Thank you for joining us at Tekedia Mini-MBA edition 5. We begin tomorrow (June 7). If you’ve paid, directly or via our Country Partners, in any location or country, by now, you must have received a login for the 5th edition of Tekedia Mini-MBA. If not, email the contact here immediately . We have 38 countries represented, using Paypal data.
Agro-related companies outperformed on corporate registrations. Accordingly, we are working to bring practical components in the agro-space including information on how to plan for exports, necessary permits, data analysis to aid extension services, indoor farming – greenhouse, cold storage – fabrication design and development, etc. An expert in this space is leading us on this.
I welcome ALL to Tekedia Institute. Registration continues here.
Thank you Edves for inviting me to deliver the Keynote for Edves Catalyst 2021 yesterday. I had prepared a speech but quickly changed everything when I woke up for the presentation at 4.30am in the US; I’d considered the current paralysis in the nation. Virtual presentation is always a challenge as you cannot read your audience on the fly.
My #1 goal was to make sure the educators (from across the nation) remain united for the conference, and I made sure that cases from social media (especially Twitter and Facebook) were removed.
But yet, we must discover A New Path in the business of education where we can produce graduates with capacities to solve problems in our communities through products and services.
Yes, education which liberates the minds of men and women.
How can a company ban a president in an ecosystem? How can a company delete contents put by a president? How can a company wipe out digital histories? Interestingly, we are just beginning a new dawn in how future economies would be wired; I explained some elements here. Pure and simple, the great empires of the future will be those which control DEMAND. Those empires will shape policies and how nations relate with their citizens.
It comes down to the near-marginal cost of digital technologies and the compounding accelerating returns of network effects which super-aggregators have used to link nations and continents around them. And in doing that, they become very powerful. Investors who understand thatplaybook have made tons of money. Yes, the techno-gene in these aggregators does not just deliver alpha but also political imbalances where big voices could be muted overnight!
Why? The raw materials are the users because those users provide the critical factor of production which is now used to produce the final products. For any tweet on Twitter, a user is adding in the production system, feeding Twitter algorithms, to engage everyone. Anything that can break that supply chain, from the angle of the platforms, must be immediately managed.
It comes down to a virtuoso circle of network effects with its accelerating returns, generating a positive loop that keeping many users will favor a platform rather than pandering to bullies who will scare everyone. This differs from the industrial age firms like Shell where governments control access to the raw materials (crude oil deposits). They will fold to politicians!
If you want to win in the 21st century digital economy, you must control or influence demand, not supply. In the industrial age economy, power went to gatekeepers of supply. Today, the empire builders are those that control demand. This is possible because digital supply is unbounded and unconstrained, making it largely not a factor. Digital utilities like Google, Facebook, and Twitter which control demand become the new gatekeepers.
In the digital age, what matters is not who controls supply, but who controls demand. Supply is largely infinite as there are many ways to get to the web, and because it is infinite, users congregate to platforms to help them navigate and make sense of the web.
In 1980, before the digital age as we have it today, the most powerful people in media were newspaper publishers. They were the people you needed to reach to get your message to the world. They decided what everyone read on the dailies and they were powerful. They controlled supply and by controlling supply, they shaped everything including advertising.
And because their raw materials which are used for production are provided and supplied by their users, presidents and nations have limited influence. Leaders must understand that in the Facebook-Twitter-Google age, the old advantage – only them could be heard via government newspapers, radio and tv stations – has been calibrated out by the unbounded digital distribution channels.
What needs to happen? Industrial age styled political leadership must evolve because new empires (mainly American) are in charge!
To President Buhari: “Mr. President, thank you for the opportunity to be in your presence. I have come here to tell you to build a New Nigeria by working with the National Assembly to abolish “state of origin”. More than 90% of our national problems are connected to that line in our national forms where irrespective of where one has lived, that individual remains tethered to his or her biological ancestral roots.
“We need you to change this abnormality of “state of origin” to “state of residence”. Through that mechanism, what would matter is where you live and how many years you have lived there to establish residence.
“If we build that structure, we will drive to make people see where they live as their eternal community, and that would make them do everything necessary to make it thrive.
“Until Nigeria does this, we will continue to underperform and our racial lines will not be blurred. ” Thank you for your audience.
(Mitt Romney, a US politician, was born in Michigan state, became a governor of Massachusetts state, and today is a Senator from Utah state. Nigeria needs to make such possible through state of residence, and not state of origin. We need to be Nigerians, and nothing more.)
Let us work together as ONE Nation. Let us see ourselves as ONE. Let us treat one another fairly and justly. We are ONE people and we are Nigerians. As I have said here many times, in Secondary Technical School Ovim (Abia state), we had a very popular Mathematics teacher. Mr Bukar in JSS3 initiated us into Mathematics. We became the group of Bukar for Maths. He was excellent; villagers admired him. Across our nation, our diversity could be a strength to outperform.
We have one President and we want him to succeed. And part of that process is asking him to speak as the leader of the nation. Imagine if President Buhari had said, “My fellow citizens in Southeast, I want to assure you that I will do all to protect you and your properties. This government cares about your wellbeing. But those causing troubles in the region, this government will go after them.” He is human and simply removing “civil war” in his statement would have shown leadership in his warning to bad guys.
That is critical. Why? Even if there are robbers and criminals in the Southeast, the nation must not declare war there. Go after bad guys but do not make it a war on the innocent citizens.
I am very confident that Mr. Buhari has learnt on this and his choice of words would be moderated henceforth. Also, I expect Twitter to be back. We have more important things to deal with than blue birds. God bless Nigeria. Happy Sunday.
