Yesterday, I received an invitation by a bank to talk about this piece: “The Biggest Career Mistake”.

If you made 2.2 after working hard, you would be fine in your career. But if you made 3^rd class because you did not have discipline or work hard, nothing will change in your life until you fix that process issue. Your problem is not the grade but the Process that resulted to the grade.

Until the process is changed, in your life, nothing will likely work. So, 2.2, 3^rd Class or Pass, is not your main problem. The problem is you have NOT fixed what resulted to them where you think they are bad.

Sure – the bank is not interested in the job part. Rather, the focus will be on process. The HR Director quoted this statement “Your problem is not the grade but the Process that resulted to the grade” as they explained what they are expecting. My job is to get the bank team to think deeper beyond outcomes but rather the processes which determine outcomes.

Largely, how can you get the staff to examine processes post-failures over just fixating on the actual failures? And how can we build the right processes to avoid even having failures? And when failures do happen, how do you ensure they cannot repeat?

Last year, I led a team that set up a Process Center of Excellence in a bank. But that was just on the ICT organization, focusing on building ICT systems which do not just Run (the bank) but also can TRANSFORM it. But increasingly, we have been zeroing on human elements and things which lead to failures.

It is very important to understand one thing: whether in our personal lives or in a big bank, unless we begin to fix unproductive processes, we cannot have predictable positive outcomes.

Do not make grade to be your god irrespective of what the banks, telcos, and oil firms will tell you when you apply for a job. The key success will come when you begin to fix systemic problems that resulted to those poor grades where you think you could have done better. But self-pity instead of focusing on fixing unproductive processes in your career will not yield anything.

Yes, as I explained in the accumulation of capabilities construct, there is more value in the upstream part of any endeavour:  From Google to Dangote Group, when companies accumulate capabilities, they see themselves operating in the segments of markets with higher value (usually upstream) compared with where their competitors operate (usually downstream). It applies in careers, not just in companies. Yes, when you improve your processes and focus on upstream capabilities, you would get huge exponential results in whatever you do.

Can someone tell me when the politics of ideas will begin in Nigeria? I am very unhappy that parties are electing flag bearers without considerations on clear visioning systems and roadmaps for the constituencies. I have called my home state (Abia) asking what the candidates are promising and proposing. The responses have been palpable: they will put roadmaps but they need to get in first.

Good people: that is the problem. We elect before we can ask what they can do. It should have been the other way – they clearly explain the manifestos and we decide, even at primaries, if they have accumulated enough capabilities to execute them.

I will suggest we improve this system. Imagine if Nigeria will have a law which will offer the following conditions on major offices (gubernatorial and presidential) with access to state or national treasuries:

• No candidate can spend more than $50k during primaries in gubernatorial election.
• No candidate can spend more than $500k during primaries in presidential election.
• No candidate can raise more than $2k (individual) or $4k (corporate entity) throughout the election cycle.
• All parties will receive federal funds to ensure their party forms do not cost more than $10k per candidate per office.
• Once all primaries have been conducted, 6 universities (UI, UNN, UNICAL, ABU, UNIJOS and UDFS), chartered by law and rotated by INEC will do public polling across the nation at state and national levels:
  • Parties with at least 5% followership at state level will receive funding from federal fund to support the flagbearer in gubernatorial elections.
  • Parties with at least 10% aggregate national followership will receive federal fund to support the flagbearer in presidential election.
  • The amount will be determined and adjusted for inflation: gubernatorial and presidential will get $500k and $20 million respectively.

Largely, by removing money politics at scale, we can possibly move to idea politics. We need ideas to rule the nation and time for money politics and fractionalization must end.

With digital and electronic payment, Nigeria can execute this via BVN if strong criminal code deterrence is included. Yes, a violation means jail time. What we have is not working: winning party primaries should not be correlated with bank accounts.

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Just having a laugh while reading the piece, because it’s too idealistic to happen anytime soon. The reasons are very obvious.

First, to make it a law, you need a LEGISLATION, just take a look at both chambers of national assembly, and see if there’s a possibility of such bill going through second reading; do not bother about the outcome of the final votes.

Secondly, the universities must have the capability and strength of character to conduct a credible poll, otherwise you have a situation where desperate political parties will end up influencing those polls.

Again, you need strong institutions across board: beginning from INEC, then the security/intelligence agencies, CBN, judiciary, civil societies, etc; to be really performing at very high level. Once any of them derails, the entire process may be greatly affected, in a negative way of course.

Above all, you need ACTIVE citizens with a great deal of awareness, without which they may be incapable of probing and critically examining lies from politicians. You do not expect low information public, largely deficient when it comes to making choices that matter so much to their future, and somehow expect them to hold politicians accountable.

As I have noted before, nothing is more important in a startup than having the capacity to acquire new customers, easily. A startup must grow because without growth, the alternative is bankruptcy. So, over the last few years, we have seen companies introduce new roles like Head of Growth, Growth Hacker [we used that in a Lagos client two weeks ago], and Vice President of Growth. In a network effect business, the most important product is “many users” because the more the users, the more useful the product becomes.

You need to know that in a perfect online market, the marginal cost of a digital product, under most scenarios, is zero. But markets are not perfect. And that means you must find ways to deliver great values to users even as the marginal cost tends to near zero. Why? Customers in the digital space congregate more into an ecosystem when the marginal cost is very low. When you have a low marginal cost, customer growth improves and when that happens, you would experience a positive continuum of network effect where great products trigger more customers and more customers enable building better products.

Scalable Advantage (SA) is a nexus with numbers between 0 and 1 which is used to ascertain the organic capacity to grow an enterprise, by examining the inherent elements like marginal cost and external forces, within an unconstrained and unbounded internet economy, where if nearly perfect, all transaction and distribution frictions between demand and supply disappear, producing an SA of “1”.

Today, I want to ask you: What is your Scalable Advantage? Does it get towards “1” or “0”? The trajectory will determine how far that business will go. I have a simple chart to help below.