Greetings. We are excited to announce that Tekedia Institute has unveiled Tekedia Career Center. This Center which is hosted in Tekedia Hub is the Institute’s resource ecosystem for our members to access relevant career development support. 

Through it, we will connect our partners with our members and network of alumni. Our goal is to create a strong network of relationships with learners, alumni, recruiters, faculty, and all stakeholders in our Institute. In the Hub, the handle is @career. We will use this handle to offer many services including mentoring, career guidance, career support, resume review support, etc.

Please like the page – https://hub.tekedia.com/career. It is built to support career aspirations. In Tekedia Institute, career is not just about jobs, but development, fulfillment, and more. Our vision is to help our members become better innovators and growth champions in companies they work, by supporting them on their career journeys. 

Last year, we organized Tekedia Career Week and brought HR directors from leading companies like Coca Cola and Jobberman, to speak to our community on career planning. This year’s Career Week is coming in Q4.

We wish you a profitable week.

Regards,

Tekedia Team

Good People, we made the LinkedIn News Editors’ Pick on the article on Apple and Tesla (see here – https://lnkd.in/eU3CTuj ). Yes, Apple might have bought 100 companies in the last few years, but it missed a really amazing one when it passed buying Tesla at about $20 billion, despite having piles of cash in its treasury! Today, Tesla is worth more than $650 billion! In a world of perception demand, sometimes, the most critical element is not really what the financial ratios show but what the perception of the future tells us.

The interesting thing is that all products that succeed at the level of perception are usually disruptive in their sector or industry. Google search cannot be considered to fall in the category of perception because many people already craved for better search because neither Microsoft nor Yahoo was offering a good one. So a product could be disruptive and yet not a percepting product. However, all percepting products are disruptive.

Building and analyzing companies based on their financials will miss leverageable factors which the future could unlock, and which no current financial model can pick. That is why even though Tesla does not sell up to 5% of cars which Toyota sells (sold about 9.5 million last year), the markets believe that Tesla is worth more – and a better company!

Beyond Customer Need and Expectation, Perception is King of Market

The governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in this video shared his views on cryptocurrency and Bitcoin. Clearly, his view is extremely pessimistic. Yet, it is a good thing that the governor is speaking, as that will help that debate the central bank and Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) have promised for the fledgling sector.

In my 2019 convocation lecture in FUTO (Federal University of Technology, Owerri Nigeria), I spoke on economic opportunities in Nigeria – and The Umunneoma Economics. (Umunneoma means “good brethren” in Igbo). In my postulation, I explained how that economic philosophy is the pillar that drives the Igbo Apprenticeship System. The new global capitalist manifesto which is working to go beyond fixated focus on shareholders, to consider ALL stakeholders, is something the Umunneoma Economics is doing already.

The core  tenet of the Igbo Apprenticeship System could be likened to the U.S. Federal Reserve which largely works to keep the U.S. dollars stable (by reducing inflation) and maximize employment through interest rates. So, the Reserve has defined main focus areas even though it can use its systems to do other things. Consequently, the U.S. Congress uses those two main factors to ascertain the effectiveness of the Reserve policy.  The Umunneoma Economics solves unemployment in communities even as it strengths communities.

The Igbo Apprenticeship System is a business philosophy of shared prosperity where participants co-opetitively participate to attain organic economic equilibrium where accumulated market leverageable factors are constantly weighted and calibrated out, via dilution and surrendering of market share, enabling social resilience and formation of livable clusters, engineered by major participants funding their competitors, with success measured on quantifiable support to stakeholders, and not by absolute market dominance.

For the Igbo Apprenticeship System, the main focus is to prevent poverty by mass-scaling opportunities for everyone, and not for building conglomerates! It makes no sense in Adam Smith Economics that a man will build a business, accumulate a market share, and one day decides to relinquish some – and even go further by funding his competitors. But he is accomplished by doing so: those competitors are his brethren (umunneoma) and they will RISE with him. In a world of inequality, despite the obvious inefficiency in this system – lack of scale reduces the capacity to solve big problems – it is all about ubuntu.

There are great lessons from African tradition:  “Onye aghana nwanne ya”- do not leave your brethren behind. Like I tell people, it would be nearly impossible to have extremely rich Igbo traders because they win by funding competitors and dividing their market shares through the Igbo apprenticeship system. How can a man give his customers to his brethren just to ensure he does not close his shop and move to the village? 

In this time of winner-takes-all, the world needs the spirit of Umunneoma Economics and the framework of an institutionalized and modernized Igbo Apprenticeship System (IAS). A vision to have that conglomerate is possible if all the members of the IAS can feed into an entity which all of them will co-own as a cooperative.

You can all make shoes but a major shoe brand with an international focus will buy shoes from the members, making sure that each member becomes a “supplier”  to the brand. That brand entity will have scale and capacity to compete and win at the global arena. Yes, at the downstream, members can continue to do business on their ubuntu mindsets, but this unified brand can scale and move upstream, and attain a global status.