Technocalamity and Africa

African entrepreneurialism is a sleeping giant, and it enjoys the current state-of-the-art technologies coming from all directions and the lessons of early incubation of entrepreneurial education and thinking.

The big picture:

When each and every one of your interactions with technology is being measured, recorded and added to an advancing digital tsunami, a new world of massive disruptions erupts. Remember the shift during the first desktop revolution. Every disruption opens new opportunities.

Old business ways have changed over the years © Merve Türkan – 123RF.com

When boundary-less, intricate, global business practices proliferate, either to make you instantly super successful or crush your empire in slow death, a new world of mega winners and majority losers becomes a reality. The world is wide open like endless boulevards with opportunities lined up on both sides. Decades ago, we went to trade shows to find customers. Today there are 5 billion online.

Round-the-clock global races for national image supremacy make obsolete the conventional local 9-5 working and thinking. These global, time-sensitive races shrink the overstretched Julian calendar-based timelines and make holidays outdated and unproductive. A new world of non-stop execution and super speed action becomes a new norm. Imagine month-long shut down of plants and slow mode seasonal office routines as a thing of the past. There is no such thing as 9-5 but rather 24 hours of constant 'sun rising' somewhere around the world.

Download the Technocalamity White Paper from Mentorian.

How technocalamity helps quadrupling innovative excellence and achieve image supremacy of the nation

The third decade of the third millennium
In about the next 1,500 days, the third decade of the third millennium starts; what does this mean? After the big fanfare at the end of year 2000, the first decade of the new millennium brought questionable wars. The second decade followed with national calamities and massive bailouts. This third decade is poised to either bring down major economies or catapult them back into their glory days. Both are possible but require deeper understanding of the new landscape, as new rules apply.

Technocalamity is now a reality. As global age competition, and availability of massive access to almost-free, technologically advanced processes to expand businesses, now challenges core competency of management. Skill gaps issues demand proof of new global age literacy to get qualified for the helm. Across the globe there are hundreds of millions of unprepared businesses demonstrating lack of practice, absence of engagement, and organisation-wide mediocrity in their relative market places. Their domestic economies are also losing their edge on a fast track. The export expansion races amongst nations are increasingly very tough and only the very best will survive.

The following are key observations, strategies and pragmatic solutions to cope with current realities.

Firstly, the three questions no one dares to ask...

Literacy question: Are we increasingly becoming too illiterate to read into the future?

New global age thinking and skill gaps: Why is there so much tension, confusion and disconnect amongst leaders of businesses all over the world? Either the processes have become too complicated or we have become somewhat illiterate. Either way, we fail to fully appreciate the business and social landscape. During the Print Society in 1900, when words were power, only the privileged had access to the printed knowledge conferring power. The privileged were the literate. This same scenario, is occurring now, 120 years later, as the thousands of options and technologically advanced processes freely available are accessible only to the highly literate who read between the lines and connect the dots, while the rest of the population watches as amazed spectators.

Job-creation question: Can universities really create global age innovative entrepreneurialism and next generation leaders?

Mass creation of "job-creators" vs. "job-seekers": Over the years, universities successfully produced millions of MBAs, but how many million entrepreneurs did they create? The main reason entrepreneurialism is not fertilised in lush grassed pathways of universities, is because entrepreneurs won't be trained by rigid syllabuses. They roam, discover, and look behind stone walls. They see opportunities invisible to common herds, or the esteemed faculties. Is it possible to re-train faculties and for them to understand true 'job-creators' and distinguish them from 'job seekers?'

Nationalism question: If the entrepreneurial gene is widespread and massive job creation can only be solved by entrepreneurs, why is a nationwide program not top of the country's national agenda?

Innovative excellence and global competitiveness: Entrepreneurs, with few exceptions, are born with certain types of personality traits and emotional make-up. In the right mix, those traits can catapult entrepreneurs to amazing performances. To create superstar, next-generation entrepreneurs, the business owners' families may provide the right entrepreneurial juices from the early ages. Yet, even the best of the best business families may fail in creating successful succession. It's also a fact that most successful business owners around the world today had no formal education, experience, or training in the business they created. This proves that any entrepreneurial type, out of box, risk-taking personality is sufficient to start on a right trajectory for bigger and bolder successes. On the other hand, entrepreneurs have been most feared because they are risk takers and were rejected when requesting early support and finances.

They were rejected as 'outside the box'. Today the 'world' is outside the box.

Now it's the world that's outside the box. Deniers are being crushed. Nations with bold and open dialogue on new age entrepreneurialism, and a country-wide programme under manifesto can ensure their image supremacy of innovative excellence in the global market place, otherwise they too become irrelevant... Creation of a top national agenda is in order. What took so long?

The Big Picture: New global age landscape for mass creation of superstar entrepreneurialism

The entire world is wrapped in the internet of everything. It has morphed into measuring everything and consumes all 'passive or active touch points' of our daily working and living routines. The big data feedback and real-time processing will create new lifestyle thinking, working and business modeling. There will be mega shifts of rediscoveries on who we are, what our real skills and talents are, what and why we are doing what we do every day and for what returns? The massive global realignments and reinventing opportunities, both on personal development and corporate reorganisation level, never before imagined on scales never previously executed, will emerge.

We are crossing a chasm. It's deep, undecipherable and embedded with massive disruptions and yet stacked with the most amazing opportunities.

The 2020: A twenty-faceted future unfolds

Approaching 2020, the new global age and fully mobile society wrapped in the internet of everything simply declares the traditional office and 9-5 work model useless. It will create new types of working-lifestyle-habitats, shaking down the centuries old work habits and office working models. The corporate centrality of downtown business complexes loses its grip in 10,000 cities as new routines and habits impacting 'on demand productivity' and 'shared services' cascade. These new routines eliminate the concepts of typical office jobs, weekly payroll and bureaucratic hierarchies transforming into likes of advance level 'gig economy'. This will thrive amongst clusters of on-demand, online, skill exchanges making 'self-trained', 'self-employed' and 'self-occupied' the largest working groups. Just like a gemologist can better appreciate the cut of a diamond a mastery of global age understanding is a prerequisite to decipher the unfolding of a multi-faceted future.

While on the other side, the age of abundance will continuously drown mediocrity and shred weaker business models, the constant overflow of great globally accessible and affordable ideas will crush parochial thinking and single-sided nationalism. The global-age culture will dominate and force re-evaluation of everything. Superstar entrepreneurialism will be the most desired model.

Innovative excellence will be the driving force

All this combined has now created a new kind of cyclone on the horizon, something that the corporate nomenclature buzz and media pundits are still years away from finding the right 'name' for. The most skilled in global age entrepreneurialism and innovative excellence are trying to get realigned to face the new realities. When in 2020, looking back to present times, the global business landscape would be unrecognisable in all aspects.

Africa has a great future ahead.