Getting up on a stage to talk about digital disruption is nothing particularly new for me, but recently I found myself in front of a very different crowd than the one I’m used to. As the speaker for the first-ever session of the CEO Series, an offshoot of Mark Sham’s brilliant Suits & Sneakers concept, I had the chance to address an audience of young entrepreneurs, graduates and some smart kids with seriously great ideas.
Without doubt, today’s business leaders have a major role to play in changing our society, but it’s the young people at the start of their careers who are going to drive the biggest change. With over 60% of Africa’s population falling below the age of 25, the power of the digital revolution is in the hands of the youth.
Faced with the pressure of addressing the literal future of our continent, I thought about what advice I might give my younger self when I was first starting out.
For today’s young people, growing up in a society undergoing seismic shifts in the way people work, the rules that made sense for their parents no longer apply. There’s no obvious road to success anymore, only a tangle of unmarked pathways that criss-cross each other.
As the first person in my family to attend university, I know very well what it’s like to take that first step into the unknown and stumble your way through the wilderness with no sense of what would happen next. But even my own journey would not suffice as necessarily great advice for today’s entrepreneurs – not in a world that’s undergoing a re-think on the future of work underpinned by advances in automation, technology and new ways of learning through MOOCs and other experiential learning techniques.
I’d like to share some of the survival tips that kept me going even when nothing seemed to make sense.
Don’t follow the crowd, work it!
Remember Wally? The character with a thing for striped sweaters and large crowds? At the start of your career, you’re him. Only instead of one page, you’re hidden among thousands of them.
Whether you’re looking to impress the right company, convince someone to give you venture capital, or sell that incredible new idea to the world, you need to find some way to get their attention in a sea of people trying to do the same. And that requires courage – to think differently, to question existing dogma, to take the initiative and to throw off that red-and-white sweater in favour or something more colourful.
Of course, in a world of reality TV has-beens and 15-minute memes, there are good ways to stand out and bad ways. The trick to capturing people’s attention in a way that paves the way for sustainable business success is to find ways of becoming relevant to them. People notice those who make a difference in their lives, in their specific context, no matter how many other people are around.
Opportunity comes in many guises
How exactly do you become relevant to others? First, you need to develop a knack for recognising opportunities when they present themselves. And when you’re just starting out, that means pushing yourself beyond what’s expected of you. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, after all.
For me, I joined the workforce as a wannabe analyst at a time when entry level jobs in the industry weren’t readily available. My supervisor at the time told me I wasn’t qualified for the tasks that were immediately available but asked if I was willing to try take on an assignment – something that he knew I had limited to no chance of getting right. Despite not having the foggiest idea of how to do it, I jumped at the chance and pushed myself to learn how – even then, the knowledge was there, all around us, waiting to be taken in. That first assignment was the foundation upon which I still use to drive me to make a difference and the ongoing determination that I can do anything.
Richard Branson said it best: “If someone offers you an amazing opportunity and you’re not sure you can do it, say yes, then learn how to do it later.” Just about every task involving other people represents a chance to prove you’re not a Wally. Put in more than you’re expected to and raise your hand when you notice someone else in need. You will start to get noticed, and slowly you won’t have to go looking for the major opportunities – people will bring them to you.
Are you the problem or the solution?
Being a problem solver is how you drive your own relevance as an entrepreneur, but there’s another dimension to that concept that’s often overlooked – not making yourself someone else’s problem.
An old boss of mine would frequently have employees go into his office, looking very determined, and leave discouraged. Curious, I asked him why so many people left dejected, and he told me that they kept coming to him with issues he didn’t have time for. They were making their problems his, he complained, without offering any alternatives for him to consider and help provide guidance on.
From then on, I made it a point to always come up with a few options every time I faced a challenge. And this trick – of coming up with a few alternative routes to whatever roadblocks arise – works wonders when trying to solve your own problems. Break up larger challenges into smaller, more immediate ones, and identify a practical course of action. I like to compare it to running a hurdle race – while you need to maintain a good pace for the entire race, you have to jump each hurdle as it comes.
Lebo Gunguluza of Dragon’s Den would stand in a corner of a CNA reading business books until someone chased him out, and then he’d go home, get changed and try again. Ludwick Marishane, the inventor of DryBath, would write full business plans on his Nokia. The smaller you scale your problems, the easier it is to find ways of solving them with the tools you have on hand.
There are many more lessons I’ve learnt and keep learning in building my own relevance, some of which I hope to share over the next few weeks.
In the meantime, I’d like to know what “disruption hacks” established business leaders have for young people. What causes you to pay attention to a young entrepreneur or junior employee?