ICT training centre
- A new delivery system for vaccines
- A new collective agriculture scheme

All of these may cost the same, and have variable outputs– some will have smaller effects on more people, others might be drastically transformational for the lives of a very few. How do you compare them? How you choose between them? How do you decide which was more successful after they’ve run?

Measurement metrics
There are a few different approaches to this, many of the latest (ish) are in things like Blended Value and SROI. These attempt to monetise the outputs, so if you increase someone’s productivity (training), then their increased productivity can be measured, turned into dollars, and compared against the increased sales prices that the agriculture scheme generates for its members, and then you report them along with your financial statements. You can add them so that you achieve “profit” in “social returns”. It’s crude but it’s something.

(if you have any better ideas, then by all means suggest away– I don’t think anyone’s particularly tied to these, although they do yield some kind of apples-to-apples comparisons, although the methodologies for each monetisation vary so they end up being apples-to-pears all to often…)

Operational metrics
These are, generally, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These should be the sorts of things that tell you what’s going on while you’re working– cost per vaccine delivery, cost per avoided pregnancy, cost per trained person. This lets you know if you’re on- or off-target, and then you can start to adjust your thinking and approach based on what’s happening in the field.

My question
The question I had with all of this was “What does it all tell you?”

Here’s the thing: Saying you trained 100 people to use the Internet is almost meaningless when you’re 5000 miles away. Saying that you created $50,000 worth of increased productivity is even worse. What you’re trying to get to is a deeper understanding about the effect thatyouvé had on people’s lives.

You want to get to people’s stories. You need the context to know exactly what it means to increase someone’s effective wage $100 a month.

There’s an important thing happening at and around SoCap about creating better, more comparable metrics, but it’s important to not just be stuck in the Excel sheet, but to also communicate what it is that you’re trying to change. There are too many “successful” projects on the ground that achieved exactly what they set out to on the Excel sheet, but didn’t create lasting change.

Teams are groups that are cohesive. In most of the work you’ll do in business school, in work, and in life will require the assistance and aid of others.

While I can build a financial model, there are others who can probably do it better, and then what I’m good at is talking through the items, finding bits that my financier may have missed, and discussing what an appropriate discount rate should be.

While I can write a detailed marketing strategy, I’m better at coming up with the broad strategy and leaving the details to those who are best at it.

Teams work well when they work together; almost no one works in isolation. Use your strengths and let your teammates shore up your weaknesses.

This series is all be tagged “Lessons learned” if you want to read all of them.

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Bugolobi trading centre hurts your eyes as you pass

Signs and billboards are everywhere, clogging the streets (though often representing the only street signs) flooding brand awareness of Nissan, Orange, and the MTN sponsorship of the 2010 World Cup (how many Ugandans will be able to attend? Likely not many, but MTN is the sponsor).

Intriguingly, a stove manufacturer who has approached CEIHD (the company I’m seconded to through MBAs Without Borders) for carbon financing is painting his stoves Zain purple, and is calling them Zain stoves. We have now arrived at tag-along branding.

Competing stove manufacturers– tag-along Zain stoves on the left.

African Marketing & distribution
The flip side of this is that Africa’s production capacity is actually pretty good: there is a lot of skilled and semi-skilled labour, engineering expertise, manufacturing skills. One of the biggest things that I see lacking is in marketing and distribution channels.

Entrepreneurs everywhere get marketing mixed up with advertising– but more so in Africa. People know they need to invest in marketing, but it ends up being copycat marketing– trying to flood the airwaves and print media with ads– all of which get lost.

The opportunity
If you can get marketing and distribution right (and almost no one is– certainly not the international mobile telcos) you will make a pile of money in Africa.

Some of the promising work that I’ve seen has been in microfranchising (i.e., the Avon model– in fact, Avon is doing incredibly well in South Africa).

At some level, Gordon Gekko is right: (some) greed is good. That’s why I personally think that the for-profit models of development will ultimately achieve faster, more sustainable development than NGO models. What’s it going to make to make our partner enterprises’ excellent pro-poor products stand out from the crowd? To get people to invest in technologies that save money over the long term and have associated benefits? Leave thoughts. I’m excited to hear them.

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In strategy courses, we talk a lot about sustainable competitive advantage-what it is that makes your company better than others at doing what it is that you do-in some cases, you may have companies that compete in markets but don’t directly compete against each other-Starbuck’s, for instance, doesn’t sell coffee, it sells an experience, the “third place” which is familiar and homelike, where you have music and comfortable seating, you can have a meeting, but you aren’t distracted by either home or work needs (except when your BlackBerry starts flashing and vibrating at you). This is why they haven’t made a competitive response to McDonald’s. People will choose one over the other, but McDonald’s isn’t going after Starbucks’ core business-the experience.

On the other hand, lots of people go to business school to give them new opportunities in their lives. One of my friends had worked extensively in technology (as had I), and we were looking for a change. We went to speak to our strategy lecturer about it, and he advised us that, strategically, if you were throwing away IT and tech skills in this market, you’d be unwise.

This caused us to look back at ourselves and really try to analyse what it was that we were good at.

I’d already been on my second career-I’d shifted from performing arts and nonprofit entrepreneurship to technology work in Silicon Valley-arguably one of the entrepreneurship centres of the world-certainly for IT companies. I turned down very good, very lucrative jobs building and running data centres, and I started thinking of myself as an entrepreneur rather than a technologist-defining myself my who I was rather than what I did.

Whereas most of my colleagues in IT had focused on a sector-biotech, say, or the Internet, I’d worked almost exclusively for small, growing companies in a wide range of fields-biotech, Internet services, advertising, security, chip design, theatre, event management, consulting, government services, transportation. Where my colleagues argued for clean, elegant design and tight, efficient code, I’d try to look at the big picture, to understand why it was that Marketing made seemingly unreasonable demands, why it was that the executive management would ignore profitable centres while focussing on money-losing businesses, and why Finance would drop critical line-items from our budgets. I certainly did make a lot of unreasonable arguments myself, but I ended up often being the person who made the connections between those groups.

My self-searching provided me with a list of things I was good at:

· Making connections

· Seeing the big picture

· Translation between groups (how you talk to engineers versus salespeople)

· Developing and mentoring

· Strategic direction, in product, marketing, sales, or overall.

· Choosing which details to focus on

All of which adds up to entrepreneur. So I shouldn’t have been too surprised when I was knocked back from the big private equity houses and consulting firms-while they’d have a use for someone like me, they couldn’t see it.

This series is all be tagged “Lessons learned” if you want to read all of them.

This one you hopefully learned in undergrad, but it bears some repeating. You take a top international business programme which requires several years’ experience to get in and you’re quite likely to have a lot of talented people who are used to having their way with things. These are (or have been) important people- important to someone, anyway.

Suddenly, these people are in strange bidding wars, having to jump through hoops and submit assignments and not getting any feedback on them and, in some cases, failing.

There were people who, through the complicated elective-choosing system, didn’t get to have lecturers or courses that they came to Oxford for. Some of the lesson here was to make better choices. Some of the lesson is that you can’t do everything. Some of it is to just pick yourself up off the floor and deal with it.

There’s an economic principle called Sunk Cost, the lesson of which is that, once something is in the past, you can’t get hung up on how much it cost-if the right decision is to move on and trash it, you trash it. You move forward. You look at the situation you’re in and move forward from there-not from before you became the King of Bad Decisions.

This series is all be tagged “Lessons learned” if you want to read all of them.

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For most of my academic life, I had some idea of what the grading policy would be for my work-I always lost all the penmanship points, but got most of the rest of them. You could, of course, use this to game the system-you’d get to know your lecturers, what they liked or didn’t, and you knew what to focus on.

The Oxford system, like life, is much more complicated and difficult to navigate. To start with, we had to tread a fine line between business writing and academic writing. Secondly, your papers are all double-blind double-marked. You hand them in at the exams schools with only a number on them, and you receive them back, without comments, with only a mark on them. You had to read others’ papers and intuit what you may have done wrong. Third, you didn’t get to know who marked them, so you couldn’t ask. The lack of a grading scale meant that it was that much harder to deconstruct what you didn’t know.

Yes, it’s unfair. And frustrating. Welcome to life. It’s a little glib, but it’s also a bit of a dose of reality.

Just like you might go out and start a business or get a job and it’ll turn out wrong, you’ll fail, lose all your money, your grandma’s house, and whatever else, so it is with work.

On the flip side, you might end up with a great mark for something that you thought was terrible. Maybe you hit on some nice insight, or maybe you just got lucky. Sometimes overanalysis is worse than underanalysis. Sometimes you just manage to start Friendster and have a decent run on VC money while you figure out what to do with your life.

This series is all be tagged “Lessons learned” if you want to read all of them.

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You can only be taught so much in life, but most of what’s important you’ll have to learn yourself.

A lot of people were frustrated in our core Financial Reporting course-the accountants were upset that the course was teaching that their science was all tricks, smoke, and mirrors. The poets were terrified that the final exam was a detailed review of the mechanics of accounting standards.

The lectures consisted, for the most part, of a Japanese and Italian man making jokes and examples about how the science of accounting is really a grey area, as the values of things change depending on the business operations.

The lessons learned were to think critically about everything-especially the hard numbers on a balance sheet. What is your inventory really worth, when it was purchased at different prices at different times? What does “goodwill” really refer to? Define revenue (you’d think that one would be easy). The other lesson learned was the bootstrapping-you had to learn all the mechanics of accounting yourself (there was an evening class for those with trouble), but Tomo wasn’t going to sit with you each week and go over adding and subtracting columns of figures-his work was on strategic accounting-what a manager needs to know about what his accountant is doing.

This series is all be tagged “Lessons learned” if you want to read all of them.

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(The most important parts of which they don’t teach you)

In my final set of posts about Oxford, I take a look back, six months out, and reflect on what I learned at Oxford.

I suspect that some of this applies to all business schools, though much of it will certainly only apply to Oxford. I feel very fortunate to have the gall to apply, raw intellect to get in, persistence to succeed, and perhaps the wisdom to let a little of what I’ve learned sink in, not to mention a great heap of humility in the face of so many talented and fascinating classmates.

Business school – like any school – is an experience, not a lesson or a set of skills. If you want to learn the skills of an MBA, you can do it on your own, with books. I’d start with a good micro- and macroeconomics primer, an accounting book, the McKinsey book on valuation, The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, and then start working through the Personal MBA.You can teach yourself strategy, operations management, valuation, management, statistics, economics, and marketing all on your own. What you won’t get out of that is the experience of others’ experiences, the network, and the time off/huge student loans. It’s up to you.

Some of what you’ll have the opportunity to learn at Oxford is here. This is beyond all the cool guest lecturers, the Oxford Union, the speakers, conferences, and amazing professors you would encounter there.

This series is all be tagged “Lessons learned” if you want to read all of them.

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I often (as often as almost always) get advice, along the lines of

You just be careful, you put your money where no one can touch it, and you get that money back. People will steal it. Don’t trust anyone. Everyone is out to get you. They all see you, the rich Mzungu, and they just want to work for you and eat up all your money.

This can, as you might imagine, become disheartening.

The best jobs for graduates
If you’re a top student from here, you might be lucky enough to go on to MIT or Harvard, or you might go to either KIU or Makerere University. And when you graduate, what do you do? What are your preferred options?

1. Go work outside of the country, preferably outside of Africa: This is usually the top option, and it’s understandable– it’s exciting to move away, to a bigger, richer, more exciting place. I did it, thrice, now.
2. Go work for the government: Secure jobs are in the government, and the government is full of interesting positions. In some cases, this may be because goverment workers amass powerful contacts, which can benefit in the form of power or cash. In other cases, this comes from a desire to change the situation from within– to work on anticorruption, for instance.
3. Go work for an NGO: I have no problems with NGOs, but it seems odd to me that this would be a top job, except for the security and stability. NGOs protect their own, and understand (and often index salaries for) inflation. Plus, the benefits are great. You get to meet people from other countries, and you may get to help out people in your own company.
4. Go work for one of the big companies: Big companies, stable jobs, decent benefits. No real surprises here.

But that, pretty much, is it. Almost no one starts a business early on. The best and brightest leave.

What is it that drives some people to return to their communities, start a business, and create jobs? What makes a student is inspired by a teacher and becomes a teacher? What is it that drives a bright young student to forego lucrative opportunities to work as a community organiser?

And what keeps that from happening?

Problems don’t get fixed
One of my biggest challenges here is in understanding expectations.

Lots of things go wrong, all the time. One of my South African friends reminds me that “Africa works, just not as fast or as reliably”, and he’s right.

But there’s another issue– that because of this working this way for such a long time, it’s become the norm.

People turn up late for meetings regularly– as much as an hour late. And they don’t call to let you know, it’s such a common problem. (There are lots of people I work with who don’t accept this and are relentlessly punctual. I thank them profusely).

There was a leak in the office the other day. A few guys moved the photocopier, but took no pains to either shut off the water or to call anyone to fix it– nor, even, mentioning it to the boss when he came in.

I get monthly reports from entrepreneurs and there are numbers off, and, each month, I have to go sit down with my guys and work with them to identify where the problem came in.

There are lots more of these problems, and they don’t get due care or attention.

Defeatism
I believe that these are all symptoms of a defeatist attitude. Why start a business locally when it’s so hard? Why re-invest in your community? Fifty years and trillions of dollars in aid hasn’t made a huge difference (and you can see the effects of this aid all over– including in cultures of dependency). Get out while the getting is good.

Sure, you’ll miss your home, but why bother fixing it? The problem is too big for one man to change it.

Relentless Undefeatism
This defeatist attitude must change. This may be the biggest thing holding Africa back from significant development.

It will take committment, day by day, to change this. It will take huge effort by many people. Some of them will rise up and be Mandelas or Gandhis, while many will be the unnammed faces in the crowds. Whether you’re one or the other will be a matter of chance.

It will take boots on the ground, working hard, getting muddy, and facing the issues day by day.

It will take concerted effort by the Cheetahs to demand receipts for “stamp fees” from hippos, slowly but surely stamping out corruption and bribes.

It will take development and efficiencies in the tax code, so that police are paid enough that they don’t need bribes to survive and feed their families.

It will take investment, and not just capital, but labour investment by the best and brightest graduates, to come in and build pride– to develop Africa’s Richard Bransons and Henry Fords.

It will take pride, building a culture that looks for goods made in Africa rather than the USA, UK, or China.

It will take the gall to step up and say “Yeah, we can do that”, and to figure out how to do it, or to ask for aid to find out.

It will take determination to see something wrong and fix it.

It will take an end to hopelessness, and good examples.

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