Dr Solomon Uwagbole, PhD finished reading, and left these words on the Board: “Nice job, thanks! A great read to start a prosperous year journey.” Yes, “The Dangote System: Techniques for Building Conglomerates” changes mindsets and provides a basis to see things differently. Critics love it. Register for Tekedia Mini-MBA and get an immediate access.
Elon Musk made $140 billion in 2020! He is now worth $167 billion. This is supremely insane, but pure. Yes, it feels like America and China have a different concoction on this drink called “entrepreneurial capitalism”. If you go with purchasing power parity, China might have minted dozens who added excess of $10 billion in their big purses in 2020!
Billionaires have always traveled in a different orbit than the rest of us. Nicer things, more power, rocket-launching stations. But 2020 threw that gulf into stark relief.
While much of the world grappled with soaring unemployment and plunging growth, the 0.001% benefited from unprecedented wealth creation.
The world’s 500 richest people added $1.8 trillion to their combined net worth this year and are now worth $7.6 trillion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Equivalent to a 31% increase, it’s the biggest annual gain in the eight-year history of the index and a $3 trillion jump from the market’s nadir in March.
As a result of a recent US executive order, the New York Stock Exchange will delist China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom, symbolically. These giant Chinese telecommunication companies are alleged to have military ties with China. This severance is unprecedented and goes into the core nexus that we will have two internets in coming years – the Chinese-led and the American-led. I am not sure there is any global-interest commonality between these two superpowers anymore.
The New York Stock Exchange will deslist China’s three largest state-run telecommunication companies to comply with an executive order that bars U.S. investments in Chinese companies with suspected military ties. China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom will be suspended from trading by Jan. 11 in a “symbolic severing of longstanding ties between the Chinese business world and Wall Street,” per The New York Times. The executive order, issued by the Trump administration in November, was part of a broader effort to decouple the U.S. and Chinese economies.
When the US banned Huawei from its semiconductor technologies, I wrote that any asymmetric reaction from China could result in Trump “delisting” Chinese firms in New York. To a large extent, China has not really done much, in direct retaliation, except ramping favorable balance of trade against the United States, being the manufacturing heart of the world.
With this delisting announcement, we will see what will happen, and what specifically China will do. Sure, I expect it to stay cool until it gets the signal on how Joe Biden will run his show. But if the trajectory continues, American companies like Apple, Dell, Tesla and practically anyone that makes “hardware” better get ready for an unpredictable future.
And finally, how far with that your book, on the free market, and capitalism? There is no ritual in the world – you have to do what works for you. China has invented its model. The U.S. has it. But when the heat comes, they can change colors. Poor NYSE on this reality!
To make sure people could use their BoundlessPay debit cards, turning their cryptos like Bitcoins into Naira, and then pay for basic things in Nigeria, our team at BoundlessPay has been working 24/7. I want to thank the team for all the efforts. I also send a Big Thank you to Bitfxt Exchange team which powers the cryptocurrency ecosystem; they have been working and some are sleeping in office. Because of their efforts, services have been delivered to users, optimally.
I continue to challenge everyone to focus on the positives. Those days in Diamond Bank, I worked for 3 years with no vacation and served on all Christmas and New Year days. In short, I lobbied for them, because that was the life then. Sure, the bank remains the greatest company ever created on transforming young people.
Well done Franklin Peters, continue to inspire, motivate and advance the mission. I want to ring a bell; they said the New York one sounds better. But I know that a new one has been ordered by Oscar Onyema, the boss of Nigerian Stock Exchange, in Lagos!
I expect our team to continue to execute as the trajectory is superb in Nigeria: “According to a recent study seen by Nairametrics, data retrieved from Usefultulips (a Bitcoin analytic data provider) revealed that the use of Bitcoin for peer to peer lending in Nigeria ended on a record high. Nigeria led the pack with about $352 million in P2P trading, while the closest rival, Kenya, had a transactional value of just $90.5 million during the last 365 days. South Africa came in third with a transactional value of $85 million”
Happy New Year.
I thought, on LinkedIn I would be different and rather than send a New Year Message, forward a message done by someone else. This is a good example of a New Year post for this platform (with qualities that could actually be relevant any time of year)
I didn’t pick this post because it’s author is a global personality, or because he is well known to me; there is no prevailing agenda. It is just one of about ten random posts in my feed at one snapshot of time on January 1, 2021. It’s not my candidate for post of the year 2020 award.
I didn’t pick it because I thought it would help me get a load of reactions or comments or get noticed, So why did I pick it from this random sample?
Nigerian CEOs and business moguls 2020
When we look at the profile of Emmanuel Abara Benson it says he is a Business Journalist/Senior Editor working for ‘ Business Elites Africa’ based in Nigeria. Nothing in the post suggests this is his employers product.
This post ‘Nigerian CEOs and business moguls I admired in 2020’ has 100% alignment with his profession(s), sector/product(s) and market(s) on LinkedIn, which is a ‘professional network’ – no brainer and not rocket science.
Do I agree with all his choices? No. Do I agree with all his reasons? No. But he has gone to the second level of ‘great relevant content’ which is he has invested individual effort as a narrative. It’s not necessary to be a journalist to achieve this easily. It can be done by bringing individual understanding to bear on a third party article, or it can be done by drawing a collective conclusion or highlighting contrasts on multiple third party articles. Too often posts appear copying the title, or a few summary lines lifted directly from the attached third party article, with no investment from the post author.
Don’t be fearful of criticism of your own literary investment in the post. In terms of traction with the wider community, a comment of any kind, even adversarial, is worth approx. 50x a reaction. ‘Comments are the gold standard of engagement on LinkedIn’ John Espirian – dedicated LinkedIn ‘Guru’
If your feed isn’t serving you well, please don’t blame LinkedIn. At the very core product, LinkedIn is like a service janitor in a business that rents corporate meeting spaces. The janitor ensures the room is clean, that it is accessible on time, that refreshments are made available, and that reception/usher services guide arrivals to the meeting space. But it is your job to select your board members, it is your job to set the meeting agenda and it is your job to chair the meeting. Feed is an output of the meeting discourse, and if you have pulled in random passers-by off the street until you’ve got a mob like the Colosseum of Ancient Rome, it’s not LinkedIn’s fault the meeting is in chaos and for the most part you have useless feed.
Caveat : I acknowledge some CEOs, product, brand and media engagement managers can be restricted by corporate protocols but encourage them to use the full flexibility of engagement that is possible within corporate confines.
In 2021 my resolution for the LinkedIn platform is to wage a war on my feed so that it announces relevant opportunities, heralds new advancements, opens me to deep technical understanding, or engages in debate on key critical issues directly related to me professionally. I invite you to join in the battle and lets win the war together!
Wishing you all both a productive Tekedia and LinkedIn experience for 2021!