Fast Company SA - October 2017 - Issue 30

DISRUPTION ON A GLOBAL SCALE HOW ENTREPRENEUR SAURABH KUMAR AIMS TO INNOVATE FOR THE GLOBAL MARKET

CLEAN TECHNOLOGY TODAY INSIDE THE WORLD OF EFFICIENCY AND DISRUPTION IN THE GREEN SECTOR

R35.00

THE FUTURE OF FOOD AID

How the United Nations is using tech to bring stability to the lives of refugees

MICROSOFT CEO

Satya Nadella rewriting the code

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.ZA

16014 7

“We understand that technology is the enabler, but innovation is the advocate.”

SAURABH KUMAR

9 772313 330006

CEO and Co-Founder of In2IT Group

What is IoT all about?

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the internetworking of physical devices, vehicles, buildings, and other items — embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity that enable these objects to collect and exchange data.

Logistics optimization

Cloud and Services + Platform

Factory optimization

Smart grid

Integrated operations centre

Smart Factory

Smart City Intelligent medical devices

Home energy management Traffic flow optimization

Comms network optimization Hospital optimization

Smart Highway Smart Hospital Automated car system

Connected ambulances

Intelligent digital signage

Connected traffic cameras

Contents October 2017

COV E R STO RY 20 Innovation is a culture CEO and co-founder of In2IT Group Saurabh Kumar shares how he has steered his company towards global recognition.

Passionate about demonstrating technology as a true enabler of business transformation, Kumar’s company has offices in 9 countries globally.

By Evans Manyonga

“For us the biggest challenge has been to ensure we continuously build technology, tools, processes and teams that differentiate us from others.”

2 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

SP E C I A L F E ATURES 38 Keeping technology clean Over the years, the fight to save the environment has been tough, to say the least. Getting everyone rowing in the same direction and ensuring that we all do the little we can to save the world we live in are key in this crucial battle.

59 Getting real about

the digital world

68 The future of education

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, once considered an unlikely choice to lead the tech behemoth, has stopped infighting, restored morale, and generated more than $250 billion in market value in less than four years.

(Page 50)

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 3

Contents

N E XT 16 Game of phones

Why it’s so hard to innovate in a market dominated by Apple, Google, and Samsung Mastermind Rostam Batmanglij played 11 instruments in his 10 years with Vampire Weekend.

(Page 36)

By Austin Carr

28 Bumble gets down to business The feminist dating app is swiping right on networking.

By Karen Valby

32 A new food chain

How the United Nations is using blockchain to bring stability to refugees

By Ben Paynter

RE GUL ARS 08 From the editor 10 The Recommender 74 UCT COLUMN 76 Fast Bytes & events 80 Why challenges and

problems are important in life

By Gjermund Nesland

GIVE THAT

CORPORATE GIFT TO REMEMBER

OUR GEAR. YOUR LOGO

ADD YOUR CORPORATE LOGO TO A WIDE RANGE OF K-WAY TECHNICAL GEAR AND APPAREL

BRANDABLE GIFTS

WE HAVE YOU COVERED WITH A WIDE RANGE OF BRANDABLE GIFTS AND GADGETS

OFF THE SHELF

WE OFFER A WIDE RANGE OF CORPORATE GIFTING, AVAILABLE FOR DIRECT PURCHASE

PUBLISHER AND EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Robbie Stammers

robbie.stammers@anapublishing.com

ART DIRECTOR

EDITOR Evans Manyonga

evans.manyonga@anapublishing.com

DIGITAL PLATFORMS

Stacey Storbeck-Nel

By Digital Publishing

stacey.nel@anapublishing.com

Charles Burman, Catherine Crook

CHIEF SUB-EDITOR

FINANCIAL MANAGER

Saarah Survé

Lisa-Marie de Villiers CA(SA)

PRINTER

ADVERTISING SALES DIRECTOR

RSA Litho

keith.hill@anapublishing.com

DISTRIBUTION

Keith Hill

ADVERTISING MANAGER Kyle Villet

ADVERTISING SALES EXECUTIVES

MDA Distribution

SUBSCRIPTIONS

susan.ball@anapublishing.com

Susan Ball

susan.ball@anapublishing.com

PUBLISHED BY

Joe Mansueto, Mansueto Ventures

EDITOR

Robert Safian

DEPUTY EDITOR David Lidsky

EXECUTIVE EDITOR Noah Robischon

EDITORS-AT-LARGE

JJ McCorvey

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR DIRECTOR, EDITORIAL STRATEGY Lori Hoffman

CREATIVE DIRECTOR Florian Bachleda

DESIGN DIRECTOR

EDITORIAL CONTRIBUTORS

Cover: Vernon Reed Adobe Stock, Freepix.com, Vernon Reed, ioulex, Justin Tran, Valerie Chiang, Kevin Van Aelst, Dan Monick, Raymond Biesinger, Nicholas Albrecht

CHAIRMAN

Jill Bernstein

Louise Marsland, Anneleigh Jacobsen, Prof. Walter Baets, Pepe Marais, Alistair King, Koo Govender, Abey Mokgwatsane, Kheepe Moremi, Ellis Mnyandu, Thabang Skwambane

ARTISTS

FAST COMPANY INTERNATIONAL TEAM

SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR

SOUTH AFRICAN EDITORIAL BOARD

Tacita McEvoy, Harry McCracken, Michael O’Carroll, Jacques du Bruyn, Adele Peters, Nicole LaPorte, Levi Letsoko, Dan Tynan, Mills Soko, Lynn Madeley, Siphosethu Nini, Sonwabo Macingwana, Evans Manyonga, Robin Booth

grant.fredericks@africannewsagency.com

Jon Gertner, Rick Tetzeli

Jacky Villet, Kevin Petersen, Mandla Mangena, Robin Scott

OFFICE MANAGER

AFRICAN NEWS AGENCY CEO Grant Fredericks

Ted Keller

PHOTOGRAPHY DIRECTOR Sarah Filippi Publisher and Editor-in-Chief:

ART DIRECTOR

Robbie Stammers

Alice Alves

Physical address: 176 Main Road, Claremont, 7700, Cape Town Postal address: PO Box 23692, Claremont, 7735 Telephone: +27 (0) 21 683 0005 Websites: www.fastcompany.com www.fastcompany.co.za www.anapublishing.com

PRODUCTION DIRECTOR April Mokwa

CHIEF DEVELOPMENT OFFICER Christina Cranley

CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER Mark Rosenberg

No article or any part of any article in Fast Company South Africa may be reproduced without the prior written consent of the publisher. The information provided and opinions expressed in this publication are provided in good faith, but do not necessarily represent the opinions of Mansueto Ventures in the USA, Insights Publishing or the editor. Neither this magazine, the publisher or Mansueto Ventures in the USA can be held legally liable in any way for damages of any kind whatsoever arising directly or indirectly from any facts or information provided or omitted in these pages, or from any statements made or withheld by this publication. Fast Company is a registered title under Mansueto Ventures and is licensed to Insights Publishing for use in southern Africa only.

6 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

From the Editor “In essence, clean technology is a sector that is not only here to stay but also a sector that will strongly influence the way we live.”

CLEAN IS PROGRESSIVE There is no standard definition of clean technology. It has been described by Clean Edge (a clean technology research firm) as “a diverse range of products, services, and processes that harness renewable materials and energy sources, dramatically reduce the use of natural resources, and cut or eliminate emissions and waste”. Clean Edge further explains that “clean technologies are competitive with, if not superior to, their conventional counterparts. Many also offer significant additional benefits, notably their ability to improve the lives of those in both developed and developing countries”.

Clean technology ultimately reduces the use of natural resources and ensures emissions and waste are either completely cut out or dramatically reduced. In the age of conscious use of finite resources and environment conservation this has become essential. The benefits of clean technology are therefore quite obvious.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect is the fact that generally clean technology is still evolving from a tech advancement perspective, which means we are still discovering its endless possibilities within various sectors.

The roots of clean tech are firmly entrenched in emerging technologies and industries (core aspects of biology, resourceefficiency streamlining and second-generation production concepts in traditional industries). Due to this aspect the sector has received strong investment in recent times as different players are trying to re-invent their offerings to stay afloat while younger players have noticed a gap that can be explored.

In essence, clean technology is a sector that is not only here to stay but also a sector that will strongly influence the way we live.

Imagine solar energy for townships, a device that cuts the cost of electricity, a consulting company that supplies solar systems for sectional complexes, retirement villages,

8 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

commercial businesses, industrials, schools and fuel stations. Even more intriguing, imagine a plant system that treats water of varying quality and intensifies other water treatment systems cheaply and efficiently by disrupting and coagulating harmful pollutants. These are some of the exciting highlights of our clean tech feature on page 38.

As always, our issue is jam packed with a plethora of exciting content.

Our cover personality, Saurabh Kumar, is the CEO and co-founder of IN2IT, a proudly South African company, which recently won the coveted ‘Most Innovative Company Award’ presented by Global Brands Magazine. Consistent and disruptive Kumar has steered IN2IT towards global success. He shares his journey and explains why IN2IT is ahead of the curve.

This issue is a tribute to the clean tech sector and an endorsement of going green as the new way of living in the modern era. Read on and become part of these conversations. Above all interrogate, reflect and re-invent.

Evans Manyonga evans@fastcompany.co.za @Nyasha1e

Recommender What are you loving right now?

Favourite destination – Kruger National Park

Favourite travel companion: Samsonite suitcase

As a travel Vlogger and Global Master of Ceremonies, I need a luggage brand that can put up with all the bumps and knocks of international travel, and this is what I’ve found with American Tourister.

My luggage moves with me internationally.

Bali, Venice, Rome, Munich and Manchester are some of the long-haul destinations. The price range is affordable and this durable luggage carrier can handle harsh airport conditions.

It is so easy to manoeuvre around the airports with its double spinner wheels for added stability as I navigate my way around.

This is the perfect travel companion as it can keep up with my long leg strides.

Changing from 2 wheels to 4 wheels on my luggage was a travel game changer! My Samsonite suitcase is fantastic to travel with because instead of pulling my suitcase behind me, I can glide my luggage next to me, behind me or even in front of me. The outer shell is hard, which means my belongings are protected and I don’t have to worry about breakages. They also come in great colours. I have the red, which really stands out on the luggage carousal.

If you’re wondering about size, I took a 3 week trip to Europe, and not only was it the perfect size to fit all my belongings, I had actually overpacked. I particularly love that it has a built in locking system, so I don’t have to worry about extra keys or locks.

Samsonite is great quality, great value for money and a must-have on your next trip.

Liezel van der Westhuizen Celebrity Personality & Vlogger

Bailey Schneider Radio Personality

My favourite place in the world is the bushveld – the Kruger National Park in particular. It’s the only destination I know of where I can be at peace and just forget about the noise of the city while getting in sync with nature’s most beautiful wild animals. I prefer spending most of my “off-days” on the farm where I can be who I want, eat what I want and just become human again. It’s very important for me to get the full experience for example: eggs and bacon for breakfast, boerewors roll for lunch and braaivleis and sweet potato for dinner. My dream is to have my own piece of bushveld one day.

Brendan Peyper Musician, and Tropika Island of Treasure Season 8 celeb contestant

Favourite luggage: American Tourister

10 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

Screen Time Our pick of the most download-worthy travel apps currently on the market

ACORNS Android and available on Google Play

FOREX HERO Android and available on Google Play

Forex Hero is a fun little simulation game where you can make money by trading currencies. It uses actual strategies and information about trading stocks to educate you on how it’s done. It’s a unique and fun way to dive into the world of investment. You’ll learn about things like trends, trading principles and even some trivia regarding the financial world. It also has some pretty good basic strategies that will teach you more and it’s great for beginners.

The Acorns app is a great choice for first-time investors.

The app is developed for both new and experienced investors who want a quick, easy and automatic way to invest their money. By linking their credit or debit cards to the app, users will be able to invest your change. The app provides credit or debit card information and uses this information to round up the cost of your regular purchases then invests the difference into a diversified portfolio of index funds chosen by Nobel Prize-winning economist Harry Markowitz. To use the app, users will be charged a monthly service.

MY STOCK Android and available on Google Play

My stock is one of the more recently released investment apps. It offers a plethora of features, including real-time quotes and charts of stocks, funds, ETFs, currency exchanges, futures and more. You can also have it alert you if a certain stock reaches a certain price. It uses material design which helps make it easy to rummage around the site. You can download the app for free or get the pro version for R40.

INVESTING.COM Android and available on Google Play

Investing.com is one of the most popular investment apps out there.

The name of the app isn’t great, but don’t let that fool you.

It boasts that it provides real-time information on over 40 000 financial instruments traded in over 70 global stock markets. There are also live charts you can follow, news you can read, analysis by experts, and information on emerging markets. This is a great way to get information quickly and effectively.

YAHOO! FINANCE Android and available on Google Play

The Yahoo! Finance app allows users to sync portfolios and quotes across multiple devices, tracking stocks currencies, commodities and more. With its beautifully designed, personalised user experience, the app is so sleek that it has even been compared to iOS 7’s Stocks app. Investors using the app will enjoy the fruits of being able to conduct a quick stock check and make use of push notifications that will allow them to stay up to speed on breaking news so they can make informed decisions on which companies to invest in.

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 11

Fast Company Promotion

How digitisation impacts your SME Find out how a digital world affects the ease of doing business

The answer seems obvious. The rise of the Internet certainly makes it easier for entrepreneurs to reach a larger audience and increase brand awareness. That is assuming you have access to the Internet to harness the opportunities it presents.

Those who have brought their businesses online and are doing it correctly, are thriving.

Entrepreneurs are crowdfunding to raise capital, communicating with customers on social media and placing targeted banners on popular websites to generate leads, and it’s working.

Popular designer Maria McCloy remarks that her business would be dead without social media.

“I think brands and young entrepreneurs who have no digital profile are crazy; it’s free communication to your current and new market.”

A strong social media presence took McCloy from arty markets to the shelves of a retail giant.

“When Woolworths contacted me regarding being part of their Style By SA collection, they did so via my Facebook inbox. It was a big deal for me.” Shop space in a mall is too expensive for her small business to manage, so McCloy has plans to create an online store in order to reach international clients.

The digital divide still exists in South Africa, but this isn’t expected to last much longer. The government is partnering with The World Economic Forum on an Internet For All Project, with a focus on increasing internet use in rural areas. In the meantime, South African entrepreneurs without access to the Internet have limited possibilities for growth. Your product could be in high demand beyond South African borders, but if you aren’t online, you’ll never know.

Digital brands including MTN Business are aware of the importance of partnering with SMEs. Hosting competitions like the Mind2Machine and App of the Year Awards fast-tracks brilliant entrepreneurs on their route to success.

Partnerships are beneficial for both established brands and small businesses; entrepreneurs are

12 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

provided with resources they might not otherwise have had access to, while big brands are exposed to new disruptive ideas for further growth.

The digital world is far from perfect though, and there are many ways to get it wrong. The online space is one where a customer complaint can be seen by everyone. It’s one thing to have an online presence, but actually managing constant customer communication is an overwhelming task. Internet users generally do not take the side of companies, and ‘the customer is always right’ becomes a tedious phrase when trolls take advantage of freedom of expression. A quick look at TripAdvisor or Hello Peter reveals how harsh users can be and business owners are expected to be careful when defending themselves online.

Customer complaints alone might suggest that having an online presence is not worth the stress, but not being online does not mean your business isn’t being talked about. If anything, being online allows you to manage potential negativity.

Your business may not be big enough to hire a team of media experts, but building a support network and sharing knowledge is a good start.

“ I think brands and young entrepreneurs who have no digital profile are crazy; it’s free communication to your current and new market.”

Tech trends taking over in 2018 Stay ahead of the rest with this summary of what could affect the way you do business next year 2

Every publication focused on technology will provide extensive details about the latest electric car, the rise of artificial intelligence and the everimminent promise of the Internet of Things as an everyday part of our lives. While we wait for our selfdriving vehicles and robotic assistants, there are tools and methods within reach which could have a great impact on the growth of small businesses.

With new disruptive trends coming up faster than we can refresh our news feeds, it’s easy for entrepreneurs to fall behind. Make sure you don’t miss a trend that could elevate the success of your business. If, by 2018, your business makes use of any of the below trends, you’re on the right track towards reaching a global standard.

1

SMART WAYS TO PAY

As South Africans have become more comfortable with online shopping, the use of payment gateways have become a normal part of retail and trading industries. If you aren’t on PayPal or accepting bitcoins, you might be limiting opportunities to trade globally. The idea of managing finances completely online and beyond basic EFT might be overwhelming at first, so start with something as simple as SnapScan. Your customers are carrying less cash now than ever before, and will soon expect to be able to make payments online wherever they are, including shopping at a market or placing large orders from their boardrooms.

DIGITAL MARKETING

By now, your business should have a strong online presence. Your website doesn’t have to be perfect and your social media needn’t be award-winning, but it has to be up and running. If you can’t afford to allocate a big budget to digital agencies to market your business, there are many affordable ways to do it yourself. Click here for insights on 8 digital tools to manage your business on a dime. In 2018, Influencer Marketing is set to grow. Word-of-mouth becomes word-online as customers share their experiences with brands and businesses on every social media platform available. Get to know the bloggers, journalists and other influencers who will enjoy your product or service, and give them an experience they want to talk about. Everyone is doing it, and you can too. When Facebook launches a new service, they give tech-centric celebrities first access before releasing it to the public. If you’re in the fashion business, send your latest designs to fashion bloggers. If you’ve created a new app, send links to the technology journalists so they can review it. Your own customers can market your business on your behalf if you give them the opportunity to do so.

“Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.”

Mark Zuckerberg

3

AUTOMATED MANAGEMENT

This trend is well underway among the tech-savvy startups and big businesses of South Africa, and SMEs can benefit from digital management tools too. The standard office working hours are long gone, as companies realise the importance of flexibility if they want to keep their staff happy.

Technology allows team members to work remotely and still be productive, as long as those involved are disciplined. Gartner states: “By 2018, more than 3 million workers globally will be supervised by a ‘roboboss’.” While South Africans might not be ready for a ‘roboboss’, the use of time management systems like Trello and Chase keep everyone up to date and accountable for their tasks. Entrepreneurs can spend the day meeting clients and pitching their products with the certainty that they can track their staff’s tasks and productivity at any time.

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 13

GAME OF PHONES Why it’s so hard to innovate in a market dominated by Apple, Google, and Samsung

By Austin Carr Photographs by Kevin Van Aelst

According to Andy Rubin, the modern mobile ecosystem is broken. He should know: He helped break it.

When Rubin, the inventor of the Android operating system and godfather of the smartphone market, surveys the industry today, he sees squandered opportunities everywhere.

The open-source platform he brought to the masses while at Google, which commands roughly 85% of the market, is overwhelmed with “bad user

14 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

Big Idea

experiences,” he says. Devices from makers such as LG and Huawei are uninspired. Samsung has been too often content with fast following: “Who at Samsung is responsible for your device’s look and UI? It’s a nameless, faceless machine.” And Apple? “The world’s biggest and most successful company doesn’t have a human side to it,” Rubin argues.

“The incumbents have lost track of why they exist, why they’re building products, and what they mean in people’s lives.”

From consumers and tech insiders, you hear similar complaints: Why can’t new mobile devices deliver the excitement they once did? The breathtaking leaps? The culture-shifting impact? Instead we’ve settled into a schedule of incremental rollouts. In the U.S., the market is dominated by duopolies—Apple and Samsung in hardware, and iOS and Android (which account for all but 0.4% of smartphone sales) in platform. And then there are the four big carriers, lording over retail distribution channels with their outsize marketing budgets and multiyear contracts. These dynamics have stifled innovation, critics say, with the giants focused on holding their leads and other makers churning out cheap devices to avoid becoming rounding errors. This is why early adopters often have to hunt for devices from lesser-known companies to experience the latest specs. And why American consumers have had to wait until this fall to get an edge-to-edge screen on an Apple phone, a full year after such displays began showing up in the Chinese market.

One of the biggest challenges for device makers in the U.S. is scale.

When you’re expected to sell hundreds of millions of units, your appetite for taking hardware risks changes substantially, says Tony Fadell, who helped pioneer the iPod and iPhone at Apple and went on to found Nest. “[The Apples and Samsungs] have to innovate more cautiously,” Fadell says, “because they don’t want to lose market share or trip up their revenue, “The incumbents which can be disastrous, as we have lost track of saw when Samsung fouled up.” why they exist, There’s simply less urgency to why they’re building innovate at the top: According to one report, Apple swallowed up products, and 104% of all smartphone profits what they mean one quarter last year (a figure in people’s lives,” made technically possible by its Rubin says. competitors’ losses).

There are pockets of disruption, even among the big guns (see “Breaking the Mold,” right). Google’s Pixel phones offer the sleekest implementation yet of Android. Apple is reportedly experimenting with an ultra-high-end handset that contains more new features than the company has introduced in years.

Rubin himself isn’t just sniping at these issues from the sidelines.

Three years after leaving Google—where he spent a decade—the 54-yearold engineer turned entrepreneur has designed the device he always wanted through his new startup, Essential. Called simply the Essential Phone, the $699 device is a stripped-down, carrier-agnostic handset with a titanium shell, a ceramic casing that enhances wireless signals, and a snap-on 360-degree camera (which Rubin hopes will seed a whole ecosystem of attachable accessories).

Of course, designing a hot product and making it a hit that can shake up a multibillion-dollar marketplace are two very different tasks. As the Essential Phone hits shelves this fall, it is a bellwether for when—and

B RE A K ING T HE MOL D Essential isn’t the only company trying to disrupt the mobile ecosystem. Here are others that signal what’s possible.

Modular phone design An attempt at delivering upgradable phones, the devices in Motorola’s Moto Z series come with a variety of back covers, called Mods, that extend the phones’ functionality and life span. This allows parent company Lenovo to support advanced features that would be unwieldy to put in the phone itself, such as a new 360-degree camera that shoots 4K video.

Direct-to-consumer retail Shenzhen-based OnePlus has brought higher-end, low-cost devices around the world without the assistance of big carriers, or even much of a retail footprint. Its trick: wordof-mouth marketing, fueled by an invite-only system that gave the small brand a feeling of exclusivity. Today, its OnePlus 5 flagship is poised to go mainstream.

A flexible phone plan A growing number of prepaid carriers offer customers an escape from rigid cell contracts, but few have gained wide traction. Google’s Project Fi presents a compelling alternative: By leasing network space from multiple carriers, the company offers expansive coverage to Pixel and Nexus phone owners, all on a pay-as-you-go basis.

if—innovation might finally reemerge in the U.S. mobile market.

If you want to see a landscape where mobile is thriving, look to China, where companies from Beijing to Shenzhen are producing some of the most innovative devices and services. In this environment, Samsung and Apple can’t rely on sheer scale to sustain their leads.

And little-known names can triumph seemingly overnight.

BBK subsidiary Oppo saw its market share grow 122% last year, propelling it from fourth place in the industry to the No. 1 slot.

To survive in this fast-moving market, Chinese companies have become increasingly experimental.

Facebook VR head Hugo Barra, who formerly ran Xiaomi’s international business, says that hardware startups in China constantly take advantage of their proximity to Asian manufacturers to pounce on cutting-edge tech, from the Xiaomi Mi Mix’s near-bezel-less display to the Vivo V5’s groundbreaking 20-megapixel camera.

It’s not that Apple is unaware of the advances these nimbler players are making; it’s simply that, at Apple’s size, its suppliers can’t keep up with demand. “When you’re Samsung or Apple and you’re selling tens of millions of units, you need to procure almost everything— screens, processors, whatever— many, many months ahead so suppliers can ramp up,” says Barra.

Companies operating at a smaller volume can land new components 6 to 12 months earlier—and that’s especially true for a startup headed

by Rubin, an industry “demigod,” according to Barra.

You can see that phenomenon in Essential Phone’s attachable 360-degree camera (which requires no app or software and can seamlessly transfer data) and its titanium body: a thin, resilient material that enables the phone to pack in enough antennas to work in every country, regardless of carrier. “[Our product-architecture head] Jason Keats found this small supplier in Germany that does

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 15

Next

Big idea

this totally new process for titanium injection molding,” Rubin says.

“They told us Apple was there a month ago and wanted to partner, but [Apple] needed like 200 million units. They were like, ‘There’s no way we could supply that!’ ” Essential’s mission is not just to pioneer new hardware. It also wants to unlock the next phase of platform innovation—at a time when smartphones have become the remote controls for our lives. Hardware and services that revolve around the phone are multiplying, especially in the home. Yet they’re hampered by big companies’ urge to own those ecosystems.

Apple, with HomeKit, wants to treat your home like another iOS-based platform, with your smart refrigerator and microwave resembling the apps currently on your iPhone. Google, with its acquisition of Nest, aims to establish an edge by rolling out massmarket home products— thermostats, smoke alarms, security cameras—that connect to your phone. And companies from Amazon to Xiaomi are pushing their own strategies to become the industry leaders in the smart-home space. This is Rubin’s preoccupation as well. “I can’t not be in the phone business and solve the other problems,” he says, “because all of the stuff in your life—the home,

16 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

“ If you want to see a landscape where mobile is thriving, look to China, where companies from Beijing to Shenzhen are producing some of the most innovative devices and services. “

the car, the office—orbit around the main screen in your life.”

Instead of owning the home, though, Rubin wants to empower it. Thus, his next release isn’t another Android-based phone— it’s another Android. Called Ambient OS, it is a similarly spongy platform engineered to hum invisibly in the background and allow fragmented products and services to coordinate seamlessly. “Right now, to just unlock your door and turn on the lights, you need to launch three apps,” Rubin says. “I want [Ambient] to rise above all the other products in your home and provide a holistic user experience that bridges all the islands.” The first product built on this platform is the Essential Home, an Amazon Echo–like speaker, but the vision is to enable all your gadgets— whether Samsung TVs, Google Nest thermostats, MacBooks and iPads, or, yes, Essential Phones— to communicate.

While many observers are bullish on Rubin’s efforts— especially the investors, including Tencent and Amazon, who have plowed $300 million into his startup—not everyone is a believer. “Neither [Rubin] nor the new Essential brand is known beyond the high-tech media and analyst communities,” says mobile analyst Thomas Husson, of Forrester Research.

Rubin, naturally, is aware of the stakes of the absurdly large bet he’s making: “Come on! There’s like 10,000 things that could go wrong!” he says. “We’re in a hits business. If we fail to make a hit, we’re not going to Motown.”

This kind of risk-taking spirit is exactly what the bigger players lack. And Rubin sees opportunity in their complacency. But even if Essential’s only success is forcing the incumbents to move faster and innovate again, he will have taken a step toward reinvigorating the mobile ecosystem he helped create.

Fast Company Promotion

The winning idea that helps make South Africa safer The difference that exposure, mentorship and investment can make to emerging entrepreneurs is invaluable. And it’s made all the more exciting when the young people are recognised for their brilliant idea that stands to make South Africa a better place.

The Santam Safet y Ideas Campaign seeks to reward exactly this kind of innovation, which is evident in the calibre of the inaugural campaign’s winners: Ntando Shezi and Ntsako Mgiba.

Awarded an incubation prize of R150 000, Shezi and Mgiba are the bright minds behind Jonga – a cost-effective security system for low income families.

Mgiba says, “This initiative is very close to our hearts because we have families in townships.

We are thrilled and grateful to Santam and LaunchLab for believing in our idea and making it possible for us to start developing our product so that we can launch our pilot programme in various communities.”

Accessible and affordable, Jonga includes a sensor that gets mounted on the wall and detects intrusion, sending an alert to the homeowner via a linked smartphone app or an SMS notification.

If no one is expected, the system alerts the neighbours, who can respond appropriately.

Mgiba says he hopes the system will go the distance to empower communities to get connected and protected, “We don’t believe security should be a privilege of the few who can afford it. We just want all people to be safe and to make security accessible to everyone.”

This encapsulates what the Santam Safety Ideas Campaign is all about. Launched in July 2016, the initiative encourages people from all walks of life to submit smart, ingenious ideas that have the potential to keep South Africans safe. It’s run in collaboration with Launchlab: a network of university campus-based business incubators, and an initiative of Innovus, Stellenbosch University’s industry interaction and innovation company.

The campaign received over 150 entries, with the finalists all worthy contenders for the title. As the winners, Shezi and Mgiba had the opportunity to participate in an incubation process that saw their ideas developed into working prototypes and a potentially viable business venture.

Social entrepreneurship is just gaining ground in South Africa, especially for young people. It’s not always easy to get a foot in the door as a start-up, unless you have connections and capital. Team Jonga first pitched their idea at the University of Cape Town’s ‘idea auction’ called UCT Up-Starts. The initiative offers students the opportunity to become social entrepreneurs through a 20-week programme. Since receiving attention and investment at Up-Starts 2015, they have entered one competition after the other to raise funds for their product.

Winning the inaugural Santam Safety Ideas Campaign will hopefully see them develop an inspired idea into a sustainable business model that’ll play a pivotal role in making South Africa’s neighbourhoods safer.

For further information on Santam Safety Ideas, visit https://www.santam.co.za/safetyideas/.

Judging panel Back row, from left to right: Nthabiseng Makgatho, Philip Marais, Asher Grevler, Nathan Van Rooyen, Ebrahim Asmal, Mokaedi Dilotsotlhe Front row, far left: Ray-ann Sedres. Far right: Nontombi Marule

Winners From left to right: Ntando Shezi, Ntsako Mgiba, Matthew Tait

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 17

Next

CROWD FUNDING INITIATIVE FOR STUDENTS An end to education barriers

18 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

Big Idea

South Africa’s University Student Dropout Rate has over the years been escalating at an alarming rate.

To date it is at 60% according to SA’s Science Forum. The main cause of students dropping out of university is financial constraints.

The South African government has acknowledged that South African homes earning below R600 000 per annum need assistance in providing education for their children. This accounts to about 94% of households in South Africa. The fees available from government entities are insufficient, only covering 17% of students who are eligible for assistance.

Feenix is a crowdfunding initiative launched to fund

“ T hrough Feenix it was clear that the support available to students in need was insufficient and that ordinary South Africans and business owners wanted to play a part, but did not have an avenue to do so.” underprivileged and deserving students, as access to education remains a major challenge for so many people who have the ability to further their studies, but lack funds.

It is a platform that allows students to access fees to pay their tertiary institutions by getting donations from individuals and corporates.

The crowdfunding mechanism is aimed at tackling the state of education and its crisis in South Africa by building a trust for student

fees. The initiative comes as part of a diverse strategy by Standard Bank to develop meaningful, practical and sustainable ways to help youth access quality education. The initiative removes some of their debt owed to universities and ultimately contributes to South Africa’s economic growth.

Head of Standard Bank Incubation and Feenix Interim CEO Jayshree Naidoo says the initiative is a call for everyone in society concerned about the state of education and willing to do something about it.

“Feenix is an opportunity to get involved, whether you’re a student who just wants to get through your degree, or a South African who believes that the future of the country depends on giving young people the tools they need to succeed; one of them being education.

“Feenix rose out of the shared belief that education is vital to breaking the cycle of poverty. The tertiary education funding crisis that resulted in the #Feesmustfall Movement highlighted the importance of education in the lives of South Africans and the barriers that prevent access to it.

There was an enormous sense of wanting to help in whatever way possible and a frustration at the lack of channels available to provide that help.”

Feenix’s simple signup process allows students at any one of the 26 public universities in the country to register their financial needs for the current year. The platform then exposes each student profile to a variety of funding sources and links them with potential sponsors. Ordinary South Africans wishing to fund students can search for individual students on the platform and pay the whole, or a portion, of their fees.

Through Feenix it was clear that the support available to

students in need was insufficient and that ordinary South Africans and business owners wanted to play a part, but did not have an avenue to do so. Feenix distributes the responsibility of funding as widely as possible and makes the process as direct and easy as possible.

“The crowdfunding method is a practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people. The power of crowdsourcing as a viable solution to boosting educational funding channels is taking off worldwide and we are excited to now be able to take part in this exciting journey in South Africa,” says Naidoo.

The programme has so far been a success raising over R120 000 and fully funding four students, with donations from Standard Bank’s internal staff in just two weeks of its inception, before its public launch.

The students are not chosen on merit, but on selection made by the donors and sponsors. For example, an individual would donate to a student of an institution where they have also studied at, or by looking at a student’s motivation on their profile.

“Individuals can donate an amount from R100 up to the full amount due for students’ fees. It is risk-free as the fees get paid directly to the student’s tertiary institution to make what is happening behind the scenes completely transparent,” adds Naidoo.

The programme plans to fund 3 000 students within the next three years with the support of Standard Bank through its commitment to making sure the target gets met. To date, over R1.4 million has been raised and 29 students have been fully funded. There are 759 students who have put their profiles on the platform, with funding and students increasing on a daily basis.

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 19

INNOVA IS A CEO and co-founder of In2IT Group Saurabh Kumar shares how he has steered his company towards global recognition.

CULTURE

By Evans Manyonga

20 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

TION OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 21

22 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

PASSIONATE ABOUT DEMONSTRATING TECHNOLOGY AS A TRUE ENABLER OF BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION, SAURABH KUMAR IS CEO OF IN2IT TECHNOLOGIES SOUTH AFRICA AND COFOUNDER OF IN2IT GROUP, WHICH HAS OFFICES IN 9 COUNTRIES GLOBALLY. KUMAR HOLDS AN MBA IN MARKETING AND FINANCE AS WELL AS A BACHELOR OF ENGINEERING (ELECTRONICS).

He is deeply entrenched in the new wave of digital technology coming to the fore and has wide-ranging experience in structuring transformation business engagements around digitisation, smarttechnology sourcing, business-aligned IT, technology-portfolio optimisation and future-edge tech.

As CEO of In2IT South Africa, he manages the business along with a mandate to drive technology innovation.

Under his leadership, In2IT has been able to establish differentiation in the consulting and technology services space.

WOULD YOU CONSIDER IN2IT AS AN IT SPECIALIST? In2IT is a multinational technology company that provides digital services to many of the top 100 companies in South Africa. In2IT uses automation, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning to solve various technology challenges that many large corporates face. In2IT is a specialist in business processes, IT infrastructure and application management as well as software services.

AS THE CO-FOUNDER AND CEO OF IN2IT SOUTH AFRICA HOW DO YOU MANAGE TO KEEP MAINTAINING YOUR SPOT AS THE BEST IT SERVICE PROVIDER IN SOUTH AFRICA? A services company that thrives on innovation is only as good as its people.

The chief reason we continue to be a trusted partner of large corporate companies is the passion of our engineers and how they engage with and service our clients. At In2IT, we believe in the philosophy that the best

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 23

way to manage people is not to manage them. Those employees that manage themselves and show initiative are the ones that excel and embody our work ethic. We lead by example and provide employees with ample avenues to innovate and grow. It is also important to empower them and break the ‘halo’ that is usually associated with senior management, that makes them unapproachable.

IN2IT TECH WAS NAMED SOUTH AFRICA’S MOST INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGY FIRM FOR 2017 BY GLOBAL BRANDS, HOW HAS THE EXPERIENCE BEEN AND WHAT ARE THE KEY BENEFITS FROM THIS? Innovation is a culture that has to be woven into the fabric of the business. We must remember that the light bulb was not invented due to the continuous improvement of the candle. It requires innovation and a revolutionary approach, where newer solutions are developed and utilised to resolve old problems. This is generally not as easy as it sounds.

Furthermore, as an organisation, we believe we must be ready to embrace failure in order to learn from it and move ahead. The experience and feedback from our clients is always encouraging, but validation from third-party organisations or analysts confirms that we are on the right path.

WHY DO YOU THINK YOU RECEIVED THIS RECOGNITION INTERNATIONALLY? Our approach towards new age technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, artificial intelligence and digital transformation is the key reason for our innovation and global recognition. A software chatbot has no nationality. It can be used in any part of the world with ease. Automation could potentially make the outsourcing industry redundant, especially those companies that have experienced growth because of labour arbitrage of delivering from low cost locations. It is thus heartening to see the international recognition In2IT is receiving.

IN2IT HAS PARTNERED WITH MICROSOFT FOR FURTHER EDUCATION AND TRAINING PROGRAMMES. CAN YOU TELL US MORE ABOUT THE INITIATIVE AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT? There are predictions that millions of jobs will become redundant with automation. The only way those affected can survive is through unlearning and then relearning. We have been partnering with various organisations who are world leaders in this space. In2IT has set up the In2IT Academy where we provide training for these future skills.

As a corporate, we also have the responsibility of transferring these skills to our youth. In2IT launched the In2ITIntellect Programme where we have been hiring unemployed graduates from rural South Africa and enabling them to gain future skills.

24 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

THE IOT IS A NEW FIELD OF TECHNOLOGY IN THE ICT SECTOR THAT IN2IT IS QUITE FAMILIAR WITH, HOW HAS IT IMPROVED YOUR SERVICES IN COMPARISON TO THE TRADITIONAL WAY OF SERVICING CLIENTS? Currently, close to 25 billion devices are connected today. However, as per industry projections, the Internet of Things (IoT) will revolutionise the way we operate and by 2020, it is predicted that more than 50 billion of these devices will connect with each other. To contextualize this, for every person in this world there will be seven devices connected to the Internet.

This is a huge opportunity for business and as such, we have set up an IoT lab in Sandton, South Africa, where clients are able to simulate real-life situations before deploying this technology in real life.

TECHNOLOGY IS EVOLVING AND RAPIDLY ADVANCING ACROSS THE GLOBE, WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE INFLUENCE OF TECHNOLOGY IN THE NEAR FUTURE ON A GLOBAL SCALE? The World Economic Forum (WEF) announced last year that we are at the start of the fourth industrial revolution. In my view, ten years from now we

will spend most of our time in autonomous vehicles, be it a car or human carrying drones.

3D printing cafés will also be widespread like Internet cafés of the past. We will have a device sitting next to our microwave to print calorie controlled food for consumption. These advancements in some form and fashion are already happening. For instance, it was recently announced that Dubai is testing selfflying taxis.

IN A FEW YEARS’ TIME THERE WILL BE NO BANK TELLERS, CASHIERS, PETROL ATTENDANTS OR CAR GUARDS BECAUSE OF NEW AI MACHINES BEING INTRODUCED BY TECH COMPANIES. THIS WILL PUT MANY JOBS IN THE RETAIL AND SERVICES SECTOR AT STAKE AND ALSO BRING

“ O ur approach towards new-age technologies like the Internet of Things, robotics, artificial intelligence and digital transformation is the key reason for our innovation and global recognition.”

OPPORTUNITIES FOR ENTREPRENEURS TO INVENT MACHINES THAT WILL MAKE OUR LIVES MUCH EASIER. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THESE TECH VENTURES? Companies across the globe are exploring ways to automate various functions and business processes. One such technology is to use blockchain and the IoT to create machines that would change the way retail industry works.

The future of retail lies in the tech industry, similar to what we have seen in other industries like Uber – the giant in ride-sharing, and Airbnb – the biggest hotel chain in the world. Today a simple transaction of you swiping a card on a till goes through tens of intermediaries. A decentralised technology like blockchain can cut through all of this and make it a real-time transaction.

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 25

IN2IT HAS BEEN IN OPERATION FOR MANY YEARS, WHAT WOULD YOU CONSIDER THE COMPANY’S MOST NOTABLE ACCOMPLISHMENTS SINCE ITS INCEPTION? In the IT industry, revenue has a linear link with the number of employees. We have consciously made sure that we move away from a traditional resource-linked way of addressing challenges in large corporates to a more automation-focused method. Thus growth of the revenue is not linked to the number of resources you hire. This has been a good accomplishment. We are now multinational and able to serve clients in over 9 countries directly and over 26 countries through partners, thus being a partner of choice if you are going multinational.

WHAT HAVE BEEN YOUR BIGGEST CHALLENGES IN YOUR JOURNEY AS A COMPANY THUS FAR? When you start a company there are many roadblocks that you overcome. For us the biggest challenge has been to ensure we continuously build technology, tools, processes and teams that differentiate us from others. These are like four legs of a table and if one leg is missing, the table is of no use. In2IT is already in a fast pace growth mode and we will maintain this.

WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE FUTURE OF AFRICA IN THE TECHNOLOGY SPACE? Technology today is a great enabler in balancing society. With access to high speed broadband, youth from urban to rural areas will be hugely instrumental in creating innovative solutions.

More than 70% of Africa’s population is below 30 years of age. There are hundreds of tech zones being set up across the continent and it is only a matter of time before the next big tech start-up has its headquarters in Africa.

What are your thoughts on the increasing gap between industry regulation and the disruptive market? In essence, do you feel regulation is moving at the same pace as disruption and what challenges are likely to keep arising from this?

One of the biggest challenges new age technology innovation faces is around regulations. While these regulations were created years ago, the advent of new technology demands significant changes to enable disruption. While a disruptive idea would certainly find its way to enable changes, lack of deregulation would bring costly delay.

26 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

30 SECONDS WITH SAURABH KUMAR ​B est quote “Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.”

Favourite book Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

HOW MUCH VALUE DO YOU PLACE ON COLLABORATION IN BUSINESS? The problems of today demand collaboration to find the right innovative solutions. We place huge focus on internal as well as external collaboration. Our innovation council has representation from customers who are open to ideas and experimentation.

Similarly, we have collaboration sessions not only with companies who own product, software or IPs, but also educational institutions.

Favourite Destination Indonesia

WHO HAS BEEN YOUR GREATEST MOTIVATION IN BUSINESS AND WHY?

Favourite City Bali

There are many aspects in business that are a great source of motivation; the first customer who puts his bet on a bunch of young guys to solve his technology challenges, to the hundreds of employees who are giving all they have to build a great company one brick at a time.

Favourite Gadget The latest 3 D printer at work that can print real life objects from your phone. ​ ow do you unwind H and relax I read around 25 to 30 books a year and that’s a great way for me to switch off and relax. ​B iggest Inspiration My grandfather, who came from an extremely poor family, did his MBBS, worked hard to raise his eight kids and practiced medicine for over 60 years to serve those in need of urgent medical care, but could not afford it. ​I deal day Starts at 05h00 am and finishes at 22h00 pm with 4 hours with family and 12 hours at work.

Best moment in your life Co-founding In2IT with two of my best friends, and the birth of my two daughters.

HOW DO YOU JUGGLE BUSINESS AND FAMILY TIME? For an entrepreneur, purpose itself determines the drive and power. Thus, business talk does come through to the dinner table and inside the house.

Thankfully, technology has made it easier to work from home or from my daughter’s tennis tournament. My spouse has been a great source of strength in handling family matters. It also helps to have a great team at work, who can independently handle tricky situations and complex decision making.

WHAT CAN WE EXPECT FROM THE COMPANY IN THE NEAR FUTURE? We have identified two more provinces, apart from Gauteng, where we intend to set up innovation labs on new-age technologies.

These will be rolled out over the next six months. We are well on target to have trained and absorbed over 100 unemployed graduates in our workforce before the end of next year. During the same time we intend to launch digital workforce or Bots to replace some of the mundane tasks being carried out in the remote IT infrastructure management space.

MAKE

YOUR BUSINESS

MOBILE FRIENDLY Zapper is a secure mobile payment application that simpliďŹ es the customer payment journey by allowing them to conveniently pay at your business with a quick scan from their smartphone.

Along with deep customer insights, tailored rewards programmes and a direct digital marketing channel, Zapper effortlessly grows your sales potential while positively impacting the way that you do business.

SIGN UP NOW

Open the attached insert to get started.

Contact Zapper: 087 150 1001 or sasupport@zapper.co.za

Next

Behind the Brand

BUMBLE GETS DOWN TO BUSINESS The feminist dating app is swiping right on networking.

By Karen Valby

Photographs by Valerie Chiang

Last year, two people met cute the modern way. Ashley and Connor matched on Bumble, the dating app where people swipe through potential partners but only women are allowed to initiate a conversation. They started texting. But when Ashley asked an innocent question about work, Connor launched into a misogynistic rant in which he called her a “gold-digging whore.”

Bumble’s response, a fiery blog post now known as the “Dear Connor” letter, quickly went viral.

The company called for a future in which Connor would “engage in everyday conversations with women without being afraid of their power”—and then, in an unusual move, banned him from using the service.

Whitney Wolfe, Bumble’s 28-year-old founder and CEO, understands how it feels to be on the receiving end of such messages. Flanked by a handful of the 30 employees (mostly women) who work out of the company’s Austin office, she explains that she founded Bumble in 2014 “in response to our dating issues, our issues with men, our issues with gender dynamics.” At the time, Wolfe had been reeling from her dramatic exit from the dating app Tinder, where she served as VP of marketing. Following an ugly breakup with cofounder Justin

28 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

Professional matchmaker Whitney Wolfe wants Bumble to be about expanding access— not just to love, but to opportunity.

Behind the Brand

P O W ER S W IP E Mateen, Wolfe brought a sexual harassment suit against her former colleagues, accusing them of discrimination and stripping her of her cofounder title—claims Tinder called unfounded. Texts in which Mateen repeatedly bashed Wolfe’s romantic life and threatened her future at the company citing their strained relationship were presented as evidence; the case was settled out of court. “I started Bumble because I was sick of being called names by boys,” Wolfe says, “[and] because every woman in this room would benefit from it.”

In less than three years, Bumble has amassed more than 20 million users, and it continues to add more than 50,000 new ones per day. It’s on track to take in $150 million in revenue in 2018. (The basic app is free, but more than 10% of its active users pay up to $9.99 per month for a subscription, which grants access to premium features such as a list of people who have already swiped right on them.) Bumble’s users are emboldened by the app’s impressively low rate of abuse reports; in addition to banning people like Connor, Bumble also blocks those who send unwanted nude photos, and it was the first dating app to initiate photo verification practices, limiting the potential for fake profiles.

Now Bumble is betting that its matchmaking technology can do more than foster romantic or personal connections. After launching its Bumble BFF vertical a year ago, which pairs users with new friends, Wolfe is repositioning the company to make room for Bumble Bizz, a professional networking vertical debuting this fall where users can look for work, find a business partner, or hire new talent. The original dating service will be rebranded as Bumble Honey.

“Whitney’s vision extended well beyond dating from the beginning,” says Wolfe’s business partner, Andrey Andreev, the

Illustrations by Justin Tran

Here’s how Bumble Bizz plans to pair users with professional connections.

ESTABLISH YOUR EXPERTISE

SEPARATE BUSINESS AND PLEASURE

START A CONVERSATION

Initially, Bizz will suggest anyone within a range of 5 to 15 miles.

Once you start swiping, the algorithm will learn your preferences and show mostly people in your field.

The app will surface short bios of potential contacts, along with profile photos, educational history, and job status. People who use Bumble Honey or Bumble BFF can maintain independent profiles.

The service will allow men who match with men and women who match with women to start chatting freely. But if a woman matches with a man, she must initiate contact.

During a coffee break at Bumble’s office, more than a dozen members of the staff, who are as loose and casual with one another as longtime friends, crowd around a laptop perched on the kitchen counter. Wolfe pulls up a video of Bumble’s first ad. It features Sam Fulgham, the company’s director of college marketing, then a junior at the University of Alabama, jumping out of a plane shortly after she started chatting with a match on Bumble (the ad’s closing statement: #taketheleap). Wolfe, who enlisted student ambassadors to make Tinder a hit on college campuses around the country, did the same with Bumble, and now she’s applying a similarly high-energy, wide-net approach to marketing Bumble Bizz.

For current users, the concept of Bizz is a relatively easy sell: Set up a discrete profile for networking, all while continuing under the principle that anyone can match, but women alone can initiate contact. Unlike many other professional and social networks, which exist to connect you to people you know, Bizz’s mission is to introduce you to new contacts, with added protections like verified profiles. One key to Bizz’s success will be drawing

a new demographic of users into Bumble’s ecosystem. The challenge, says Bumble’s director of marketing, Chelsea Cain Maclin, is convincing “someone like my mother, who is married and has three kids and now wants to get back into healthcare work, that we have something to offer her.”

This month, Bumble is launching a targeted national ad campaign, geared toward women and men of varying ages, that will promote the idea that just one connection can transform your professional life. Bizz will debut with verified brand partners such as Postmates and Outdoor Voices. Hiring managers at those companies will help fill open positions by swiping through candidates they find on Bizz. Bumble has also recruited “Queen Bees”—existing users who are social media influencers and entrepreneurs—to partner with the app on networking and awareness events.

Wolfe believes that Bumble’s mission of empowerment will be as appealing in the professional realm as it is in the personal. “We have women already reaching out saying they’re getting [unwanted solicitations] on LinkedIn, that they need a professional network

founder and CEO of social networking site Badoo. (Andreev owns a majority stake in Bumble.)

Giving users more to swipe about than merely romance fits nicely with Bumble’s feminist founding mission. But this approach also taps into a critical cultural zeitgeist as women push back against the subtle and overt harassment they face in business.

A rising cohort of women, from venture capitalists to finance and tech entrepreneurs, are determined to refashion what is acceptable and possible in the workplace. In Wolfe’s case, it starts with a simple question: “Why does it have to be all about love?” she asks. “How do we expand horizons beyond just saying, ‘You’re a female, you have to get married by 30’?”

“How do we expand horizons beyond just saying, ‘You’re a female, you have to get married by 30’?”

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 29

Next

Behind the Brand

Generating buzz Director of marketing Chelsea Cain Maclin, bottom left, and head of brand Alex Williamson are leading Bumble’s transition from a dating app to a connection hub.

where they make the first move,” says Wolfe. “Women will always control the experience on Bumble.” Ashley Wright, Bumble’s content manager (whom Wolfe hired after swiping right on her on Bumble BFF), spent seven years working in technology, often at jobs where she says she was dismissed as “the booth girl” at conferences and talked over during staff meetings.

“A woman-owned, primarily woman-operated company is mind-blowing in the tech space,” she tells her colleagues. “I’ve

30 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

worked on the other side, so believe me when I tell you that this is a dream job.”

On this day, the team works knee to knee on laptops, with the bathroom serving as space for conference calls in a pinch. There’s a scrawled two-week countdown on the wall until the staff moves into its new headquarters, a 5,000-square-foot space done up in Bumble’s signature canary yellow and equipped with a private room Wolfe calls the Mommy Bar, where new mothers can pump in peace and everyone can enjoy

weekly blowouts and manicures on the company’s dime. This is a group that hugs and cheerleads and hyper-communicates, like when Wolfe clarifies three times that she was calling something her colleague said “weird,” not the woman herself. The prolonged exchange ended with the two making heart shapes at each other with their hands. “Once a week someone tells me to toughen up, get a sharper edge,” says Wolfe. “I don’t do that.”

She insists that Bumble’s culture of positivity is the engine

behind the team’s productivity.

In July, Bumble launched SuperSwipe, its most recent monetization effort. For $1.99 a pop, users can reinforce their interest in a match by pressing a heart sign over his or her profile picture (it’s similar to a Tinder feature, Super Like). Overnight, SuperSwipe turned the company into the 29th most-profitable app on iTunes, a 35% increase from its previous position. Next year, Bumble will launch in-app advertising that will be tailored to users. The app will give you the chance to swipe right on pizza, for example, before offering a coupon to the pizzeria around the block.

Even as Bumble expands, it could be a long time before it reaches the scale of its contemporaries. It faces stiff competition from the likes of 22-year-old dating site Match .com and Tinder, which has nearly 2 million paying subscribers. And LinkedIn probably doesn’t consider Bumble Bizz a threat. But in giving users a new set of guidelines for how to relate to one another—both socially and professionally— Wolfe is asking us to reset our expectations for such interactions.

Back at the office, Wolfe’s team is workshopping new billboard ads for Bizz; “What does your Dad do?

What does your Mom do?” is a top contender. Wolfe’s own mom is a brand ambassador who has spent the past six months recruiting the over-50 age group at various events in the Santa Barbara, California, area. As for her dad— Wolfe’s parents divorced when she was 17—she has a story about him. Wolfe tells her team that she called him recently to share news of Bumble’s rising revenue: “And he said, ‘Well, good for you, now why don’t you just leave it be? Get a CEO in there and take care of [your husband] and enjoy your life.’ ” The room of women (and three men) groans, as Wolfe laughs and throws her arms up in mock outrage. “We need more users,” she says. “Clearly our job isn’t done yet.”

Next

A NEW FOOD CHAIN How the United Nations is using blockchain to bring stability to the lives of refugees

By Ben Paynter

Illustrations by Francesco Ciccolella

32 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

World Changing Idea

The future of world food aid arrived, in early May, unnoticed by its first recipients: the grocery shoppers inside a supermarket at the Azraq camp in Jordan, home to 36,000 Syrian refugees. To be fair, their buying process already looked pretty high-tech, especially for a store with a dirt parking lot in the middle of the desert.

Before paying, each shopper

peered into a black, rectangular iris scanner mounted at eye-level, which confirms users’ identities with the camp’s organizing group, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and allows them to access a food stipend from the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP).

That’s a spiffy authentication process, but it had been there for months. What the shoppers didn’t see was the new back-end procedure.

Instead of receiving WFP funds via a third party, such as a bank, the grocery store was reconciling each purchase directly with the aid group through a secure platform called Building Blocks, based on blockchain technology. Inside the store, Houman Haddad, a finance officer for the WFP and the founder of Building Blocks, watched as each eye scan led to a cashier’s tablet flashing a green check mark, signaling a completed transaction.

“It was the moment when I knew this was technically possible,” he says.

The technology behind cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ethereum, blockchain is essentially a shared digital ledger system: a decentralized database that allows information to be exchanged among several parties but not altered.

Transactions become blocks of data that are chained together, making everything transparent and easy to review. The concept arose in 2008 as a way to securely track and transfer bitcoins. Today, blockchain is being applied to everything from energy trading to legal contracts, and is poised to transform how we store and share personal information. But one of its most profound uses, say advocates, may be in international aid, where documentation is scarce and operating budgets are low.

By eliminating intermediaries, blockchain technology creates faster, safer, and, ultimately, cheaper ways of doing business.

Organizations working in international relief can lose up to 3.5% of each aid transaction to various fees and costs. What’s more,

across the industry, an estimated 30% of all development funds don’t reach their intended recipients because of third-party theft or mismanagement. In Jordan, the WFP can use Building Blocks to audit each beneficiary’s spending in near-real time. And by paying vendors directly, Building Blocks has reduced money-management costs by 98%, according to Haddad.

For an aid organization spending $6 billion annually across 80 countries, that adds up to tens of millions of dollars in savings.

Bernhard Kowatsch, who heads the WFP’s Innovation Accelerator, which incubated Building Blocks, sees more value: “[Building Blocks] provides even higher assurance to

“ By eliminating intermediaries, blockchain technology creates faster, safer, and, ultimately, cheaper ways of doing business. ” individual donors that if you give to the World Food Programme, that money actually reaches the people it’s intended for.”

Haddad, who has worked for the WFP for seven years, approached his employer in mid-2016 about developing a blockchain-based business through its accelerator. The WFP incubator offers intensive coaching and up to $100,000 to social entrepreneurs who share its goal of eradicating global hunger.

Once in the program, Haddad joined forces with Alexandra Alden, a Silicon Valley–based mentor, refined the concept during a boot camp run through California’s Singularity University, and, in January of this year, began testing a prototype in the Sindh

province of Pakistan, whose rural inhabitants are dependent on food entitlements and direct cash distributions. (This trial didn’t involve fancy iris scanners, relying instead on text-based mobile voucher codes.)

The WFP initially scheduled just a one-month trial of Haddad’s technology in Azraq, but the program was surprisingly successful. The organization has asked Building Blocks to stay—and expand to other camps later this year, reaching a total of 100,000 people. An even wider rollout to the country’s half million refugees scattered throughout different host communities will follow. Haddad expects the system to be available in other countries sometime in 2018, along with the ability for recipients to review their balances and itemized lists of purchases.

Because the design for Building Blocks is largely open sourced— its ethereum-based operating system allows for customizable applications—Haddad envisions the technology being used well beyond grocery stores. For instance, the WFP’s recipient rolls could be tethered to health data from the World Health Organization, or educational information from UNICEF. That would give aid groups a better understanding of their recipients, and refugees a better way to manage their affairs. And the technology would be easily transferable across borders. “That’s when [it] starts getting pretty interesting and powerful,” says Haddad’s mentor, Alden.

Ben Siegel, an impact policy manager at ConsenSys, an ethereum development company that has helped form the Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition, considers Building Blocks a “superb” first step, and several UN organizations are exploring how to take it further.

The ultimate goal, Haddad says, is to give uprooted people “as much control as possible” over their own lives.

B LOCKCH A IN F OR GOOD These other organizations are using secure technology to bring stability to vulnerable communities.

ALICE

BANQU

AID:TECH

PROJECT AMPLY

This London-based platform brings transparency to philanthropy by collecting and holding charitable donations—and releasing them only after an organization shares metrics demonstrating its success. Its first project is with a local homeless charity.

Minneapolis’s BanQu uses blockchain to establish “economic identities” for people who lack access to banks. In Kenya, it’s helping refugees secure government aid and services. In Latin America, it has created shareable property registries to help female farmers prove ownership and secure loans.

Like Building Blocks, Aid:Tech eliminates transaction fees and fraud by allowing NGOs to disperse digital cash vouchers directly to recipients. The Irish Red Cross has used it to help Syrian refugees in Lebanon.

The Cape Town organization, which is running a pilot with South African preschoolers, creates immutable digital identities to help children in Africa receive educational services and subsidies.

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 33

Fast Company Promotion

Taking the pulse of the natural world Reshaad Sha, Chief Executive Officer, SqwidNet

The rise of the Internet of Things and other mobile technologies offers humanity the opportunity to truly advance their efforts in preserving and saving the environment in more innovative and relevant ways.

Humanity today finds itself living in what is defined as the ‘Anthropocene Age’, or the age of man.

This is characterised by the massive environmental modifications occurring on Earth, encompassing such issues as climate change and the rapid loss of biodiversity. Fortunately, there is another age we are also living in at present, namely the ‘Information Age’, where the Internet, social networks, mobile devices and incredible computing power mean that people and things are being more connected than at any time in the past.

The latter clearly offers humanity a huge opportunity to change the impact of the former, as there is enormous potential for data analytics and technology to play a major role in monitoring, modelling and responding to the challenges of global biodiversity loss and climate change. The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) in particular, provides us with an opportunity to continuously monitor the pulse of the natural world.

The IoT has taken off, thanks to cost effective, production at scale of high-tech sensors that enable scientists to capture more comprehensive and complete data in a more contextual, frequent and secure manner than was previously possible.

There are, in fact, multitudes of ways that the IoT is enabling more frequent monitoring of the natural environment, and on a much larger spatial scale. Sensors today allow for finer resolution monitoring to take place in previously inaccessible or dangerous locations, as these allow for the automated capture of data. This means that once activated, these devices require minimal further human involvement. It is obvious that solutions such as these offer clear benefits to conservation science and management.

Ultimately, being able to gather and analyse vast amounts of data rapidly will enable humanity to close the environmental loop, as it will allow us to find out what the consequences of our actions are and thus ensure we take smarter actions as a

34 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

result. Of course, the environment is a vast and complex entity, so the first question we will need to answer is what do we want to measure? Once we know this, we need to decide what we do with this data and – once we have used the data - how we can manage things differently, based on this information.

REAL WORLD APPLICATIONS The good news is that there are scientists and conservationists out there already hard at work using the IoT to answer these questions. Spain offers a fantastic example of how to save a species on the verge of extinction, using technology. At the turn of the century, there were fewer than 100 Iberian lynxes left. Thanks to a cutting edge captive breeding centre, the numbers within this critically endangered species have more than tripled and it is now being reintroduced into safe habitats, as a second stage of this repopulation effort.

Today, these lynxes are tracked with location collars that geo-reference individual animals in the same manner as an asset management system would. This enables scientists to study behavioural uses of space and territories by these animals in the wild. In addition, connected drones are used to provide additional monitoring, to see how they are doing from a distance. The next step is to move away from the current battery-dependant collars to subcutaneous sensors that would remain under the lynx’s skin for its entire lifetime.

Another good example of IoT-related conservation is the efforts being put in place by the Sigfox Foundation. Its parent company, Sigfox, has recently partnered with Dark Fibre Africa to launch SqwidNet, an IoT network that is built on Sigfox technology. The Foundation is currently using connected sensors to assist conservationists in better monitoring rhino populations, since there are only estimated to be around 29 000 individual animals left.

Although still in prototype form, it uses a GPS tracker that is implanted in the horns of the rhinos, which securely sends out three GPS signals per day via the Sigfox network, on a dedicated secured platform. By knowing the exact locations of these animals, the

“ Entrepreneurs who don’t have big agency budgets, should be using free tools to market their business.”

Reshaad Sha, CEO of SqwidNet

conservationists are thus better able to protect them. The end goal, naturally, is to produce 29 000 connected sensors to monitor all the living rhinos around the world.

Just a few months ago, there was much ado about three male lions that escaped from the Kruger Park. Despite valiant attempts to find and bring them back to the reserve, two were killed by a farmer after he discovered they had killed one of his cattle, and the third was put down by SA National Parks staff.

This sad story serves to illustrate yet again the benefits of location tracking and real-time IoT connectivity. Had these lions been tagged the way the rhinos in the Sigfox project are, it would have been easy to determine where these animals were at any given time, and SAN Parks staff could have darted them and returned them to Kruger long before they attacked any cattle.

Of course, the three examples given above are just some of the more basic methods conservationists are using to improve the natural world. Many others can also be cited, including initiatives whereby drones are being used as an anti-poaching measure, or where GPS-tagged sharks not only provide scientists with invaluable information about the animals themselves, but the tags can also tweet the locations of these fish to nervous beach-goers. Remote camera traps are starting to lead to the discovery or rediscovery of species in inaccessible regions while still others are using this technology to enable the monitoring of illegal fishing.

The IoT and other modern technologies clearly offer humanity the chance to significantly change the game as far as conservation goes, giving us the tools to tackle some of the trickiest problems facing the natural environment. By properly leveraging the benefits of the Information Age, we at last have the opportunity to eliminate some the greatest challenges posed by the Anthropocene Age.

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 35

Next

THE MUSIC MAKER How producer and Vampire Weekend alum Rostam Batmanglij inspires ingenuity from A-list artists

By Claire Dodson

Photograph by Dan Monick

Once you know what you’re listening for, it’s easy to identify Rostam Batmanglij’s fingerprints on a song. The former keyboardist for the alt-rock band Vampire Weekend is now a producer who has worked with artists including Solange, Frank Ocean, and Kid Cudi. Batmanglij infuses his penchant for uncommon chord progressions and classical music into every album he touches.

The result is fully realized, often startling pop, from Carly Rae Jepsen’s heady single “Warm Blood” to the eerie instrumental theme song for Netflix’s sci-fi show The OA. This fall, Batmanglij is releasing his first solo album, Half-Light. Here’s how he uses collaboration as a tool to unleash creativity, in himself and in others.

Make downtime productive When he’s producing an album, Batmanglij often invites the artist to meet at his Los Angeles home.

The cozy surroundings keep things relaxed, but Batmanglij is ready to work at a moment’s notice: The microphones in his home studio are always turned on

Mastermind Batmanglij played 11 instruments in his 10 years with Vampire Weekend.

36 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

Master Class

Weekend days and expand his repertoire beyond pop and altrock. Batmanglij played the piano, organ, and shaker on Solange’s 2016 track “F.U.B.U.,” which is part of her critically acclaimed album A Seat at the Table.

Don’t make people too comfortable When Frank Ocean brought Batmanglij a rough, early version of “Ivy,” an R&B track from his 2016 album Blonde, Batmanglij had an idea for the instrumentation that was more guitar-driven than Ocean was accustomed to. He isolated the vocal track, plugged in a guitar, and played a new, more atypical chord progression for Ocean, who was convinced. The distorted, dreamy electric guitar helped turn “Ivy” into a standout ballad. “Artistically I want us to go somewhere that neither of us has been before,” says Batmanglij. “You’ve got to feel a little uncomfortable to push to that place.”

Team players Performers such as, Danielle Haim above, and, Frank Ocean left, have sought out Batmanglij for his unique perspective.

Keep something for yourself Be ready to shift roles

and ready to record an instrument within 30 seconds. Blurring the lines between brainstorming and recording, says Batmanglij, is an effective way to ward off writer’s block and self-consciousness. “I like to be able to work quickly, to capture the spark of an idea before it goes out,” he says. That sometimes means acting on creative impulses even if there’s no studio nearby. Batmanglij recalls one afternoon sitting in

his living room with Haim lead guitarist Danielle Haim when they got an idea for an early version of what would become the bluesy “Kept Me Crying,” which appears on the group’s latest album, Something to Tell You. Not wanting to interrupt the moment, they recorded the riffs and lyrics on their iPhones. Two days later, in the more formal studio setting, they were able to tap into their original flow.

In addition to playing lead guitar and producing all three Vampire Weekend albums, Batmanglij also played the keyboard, banjo, and drums, among other instruments.

Once he left the band, he temporarily set those instruments aside. But last year, Batmanglij ran into Solange and one of her producers, Raphael Saadiq, at a café in Los Angeles. Saadiq said something to Batmanglij that stuck with him: To produce your best work, “you have to be able to shoot from any place on the court.” When Solange later asked Batmanglij to collaborate, he recognized it as an opportunity to revisit the instrumental fluencies he’d picked up during his Vampire

Despite Batmanglij’s success working with other musicians, he recognizes that some creative efforts require solitude. HalfLight represents years of personal material that Batmanglij wrote between Vampire Weekend gigs.

The project also allowed him to experience an artist-producer collaboration from the other side; Wet’s Kelly Zutrau and Dirty Projectors’ Angel Deradoorian both provided vocals and cowrote songs. In the past year, Batmanglij has started performing shows under the name Rostam, and incorporating a string quartet and dancers in some numbers. “It’s about building off of one another’s energy,” he says. “There’s a joy I get from collaborating with other artists, and there’s a joy I get from making songs on my own.”

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 37

ECH-

EEPIN 38 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

OLOG

SAVING OURENVIRONMENT THROUGH CLEVERTHINKING

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 39

Brave young entrepreneurs have taken it upon themselves to invent innovative ways to help save the environment. Their inventions and ideas are testament to the fact that great minds can achieve great things when put to good use.

The war against pollution, saving water and energy are challenges we have to meet together. It needs the creative minds of business and other leaders who have the capacity to change how we use our precious resources and invent lasting solutions to preserve the environment for future generations.

KEEPING IT CLEAN AND SIMPLE Solar systems are one of the greatest inventions on the planet, converting sunlight into electricity without harming the environment.

Jaco Venter is a CEO making moves to eradicate the use of and dependency on fossil fuels through Zeroth Energy, a consulting company that supplies solar systems for sectional complexes, retirement villages, commercial businesses, industrials, schools and fuel stations. Jaco chatted to Fast Company and shared some insight into what the company is all about.

Can you give us a brief background of your childhood and adult education?

I was born in Vereeniging on 18 July 1985, grew up incredibly poor and often moving from school to school, house to house, neighbourhood to neighbourhood. Even though it was painful growing up in that manner, I appreciate the value it had on my life, as I started asking the question WHY, especially in patterns I noticed. This helped me to become a top 10 student in school even though I was a massive rebel and always got into trouble.

This foundation gave me the opportunity to go to North West University, where I studied Mechanical Engineering, which I later changed to Actuarial Science. I left university with a few credits short, the best decision I made in my life even though I was classified as a failure.

This allowed me to pursue my true passion, which was to know myself and the universe, so I went traveling.

I travelled the world for 7 years, where I visited over 90 countries on all 7 continents. Looking back I basically got a 7 year degree in human psychology, philosophy and learning to think big. For me knowledge is not the key, but experiences are the key, and experiences lead to the ability to do things smarter, with a bigger picture in mind.

Can you give us a brief background of your career?

My career has always been sales orientated. I worked for numerous companies while living in London, one of them being a $ billion fitness/detox company, as well as the biggest art company in the world in America, where I was an Art Auctioneer. Even though I was never actively pursuing a career in art or fitness, I did get interested in sales as it was aligned with human nature

40 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

Art credit teekay

GUTTER CREDIT TK

Over the years, the fight to save the environment has been tough, to say the least. Getting everyone rowing in the same direction and ensuring that we all do the little we can to save the world we live in are key in this crucial battle

and my philosophical way of thinking was intrigued.

The time I spent in sales jobs around the world was great, as I had different teachers and different perspectives, making my view point on sales very unique. For a brief stint I lived in Thailand, where I taught philosophy and yoga for free on the beach, and this is where I got more aligned with the energy of the universe, as well as learned how I was in control of my own reality and the creator of my own life. I came back home in 2015 for two of my sisters’ weddings, and decided to stay in South Africa.

Can you give us more info on Zeroth Energy and what it is about?

Zeroth Energy is a unique African energy brokerage firm, specialising in making renewable energy accessible to the masses. We work with numerous solar and wind suppliers, installers and financial institutions to simplify the process, from client introduction to system implementation. We have successfully managed to shorten the process, as well as make it much more cost effective for solar/ energy suppliers to operate in the market, bringing the total cost down for the clients.

Along with our partners, we have also introduced solar rental models to the market.

Making renewable energy accessible to the masses by completely removing the upfront costs is our mission at Zeroth, and we also aim to change the way we use energy effectively and productively manage our energy sources in all forms. Our principal objective is to make renewable energy accessible to the masses and effectively through a comprehensive paradigm shift, alter methodologies of producing food, personal and produce transportation and power to our industries and residences.

What was the need to facilitate change in the energy market? Did you see a gap for an opportunity?

When I came back to South Africa I wanted a challenge, as I am a big thinker, and after traveling the whole world I felt

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 41

I wasn’t challenged in my own life any more. Been there, got the T-shirt... So I started asking what South Africa needs.

The rating agencies said two things will make life better in SA. One is the political situation and the other is the energy problem.

Since I won’t be a great politician with my rebellious nature, I started questioning the energy space. I got my first chance with an IPP company, helping them start a division to bring PPA (Power Purchase Agreements) to the private market.

From my sales background and learning to turn “no’s” into “yes’s”, I started realising that my ability was very limited, being associated with only one company, even though I was bringing a product to the market that was a no-brainer, with no upfront cost, to get solar, with savings from day one. As time went by, and coming from a traveling background where I saw plenty of solar systems installed, even in countries with little to no sunshine, I questioned why Africa was not fully renewable in energy, why clients were not taking it, why there was no competition and why nobody was representing the clients.

I also saw and realised that most solar and energy companies are run and developed by engineers who are the ones needed for the innovation, but they didn’t have the ability to sell their innovation to the public. This is where I saw the gap; that you need a company that represents both the suppliers and the clients, helping the clients to get the best deal and helping the suppliers to sell and to always improve, which will lead to a better product offering to clients and better pricing.

We want a never-ending cycle where everybody wins. If it is not a win-win situation then Zeroth doesn’t get involved.

So I started Zeroth Energy. It was a poor start as I lost all my clients I had built up with the other company, eventually going from two suppliers to none as I left them due to unethical business practices. I refused to do business with people who didn’t treat my clients like I did, even though it almost cost me my entire business.

My ability to stick with something, even though it is costing me in my personal and family life, as everything in my life is about Zeroth Energy, helped me keep persisting and eventually build up an amazing business, with talented people all over South Africa. Even though I had the ability to not give up, it was the people who worked for me, past and present, who helped me build this company. Since the beginning I knew this was bigger than me, and I could not have gotten Zeroth to this point without the people involved.

And divine energy places the right lessons and the right people in my path to steer Zeroth to great heights.

What are the pros and cons of being in the industry of manufacturing renewable energy in South Africa?

The con is that to have a financial model work in renewable energy we can only use Tier 1 products. Tier 1 means they are Vertically Integrated, with over 5 years’ experience. In South Africa we only have Tier 2 & 3 locally produced solar products. So it makes it incredibly hard to buy and support local products. This is something I would love to change, however this will take a tremendous amount of money and a few years to achieve.

The pro is that we have one of the best climates in the world to have renewable energy implemented. The only push we need is some education to the masses that renewable energy is now accessible, and that it works.

Funnily enough, Solar was invented before AC electricity. JP Morgan saw the opportunity to make loads of money with Thomas Edison and so pushed the funding for the electrification of New York, and the world followed the working mode. However, it is changing rapidly.

Zeroth has consultants across South Africa. What is the response towards your services from customers and entities who you supply to?

Zeroth has an amazing team of partner consultants, together with a team of referral agents. Our innovation does not come from technology enhancements, but from the way we have broken down all the barriers for somebody that wants to get into the renewable energy space at little to no cost.

We provide our consultants with everything, from solar to wind, smart meters to designing, installation to maintenance, contracts to marketing as well as one hell of a brand, Zeroth. All they have to do is talk to the people of this world and tell them that they can switch over to renewable energy at no cost.

What more can somebody ask for when wanting to start a successful business in this incredible space? All our consultants are their own business owners under the Zeroth brand, and our model is to make sure we empower people to grow their own business and to run a flexible schedule. We don’t believe in office hours or checking up on each other. They are all business owners and as long as they act like business owners and keep up with our high standard they will always be part of us.

We work on a pride system – personal responsibility in developing excellence, make your targets, help the clients and you can take the rest of the month off if you want to.

They all are fantastic at what they do and have an incredible product knowledge.

However, their best ability is to relate to the clients on a personal level and become friends with their clients. We are in this for the clients, and our number one thing is to

“ W E H AV E O N E O F T H E B E S T C L I M AT E S I N T H E W O R L D T O H AV E R E N E W A B L E E N E R G Y I M P L E M E N T E D . T H E O N LY P U S H W E N E E D I S S O M E E D U C AT I O N T O T H E M A S S E S T H AT R E N E W A B L E ENERGY IS NOW ACCESSIBLE, AND T H AT I T W O R K S .“

42 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

make sure every client sees our consultants and company as a friend. Customers have come in their droves, and lately we have experienced a growth rate of almost 4 000%. As people learn more about our effortless approach, they are more drawn to doing business with us.

Do you have a global presence or are you currently based in South Africa?

At the moment we are exploring our entry into the entire African market, and eventually into the entire world. By introducing our app in the near future it will help us to control the demand, as we are struggling to keep up with a limited amount of installers and suppliers, so our aim is first to make sure we can handle the demand in effective ways without disappointing our clients in the process. Our goal is to be all over Africa by the end of 2018 and all over the world by the end of 2019. With our current growth rate we might get there quicker.

Who would you consider as your competitors and how are you staying ahead of the competition?

I personally believe our biggest competitor is who we as a company were yesterday, and that keeps us thinking in a creative mind-set, making sure we improve every single day. We are never satisfied with where we are. Currently our business model is working perfectly, and without any modifications and we will be in business for a long time. However, we want to make it even better and quicker and more accessible to every client.

Currently the people trying to do what we do in the market are miles behind us, as we have a global view of doing things and they have a local view. We will never chase, as we set the example, and with our high standards we make sure the bar is raised high and keep raising it higher on a daily basis, not to shut down competition, but because we believe we are doing this for the right reasons – to help our clients. And we want our clients to always get the best. And the best is Zeroth Energy.

What are your thoughts on collaboration partners?

As I said earlier, this is much bigger than who I am, or my team, so I am always up for more partners and collaboration. We are doing this for the planet and for the people of this planet, and the quicker we can stop our dependency on fossil fuel and start relying on renewable energy, the better we will be as a species and leave a healthier and better planet to our next generations. In the end we are all going to die and be buried in the same grave, so it’s not about us, it’s about the change we make. Zeroth is here to make change for the masses, so the more people we can get involved the more wonderful change we can make.

What are the business’s most notable accomplishments since its inception?

Our first client that signed up. As everybody doubted us and the way we were doing things, even suppliers were reluctant to sign up with us, and since our first client, a 5 star hotel, for which almost all our current suppliers (who at that point were not our suppliers) bid as well, signed up, suppliers have been flocking to us, wanting us to do their sales and help them improve in the market space.

It took us over a year to get our first client, as the market was not ready. We worked on helping suppliers create products for us to sell.

However, we learned more in that year than we would have getting sales straight away, so I am grateful for that moment. It took Colonel Sanders 1 008 “no’s” before he got his first “yes”, and look where KFC is today. It is not the “no’s” that create a business, it’s the ability to take a “no” on the chin and improve every day. Persistence makes a company great and will make us stand the test of time.

What has been your greatest challenge to date?

One of my first partners, Terry Tompson, died just before we had a meeting with a client. It shook me incredibly hard and really made me revaluate what we did and who we did it for. We are in this for the people of the planet, for the people who work with us and their families, and for the creatures and plants of this world in any form.

I stood up at Terry’s funeral, even though I didn’t know him long, and I thanked him as he was one of the most important people in our company’s short history. Thank you so much, Terry.

As the CEO of Zeroth Energy, what are your thoughts on SA’s manufacturing and renewable energy industry?

This industry is a human, at the moment it is a baby. The baby has just been born and has its whole life ahead of itself. We are at an amazing stage, with renewable energy only playing a 1% role in the entire market at this moment. Now is the most crucial time in the growth of this market, as what we do now will either propel the baby into an amazing childhood of superior development or slow him down.

I believe that South Africa’s renewable energy market will grow tremendously once people get familiar with our brand and realise that we are there for them, there to help them get the best solution for their business or home, there to tell them if it’s a good or bad choice, there for them to save money, there for them to improve their brand and business image to the public, there for them to spend their money on their own business, instead of giving it away to Eskom and getting nothing in return down the line.

As soon as they see us as their friends and that we will do anything to help them, then we can speed up the process and get everybody on renewable energy. We are doing it for you. All you have to do is call us. From then on sit back and relax as we do everything for you.

All you have to do then is make a choice, which will be guided by our expertise and recommendation. If we won’t sell or provide the solution offering to our mother, then we won’t recommend it to you.

What does the future hold for the company?

Amazing things; we are growing super-fast and we actually have an inside goal we are aiming at, and that goal is to buy Eskom in 3 years’ time, as we believe our business model will be the downfall of them, and we would like to buy them for their distribution network, shut down all fossil fuel power stations and build huge solar farms. There shines enough sun energy in 1 hour to power the entire planet for a year. It is doable and Zeroth is not just showing the way, we are making it easy for anybody who wants to be involved.

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 43

ECOLOGICAL ENGINEERING IS KEY 44 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

Baoberry is a multi award winning disciplinary environmental, social and ecological services company that provides integrated ecological engineering and innovative solutions and services to mining, industry, home owners, protected areas, municipalities, developers and others. Since its inception it has developed a number of exciting and innovative services.

Yolandi Schoeman started the company with the dream of establishing and growing Baoberry to be a leader in ecological engineering in Africa that provides innovative solutions and services to a wide range of industries. Still at the helm of the company, Yolandi has experience in integrated water resource management and organic cosmetic science.

Inspired by current sustainability challenges in Africa, Baoberry has dedicated its services to finding ways to address these challenges.

Through the hard work of Yolandi and her team, the company was awarded the Most Promising Woman-led Business Award in the Global Cleantech Innovation Competition for 2016.

“In Africa, as is the case in South Africa, we need to focus on more integrated solutions to address current sustainability science. Whilst working at SANPARKS, the CSIR and various mining and industrial complexes I came into direct contact with complex sustainability challenges where more integrated and ecologically sustainable solutions were required.

Over the past decade I implemented and experimented with various ecological and engineering projects with astonishing and inspirational results,” says Yolandi.

All about innovation, sustainability and science innovation, the company is currently involved in developing an ecologically engineered grey water re-use solution for domestic and corporate application that will not only provide cleaner water, but also lead to job creation and food security as well as contribute to water security in many water-stressed areas.

The project will also make a contribution to the Green Star rating of buildings and provide a tool to optimise water resources.

The company’s contribution to the fight to better the environment and the development of new cleantech initiatives lies in its innovative nature. The innovation of ecological engineering solutions that actually make economic sense to optimally address sustainability challenges between communities and nature is a very important factor, according to Yolandi. “Our expertise and innovation lies in the designing and

establishing of ecosystem components that make economic sense and that benefit communities and the natural environment,” she adds.

Amongst numerous awards that the company has won is the gold award at the EcoLogic 2015/2016 Awards held in Cape Town on 21 April 2016 in the category of Eco-Innovation. It also won an award for innovation at the Global Cleantech Innovation Competition in 2016.

In South Africa, it is particularly important to consider the current economic climate so that cleantech companies can innovate and introduce solutions that also make economic sense – then implement them under already pressing economic conditions. Considering the above it is crucial for cleantech companies and initiatives to come up with environmental, social and ecological solutions that are accurate and cost-effective.

These solutions need to make a notable difference and address current pressing needs that are not addressed adequately by existing solutions. There is a notable payback in implementing such sustainability projects. In South Africa, as in the rest of Africa, we face a very unique sustainability challenge and because of this it makes sense to design with nature; Yolandi and her team have done this exceptionally well.

When designing with nature, you learn about patterns, fluxes, vulnerabilities and levels of tolerance that will be very helpful in understanding the environment, and only then will you be able to develop a solution that addresses challenges sustainably, especially when a natural resource is at the core of the challenge.

Seen as the company’s biggest achievement is the fact that recently Baoberry managed to take ecological engineering to the global stage, where it received multi international recognition for its innovations and initiatives.

The company has brought a new awareness to the area of ecological engineering, which adds significant value in addressing some of the most pressing sustainability challenges in South Africa and beyond.

Yolandi cannot stress enough the importance of everyone doing their bit to contribute to an environment that will enhance our prospects of survival as a species. The need to think about the environment that the next generation will live in is crucial, as is the need to focus on more projects where we design with nature rather than against it. In order to do this, we need a proactive rather than reactive approach.

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 45

GETTING TO THE HOT SPOT Electric geysers are among the most expensive home appliances, consuming millions of Rands in households across South Africa every month. Ever-rising electricity costs mean electric geysers are one of the chief culprits in soaring electricity bills.

Switching geysers on only when needed is a solution preferred by many to conserve water and energy, but it takes a lot of time to actually heat up the water when you need it.

Sandiswa Qayi is not just a pretty face fronting for her male partners, but an inventor who has found a solution to reducing the cost of a geyser’s energy consumption with a simple contraption to heat water as and when necessary. The Hot Spot is a geyser sleeve/conduit that can be retrofitted over any standard geyser element to push hot water from the bottom to the top, using the thermosiphon system which provides 50 litres of hot water within 30 minutes at 50 degrees Celsius.

Sandiswa is the managing director at Amahlathi Eco Tech Africa, a company that manufactures clean renewable energy through technology. After starting work as a field researcher, she later became project officer at Aspire, an economic development agency in the Amathole District Municipality in the Eastern Cape, and was later promoted to project manager in charge of economic development projects.

Born in Whittlesea in the Eastern Cape to a mother who was a textile factory worker in Butterworth and a father who was a bus driver, Sandiswa was raised by her grandparents and aunts from her mother’s family. She went to Eardley Primary and Hewu High School until Grade 9, when she moved to Port Elizabeth and matriculated in 2002.

She holds a Post Graduate Certificate in Business Management from Regenesys Business School, a National Certificate in Systems Engineering Approach & Platformbased Manufacturing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, USA, a Bachelor’s of Social Science degree majoring in Industrial Sociology & Organisational Psychology from Rhodes University and a Master’s degree in Development Studies from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU).

46 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

Before establishing AET Africa, she was part of Abenzi Woodhouse a furniture manufacturing, skills development, training and incubation centre based in Stutterheim in the Eastern Cape and was general manager between 2012 and 2015.

“As general manager of Abenzi Woodhouse I worked with my current business partners, Michael Romer and Tamsanqa Gxowa, on several manufacturing projects. As strategic partners in the manufacturing space we were based in the same industrial park and later formed our business, AET Africa, to identify energy-related challenges in the manufacturing sector we were operating in,” she says.

“We were strategic partners sourcing resources from each other’s companies before we even formed our company, and this gave us a chance to know each other personally. We then realised a gap in the market and decided to form a business that focuses on the energy sector as an untapped market,” says Sandiswa.

AET Africa is a start-up energy manufacturing company with researchers and innovators based at East London’s Science & Technology Park. The company is 80% BEE and 55% youth and women-owned. The company was registered in 2012 and has been since involved in research and development of Hot Spot and heat-raider prototypes to be manufactured for the energy efficiency market, targeting the geyser industry.

In addition to energy efficiency products, AET Africa has been appointed as the ECDC’s technical partner in the Eastern Cape for the manufacturing of jet pulse filter bags for the industrial market and power stations. As a manufacturer of components for clean-technology, AET is also working with Hydrogen South Africa (HySA) and the University of Cape Town in the manufacturing of fuel cells using heat exchange technology.

“As manufacturers, we experienced the high cost of electricity in our operations, which encouraged us to consider energy efficiency and the renewable energy space. My business partner, Michael Romer, is a refrigeration technician and has experienced being burnt by waste heat when fixing a refrigerator. This encouraged us to start our first project, involving heat radiation, in 2013, focusing on the commercial market,” says Sandiswa.

She continues: “In 2014, due to continuously rising electricity costs, the high costs of operating household geysers, and because I could not afford to switch to alternative solutions, I was turning my geyser on and off every day, which encouraged me and my partners to look into the residential geyser market to find a solution to address the problem. As a socioeconomic researcher I realised that the majority of people in our country were experiencing the same problem, and it is in this regard that the Hot Spot concept was developed and designed.”

Coming up with new innovations requires a lot of research and development, and there is always a fair degree of trial and error involved. It requires a lot of money and takes time.

“We had to spend our own money first before we could secure third party funding. Entering into agreements before you can manufacture the product also takes time and hard work to build market traction as investors and consumers are sensitive to new technologies because of failed products that over-promised and under-delivered. Therefore one needs to work hard to prove

the concept and change existing perceptions.

“In addition, being a young black female leader in a male-dominated space has its own challenges and it requires hard work to change boardroom discrimination and gender stereotypes. As industry players we had to continuously research and develop products in order to stay relevant and competitive in the market as well as identify new ways of production,” says Sandiswa.

The company has retro-fitted seven million existing geysers, which benefit consumers who now do not have to switch to alternatives.

Through its high technological efficiencies, AET Africa has won numerous awards, securing almost R1.4 million cash funding for research and development from various government seed funding institutions like the Technology Innovation Agency, The Innovation Hub, Grassroots Innovation, the Small Enterprise Development Agency and Eastern Cape Development Corporation.

In 2016 AET Africa also won the Global Cleantech Innovation Programme as the Most Promising Youth Led Business as well as the Eastern Cape Top Green award for special innovation projects. In 2017 the company won Enviropedia’s Ecological award as the Gold Winner for energy efficiency for its Hot Spot product and the Department of Energy’s Young Women in Energy Award.

Since then the company has been the Eastern Cape’s ambassador for the Grassroots Innovation programme run by the CSIR and the Department of Science & Technology (DST) and has formed strategic partnerships with the Department of Energy, the DST East London’s Industrial Development Zone, Hydrogen South Africa and the University of Cape Town.

The company is in the process of commercialising its innovations and setting up its manufacturing plant, fundraising and plans to launch its products to both national and international markets. AET Africa also wants to be a key player in promoting science and innovation as a vehicle to foster socioeconomic transformation, hence its partnership with the relevant government departments and institutions as grassroots innovators to promote skills development and grassroots innovation for industrialisation purposes.

AET Africa is currently based in South Africa and plans to enlarge its product circulation throughout the African continent for its global presence and is also currently in partnership with an international Chinese company for a manufacturing project involving filter bags.

KEEPING IT CLEAN

South Africa has its own fair share of problems due to global warming, and like most developing countries it is faced with the gradual deterioration in quality of its drinking water. In many smaller cities and towns drinking water is sourced from rivers and streams which are not properly managed, thereby putting the quality of the water at risk.

According to Professor Anthony Turton, from the Centre for Environmental Management at the University of Free State, South Africa produces five billion litres of sewage waste a day, and of this only 20% is able to be treated to a standard safe level to discharge into water sources. He says this presents both opportunities and risks.

In terms of opportunities, individuals and companies are challenged to come up with innovative ideas for solutions to declining water quality levels, but on the down side, the more people are exposed to this problem the more we run the risk of losing lives.

San Aqua HCA, a Cape Town-based company, is one of the companies that saw an opportunity and designed and patented a solution called HydroChemical Activation Treatment (HAT).

Pamela Alborough, who is a co-founder of the company, began her career as a science teacher but the attraction to entrepreneurship began with her starting her first business from home, when her twins were one-years old.

The company was established to bring to the market a solution to deal with declining water quality. This entailed creating a small, electronic water treatment component that is capable of improving the standard of small to large quantities of water without the use of chemicals.

When her chemical scientist husband Howard Alborough created the HAT System she was presented with an opportunity to combine her love for science, business and social entrepreneurship. Together they developed the HAT System and took it to the market to play a role in the war against the looming global water crisis which particularly affects marginalised communities lacking access to treated water, good food and health care.

In its development phases, an informal test was conducted, with 1.8, 0-5 and 0.25 megalitre/day municipal water treatment plants, which Pamela says surpassed expectations. The process involves an electrical charge being applied to water in order to sterilise it. The system uses platinum group metals and other catalysts which eliminate the need to separate anode and cathode cells and puts a higher effective current through the water. The HCA plant system treats water of varying quality and intensifies other water treatment systems cheaply and efficiently by disrupting and coagulating harmful pollutants.

The HCA plant system assures consumers that their water will be safe and clean to cook with and even drink. The system does not use any chemicals and doesn’t require high skills to operate.

The system needs a power source, but only uses about the equivalent amount of electricity used by eight light bulbs of electricity at a flow rate of one megalitre a day.

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 47

COOKING GOES SOLAR For many millions in Africa and the developing world, a light is not just about the flip of a switch and cooking doesn’t happen at the twist of a dial. These simple tasks require using fossil fuels that are inefficient, unhealthy and costly. In fact the cost of these essentials is too expensive for millions of people who live in poverty.

Billy Hadlow is the founder and owner of Khaya Power, a clean power company that generates solar energy for townships where there is no electricity. The company has invented The Khaya Tri Cooker, a solar-powered appliance that provides three essential energies needed in the home for cooking, heating and baking.

The Khaya cooker is a fan assisted gasifier that uses a two stage combustion process to ensure full use of the fuel. The first stage heats the biomass through a process called pyrolysis, which releases the volatile gases in the fuel. The second important stage injects air jets into these gases and burns the released gas efficiently, creating more heat and eliminating harmful emissions.

The gasifier has a double insulation layer which ensures that the body of the stove stays cool while the fire chamber temperature is over 700 degrees Celsius.

48 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

The stove costs less to run than stoves that operate on paraffin and uses less renewable fuel made from wood waste products. It has a high level of burn efficiency, is easy to load and safe for indoor use as it produces no smoke or harmful gasses and can be run off a battery or a power adapter.

“I was in the township one evening and I saw a girl sitting close to a street light and studying under it. That gave me the idea to start Khaya Power. My solution was a 12V rechargeable power pack housed in a 5-litre plastic container, the kind you’d usually see containing fruit juice or cleaning fluid,” says Billy.

“Essentially, it’s a recyclable and portable jug kit with wires, battery, cords, adaptors and a bag to supply energy. The idea grew step by step, turning the technology into a business model, and we subsequently developed more products like the stove,” he adds.

Billy grew up in Grabouw in the Western Cape and holds a National Diploma in Forestry from the University of Stellenbosch. He enjoys creating solutions and says one of the things that motivated him was shack fires in informal settlements.

“Hundreds are injured and made homeless every year in South Africa, in blazes often caused when cooking on a fire left unattended or when a paraffin stove is knocked over. My aim was to come up with a safe and smokeless device that would reduce the number of shack fires annually and that is how the idea of the stove came about,” he says.

The Khaya Tri Cooker has been designed for use in rural/informal settlements and will eventually replace paraffin stoves, charcoal stoves and open wood fires, all of which pose their own dangers.

The company has won support and recognition for this innovation and has received several awards, including finishing as a second place finalist at the Innovation Summit in 2012. It was nominated as one of the 20 businesses that were part of the Nedbank Accelerator Programme via Cape Talk Radio, and won the community awards category at the Eskom Eta-awards in 2012.

Khaya Power also won the 4th prize in the 2013 SAB Foundation Social Innovation Awards, which included a grant of R150 000 for product development and was nominated as an official Cape Town Design Capital project in the sustainability category. It was also nominated as an energy category finalist in the 1776 Global Challenge in Washington DC, USA in 2014.

Khaya Power is also developing a franchise model in Africa to develop Energy Shops that will provide clean technology home power solutions for households who are not connected to basic services, especially electricity.

“We aim to power rural and township homes in Africa, as well as charge low-powered devices like cell phones, with portable solar-powered batteries called Juz Boxes that can be leased from local franchises, thereby creating employment and sustainable income in local communities. I believe that the technologies used in the past to build large power stations and supply power via regional grids will be surpassed and replaced by locally distributed power plants and supply companies,” says Billy.

SAV I N G WATER, SAV I N G THE EARTH Despite the fact that water is the most precious natural resource on earth and essential to all life, millions of litres of water are wasted in South Africa each day. This happens despite widespread educational programmes and commercial and marketing campaigns to encourage consumers to conserve this precious resource.

Water wastage often occurs through irresponsible use, the effects of pollution or improper management. The human species’ water waste problem is not helping a situation made worse by global warming and irregular weather patterns.

When we consume water either at a workplace or at other places where we don’t actually pay for it, we tend not to care about the cost and quantity of our consumption. In total 5% of South Africa’s fresh water supply is used to flush urine away every day.

Established by Flynn Goodwin, the owner of Flynn Goodwin Plumbing (FGP), PlanetSaver is going about trying to meet

this problem – and find a solution.

Flynn, whose company is responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of corporate and commercial buildings, says FGP strives “to provide outstanding, value-added products and services that meet every demand of our customers, whilst simultaneously saving water and being kind to the environment”.

With the experience he gained over the years from having worked closely with various building managers and supervisors, he was able to explore new avenues for cutting costs for companies. In the process, he developed a passion for saving water and energy.

His company developed a product called Lilydome, which is a waterless urinal waste system that is more hygienic and less odorous than conventional systems.

One of the key benefits of Lilydome is that they are very easy to install – the unique Lilydome system can be fitted to nearly all

conventional urinals without the need to replace the bowl.

The conventional urinal trap seal is replaced with a disposable one that contains a specially formulated valve, trapping odours away. Lilydome equipped urinals are plumbed into the waste lines, but do not require a water supply.

PlanetSaver’s Lilydome system uses unique technology which is environmentally friendly and cost effective, doing away with water consumption associated with urinals. Lilydome is also proven to put a stop to urinal flooding and provide better hygiene as well as an odourfree restroom.

It is estimated that a single PlanetSaver Lilydome waterless urinal waste system saves around 130 000 to 200 000 litres of water per year. Indeed, the amount of water saved is equivalent to a water supply for one person of two litres of drinking water each day for 226 years.

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 49

MICROSOFT REWRITES THE CODE

CEO S AT YA N A DEL L A , ONCE CONSIDERED AN U N L I K E LY C H O I C E T O LEAD THE TECH BEHEMOTH, HAS STOPPED INFIGHTING, RESTORED MORALE, AND GENER AT ED MORE T H A N $250 BILLION IN M A RK E T VA LUE IN L ES S THAN FOUR YEARS. ALL IT TOOK WAS A LITTLE THOUGHT ABOUT W H AT M ATT E R S M O S T. B y Ha r r y McCra cke n

Photographs by ioulex

Three years after becoming CEO, Nadella is as focused on Microsoft’s culture as he is its business strategy.

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 51

S AT YA N A D E L L A’ S C O R N E R OFFICE, ON THE FIFTH FLOOR OF BUILDING 34 AT M I C R O S O F T ’ S R E D M O N D , WA S H I N G T O N , H E A D Q U A R T E R S , F E AT U R E S A C A N ’ T- M I S S 8 4 - I N C H TOUCH-SCREEN COMPUTER T H AT D O M I N AT E S O N E WA L L . B U T W H AT DEMANDS EVEN MORE AT T E N T I O N A R E T H E VA S T QUANTITIES OF BOOKS IN THE ROOM. THEY FILL R O W S O F S H E LV E S A N D ARE PILED BY THE DOZEN O N A L O N G TA B L E N E X T T O N A D E L L A’ S D E S K .

52 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

The place looks more like a neighbourhood bookshop than the command centre for the third-most-valuable company on the planet.

“I read a few pages here or a few pages there,” Nadella says, in his typically understated manner. He is sitting in a turquoise armchair, with multicoloured socks showing above his casual brown shoes.

The stacks around him include heady tomes such as Bionomics and How Will Capitalism End?, but his taste is eclectic. At one point during our conversation he references a Virginia Woolf essay about illness; at another, Trinidadian author C.L.R. James’s literary take on cricket. When explaining the impact of Microsoft’s Cortana AI assistant, Nadella eschews market-share data for Shakespeare: “If Othello had Cortana, would he have recognized Iago for who he was?”

One of Nadella’s first acts after becoming CEO, in February 2014, was to ask the company’s top executives to read Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication, a treatise on empathic collaboration. The gesture signaled that Nadella planned to run the company differently from his wellknown predecessors, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, and address Microsoft’s longstanding reputation as a hive of intense corporate infighting. (Cartoonist Manu Cornet crisply summed up the Microsoft culture in a 2011 org chart spoof that depicted the various operating groups pointing handguns at each other.) “It was the first clear indication that Satya was going to focus on transforming not just the business strategy but the culture as well,” says Microsoft president and chief legal officer Brad Smith, a 24-year company veteran. Nadella has been committed to altering how Microsoft works by changing how it thinks.

The Microsoft that Nadella inherited was regarded by both Wall Street and Silicon Valley as fading toward irrelevance.

The tech industry had shifted from desktop computers to smartphones—from Microsoft’s Windows to Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. (Windows’ market share on phones was less than 4%.) Apple and Google had soared to record market valuations; Microsoft’s stock price had stalled, despite the fact that revenue had tripled and profits had doubled during Ballmer’s reign as CEO from 2000 to 2014.

Leading While Learning Nadella makes it his mission to teach, listen, and absorb new ideas.

Workplace warrior Nadella, seen here backstage before his first speech to Microsoft employees as their CEO, on February 4, 2014, believed that prioritising a culture shift would inspire a new approach to the company’s customers and products.

Groomer: Brent Henry (portraits)

Master builder Nadella visits a public school in Hyderabad, India, where he grew up.

He purchased Minecraft for $2.5 billion in 2014 to push Microsoft into education and grow with his next generation of customers.

Global explorer Nadella regularly visits far-flung places, including this solar-powered internet café in Kenya, to understand how his customers use tech so he can better serve them.

Future seer Nadella has embraced the HoloLens research project because he is open to the idea that augmented reality could be the future of computing.

Tech ambassador Nadella has engaged with the Trump administration because he believes he has a role to play in helping government deploy technology.

Charismatic host In a 1993 satellite broadcast to Microsoft developers, a young Nadella proved himself to be a confident presenter, a skill that would continue to serve him well.

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 53

Satya’s Book Club Microsoft’s CEO loves to tell people about the tomes that have inspired him—such as these five on history, economics, technology, and management strategy.

The Great Transformation KARL POLANYI

“My father recommended this book long ago,” says Nadella of the 1944 classic by a Hungarian-American writer who chronicles the development of England’s market economy and argues that society should drive economic change.

Deep Learning IAN GOODFELLOW, YOSHUA BENGIO, AND AARON COURVILLE

Elon Musk and Facebook AI chief Yann LeCun have praised this textbook on one of software’s most promising frontiers. After its publication, Microsoft signed up coauthor Bengio, a pioneer in machine learning, as an adviser.

The Boys in the Boat DANIEL JAMES BROWN

Nadella calls this tale with a local Seattle connection—it involves an underdog University of Washington crew team and the 1936 Berlin Olympics—“a wonderful illustration of the importance of teamwork, which was a core part of my focus out of the gate as CEO.”

The Great Convergence RICHARD BALDWIN

In this look at how telepresence and telerobotics will increasingly let people cross international borders from the comfort of their own homes, Nadella sees analogies to Microsoft’s HoloLens headset, especially as the technology matures and its cost comes down.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth ROBERT J. GORDON

Covering everything from the combustion engine to the flush toilet—and judging recent breakthroughs with a skeptical eye—this work of economic history “concludes that innovation is the ultimate source of dramatic improvements in the human condition,” says Nadella.

54 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

When Ballmer announced his intention to retire, in August 2013, succeeding him wasn’t necessarily seen as a plum assignment. A Bloomberg story about the search for a successor was simply titled “Why You Don’t Want to Be Microsoft’s CEO.” “I was envisioning [someone with] more of a bull-in-a-china-shop mentality,” says Mason Morfit, the president and CIO of ValueAct, an activist hedge fund that had gotten a say in the new CEO hire by investing $2 billion in Microsoft. “I was personally more inclined to lean toward an outsider.” So were most other Microsoft watchers. Nadella, who had joined the company in 1992 at the age of 25, was hardly a favourite, despite the fact that he was already running Microsoft’s cloud business. (“There’s no question that I’m an insider,” Nadella says, with a touch of cheerful defiance. “And I’m proud of it! I’m a product of Microsoft.”) When his name was announced, some critics described the choice as a fallback.

Since then, Nadella has not only restored Microsoft to relevance; he’s generated more than $250 billion in market value in just three and a half years—more value growth over that time than Uber and Airbnb, Netflix and Spotify, Snapchat and WeWork. Indeed, more than all of them combined. Only a handful of CEOs—names like Bezos, Cook, Zuckerberg— can boast similarly impressive results. Microsoft’s shares have not only returned to their dotcom-bubble highs but surpassed them. “[Nadella] has exceeded all my expectations,” says Morfit, now a member of Microsoft’s board. “I wish I could say we saw it all happening.

That wouldn’t be honest.”

How Nadella turned things around comes back to the book he had his top lieutenants read, and the culture that took hold from there. He has inspired the company’s 124,000 employees to embrace what he calls “learn-it-all” curiosity (as opposed to what he describes as Microsoft’s historical know-it-all bent) that in turn has inspired developers and customers—and investors—to engage with the company in new, more modern ways. Nadella is a contemporary CEO able to emphasize the kinds of soft skills that are often derided in the cutthroat world of corporate politics but are, in today’s fast-moving marketplace, increasingly essential to outsize performance.

“There’s a long list of other leaders Microsoft could have hired,” says Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, which made its name as a cheeky startup by putting up billboards bashing Microsoft but now partners with the company on a variety of efforts.

“There aren’t a lot of case studies about cultural shifts of the size and scale that Satya is creating.”

“ YOU H AV E TO BE A BLE T O S A Y, ‘ W H E R E I S THIS PERSON COMING FROM? W H AT M A K E S THEM TICK? WHY ARE THEY EXCITED OR FRUSTR ATED

BY SOME THING TH AT IS HAPPENING?’ ”

It’s 8 o’clock on a Friday morning—which means that the members of Microsoft’s senior leadership team (SLT) are gathering around a horseshoeshaped table in a boardroom down the hall from Nadella’s office. As additional executives stream in, Surface devices in tow, Nadella, dressed in a black Microsoft AI school T-shirt, plops himself in a seat at the middle of the table and picks at a plate of grapes and pineapple chunks.

The meeting begins with a regular segment, instituted by Nadella, called “Researcher of the Amazing,” which showcases something inspiring going on at the company. On this day in late June, engineers at Microsoft Turkey, in Istanbul, are patched in via video

conference to prototype an app they’ve built for the visually impaired that reads books out loud. After an uplifting opening such as that, the weekly meeting can sometimes stretch for as long as seven hours. Initiated by Ballmer late in his tenure as CEO, the SLT session has become a hallmark of Nadella’s team-sport approach to running Microsoft.

He solicits opinions and offers positive feedback throughout, at one point nodding in vigorous agreement with someone’s point while holding a cardboard coffee cup in his clenched teeth, leaving his hands free to gesticulate expansively.

The gathering’s relaxed feel is quite a change from the days when collaboration at Microsoft involved a large dose of showing off how smart you were. In the past, says president Smith, “all of us who grew up here knew that we needed to be well prepared for every meeting. There’s nothing wrong with that, but that meant trying to discern the answers before the meeting began and then being tested on whether your answers were right. Bill [Gates] and Steve [Ballmer] both used that to great effect to tease apart areas where the thinking needed to be developed further.”

When I ask Nadella for his own account of working with his predecessors, he’s blunt.

“Bill’s not the kind of guy who walks into your office and says, ‘Hey, great job,’ ” he tells me. “It’s like, ‘Let me start by telling you the 20 things that are wrong with you today.’ ” Ballmer’s technique, Nadella adds, is similar. He chuckles at the images he’s conjured and emphasizes that he finds such directness “refreshing.” (Upon becoming CEO, Nadella even asked Gates, who remains a technology adviser to the company, to increase the hours he devotes to giving feedback to product teams.)

Nadella’s approach is gentler. He believes human beings are wired to have empathy, and that’s essential not only for creating harmony at work but also for making products that will resonate. “You have to be able to say, ‘Where is this person coming from?’ ” he says. “ ‘What makes them tick? Why are they excited or frustrated by something that is happening, whether it’s about computing or beyond computing?’ ” His philosophy stems from one of the principal events of his personal life. In 1996, his first child, Zain, was born with severe cerebral palsy, permanently altering what had been a pretty carefree lifestyle for him and his wife, Anu. For two or three years, Nadella felt sorry for himself. And then—nudged along by Anu, who had given up her career as an architect to care for Zain—his perspective changed. “If anything,” he remembers thinking, “I should be doing everything to put myself in [Zain’s] shoes, given the privilege I have to be able to help him.” Nadella says that this empathy—though he cautions that the word is sometimes overused—“is a massive part of who I am today. . . . I distinctly remember who I was as a person before and after,” he says. “I won’t say I was narrow or selfish or anything, but there was something that was missing.”

Zain “is just such a joy at this point,” Nadella says of the ongoing inspiration he draws from his son, who turned 21 in August. “Everything else that’s happening in my life is suddenly brought into perspective when I think about how he has endured through all his challenges. The one thing that he can communicate is, when I get close to him, he’ll smile.

And that makes my day, and makes my life.”

Growing up in Hyderabad, India, Nadella liked computers almost as much as he did cricket. When he was 15, Nadella’s middle-class parents bought their only child a computer kit from Bangkok. On his 21st birthday, Nadella arrived in the U.S. to study computer science at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. After graduation, he spent a couple years at Sun Microsystems before being lured to Microsoft. It was Microsoft’s boom years— the 1990s—and Nadella found himself steadily promoted. “Saying, ‘Well, I’m waiting for the next job to do my best work’ is the worst trap,” he contends. “If you say, ‘The current job I have is everything I ever wanted,’ life becomes just so much more straightforward.”

Doug Burgum, who ran Microsoft’s business solutions group and is now governor of North Dakota, became a mentor. “Early on, Jeff Bezos was trying to recruit him [to Amazon],” says Burgum of Nadella. “It was my job to re-recruit him.” Though Amazon had already begun to spread its reach, Burgum successfully argued that the opportunities available at Microsoft beat anything a mere bookseller could offer. “I was wrong about my characterization of Amazon,” Burgum admits, “but I was right about convincing Satya to stay.”

Burgum groomed Nadella to be his successor. In 2007, at Burgum’s last customer conference at Microsoft, he lavished praise on Nadella in front of an audience of thousands and then handed the keynote off to him. But right after the conference, Ballmer stepped in, reshuffling the staff. He decided that Nadella would be more valuable running a different group, the engineering arm of Windows Live Search, later known as Bing.

“Steve was very clear,” recalls Nadella, describing the position, which he felt he couldn’t refuse. “He just said, ‘Look, this is the most important challenge I have. I don’t think this is maybe even a smart decision for you, but I want you to do it. Think wisely, and choose.

And by the way, if you fail, there’s no parachute.

It’s not like I’m going to come and rescue you and put you back into your old job.’ ” In search, Microsoft was an extreme underdog to Google. To compete, it had to operate in a looser way than it did in other domains. “I remember when most of the senior execs at Bing carried around iPads to meetings,” says Mark Johnson, who worked at the company after Microsoft acquired the startup where he worked and who is now CEO of geographic-data provider Descartes Labs. “It was seen as very hip and a symbol of defiance against the Microsoft machine.”

Nadella honed an outsider perspective at Bing, which was enhanced when Netflix CEO and then–Microsoft board member Reed Hastings invited Nadella to shadow him at Netflix meetings. Nadella did so on and off for about a year. “Oh, my God, I learned so much,” remembers Nadella. “One of the things I felt was a big handicap for me was, having grown up at Microsoft, I’d never seen any other company.”

Though Nadella cut his Netflix adventure short when he was given control of Azure, Microsoft’s web-tools division that competes with Amazon Web Services, he leveraged the experience to make a case for his promotion to CEO. “Netflix pivots very quickly based on new data,” ValueAct’s Morfit recalls Nadella telling him. “He thought that was very interesting compared to the bureaucracy Microsoft had built up.”

Nadella made his first public appearance as Microsoft’s CEO at a San Francisco press conference eight weeks after he got the job.

He strode out without any introductory hoopla—dressed in black, enthusiastic but

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 55

calm, a trifle owlish in his chunky blackframe eyeglasses. It made for a sharp contrast with the often bombastic Ballmer, and that was before Nadella began paraphrasing T.S. Eliot to describe Microsoft’s goals: “You should never cease from exploration, and at the end of all exploration, you arrive where you started and know the place for the very first time.”

During the press event, Nadella announced the first version of Office for Apple’s iPad. It was a meaningful way to mark a new era for Microsoft, even though the software had been in the works long before he took the helm. “We’re not going to say, ‘Only use this device,’ ” Nadella tells me, referring to Microsoft’s Surface tablet and other Windows devices. The company had long aimed to control its ecosystem; by putting ambitious versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on Apple’s tablet—before it had comparable touch-screen-friendly versions ready for Windows—Microsoft was forging a new direction.

Nadella “is bringing Microsoft into [today’s] more open and integrated computing environment,” says Scott McNealy, cofounder and former CEO of Sun Microsystems, one of Microsoft’s principal rivals in the 1990s and Nadella’s first employer. “He’s brought a level of diplomacy to it.”

When Nadella hired Peggy Johnson from Qualcomm in 2014, it reinforced this message. Her job, as executive VP of business development, would be to strengthen Microsoft’s ties with Silicon Valley and pursue deals with companies it once solely considered rivals, such as Box and Dropbox.

“Satya was already on a regular cadence of visiting the Valley, which was new for the CEO of Microsoft,” Johnson says. “And he said to me, ‘I want you to be outside of Redmond as much as you are inside of Redmond.’ ” Today, some of the startups that once would have defaulted to Amazon Web Services are choosing Azure, which—though still playing catch-up—posted 93% revenue growth in the most recent quarter.

Nadella also updated Microsoft’s mission statement—once, in Bill Gates’s words, “A PC on every desk and in every home”—with a more modern mantra: “To empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.” Then he began refining the company’s efforts to reflect it, leaning into

56 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

areas with ambitious strategic promise (Surface, HoloLens) and pruning smaller-impact initiatives like the Fitbit-esque Microsoft Band (which he had proudly sported the first time I met him, during a press dinner at a Tuscan restaurant near Microsoft headquarters in November 2014). He wrote off Ballmer’s $7 billion acquisition of Nokia’s mobile phone business as a loss, eliminating more than 20,000 jobs in a tacit acknowledgment that Windows was not going to catch the iPhone and Android on mobile any time soon. The company has released more than 100 iOS apps and even embraced Linux, the opensource Windows rival. Microsoft joining the Linux Foundation was a hell-has-frozen-over moment, given that Ballmer famously called Linux “a cancer.”

And then there’s Nadella’s $26 billion deal for LinkedIn. Investors have largely applauded the move. Combining Linked­In’s 500 million professional users with the 85 million people who use Office 365 gives Microsoft a formidable data hoard from which it can glean insights—arguably as valuable and impossible to clone as Facebook’s social network or Google’s search engine. (This past January, Microsoft acquired a hotshot startup in Montreal called Maluuba with technology geared to parse such data.) “We get very excited about this unique Microsoft AI,” says Harry Shum, executive VP of AI and research at Microsoft.

Nadella isn’t letting all this activity and achievement swell his ego. As he told me at one point, describing the benefits of the dark-horse perspective he developed during his ascent at Microsoft, “When everybody’s celebrating you is when you should be most scared.”

Nadella’s management worldview is deeply influenced by Stanford professor Carol Dweck’s book Mindset, which outlines two types of thinking. Those who operate with a fixed mind-set are more likely to stick to activities that utilise skills they’ve already mastered, rather than risk embarrassment by failing at something new. Those focused on growth make it their mission to learn new things, understanding that they won’t succeed at all of them.

Nadella’s wife, Anu (whom he asserts is the real reader in the family), turned him onto the book a few years before he became Microsoft’s CEO. They found its guidance useful as parents. But it’s easy to see why Nadella would apply its concepts to Microsoft, a company whose philosophy was once so fixed that it could be summed up as “everything has to be on Windows and God forbid we do something that works well on another platform,” as Creative Strategies analyst Carolina Milanesi puts it.

After Nadella’s promotion to CEO, as he was crafting a new manifesto for Microsoft employees, he consulted with Dweck and incorporated themes from her work. “We needed a culture that allowed us to constantly refresh and renew,” he explains. For her part, Dweck pronounces Microsoft a “spectacular” example of a large organization with a hunger for new knowledge, and praises Nadella for leading by example. “We’ve seen a lot of places where leaders preach growth mind-set but don’t practice it,” she says. “It’s not easy to grasp it and implement it, especially in a culture of scientists, who tend to worship natural ability.”

Nadella admits that some Microsoft managers have misunderstood the concept of fixed and growth mind-sets, seeing them as unalterable personality traits rather than behaviors.

He says that some of his colleagues have even attempted to sort members of their team into these two buckets. Mostly, though, he believes that people get it. “No one at Microsoft is inspired by growth mind-set because of Satya Nadella, the CEO,” he says. “It’s because of what it means to them as a better parent, a better partner, a better colleague.”

Encouraging a growth mind-set among all employees, Nadella adds, carries some responsibilities, including “flying air cover for someone at some point when they’ve gotten something wrong.” So it was in March 2016, when the researchers at Microsoft’s Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs unveiled Tay, an AI-based chatbot trained to converse in the slangy patois of an 18- to 24-year-old American woman (“omg totes exhausted”).

Twitter trolls discovered that if they pummeled Tay’s account with racism, sexism, and other hateful rhetoric—a scenario Microsoft had not accounted for—she would spew some of it back. Over the course of one day, trolls brainwashed the bot, who tweeted 96,000 times in increasingly vile fashion, turning Microsoft’s public experiment in AI into a humiliation.

“In the morning it was great, and by the evening it wasn’t so great,” says Lili Cheng, FUSE

Lili Cheng, general manager of Microsoft’s experimental FUSE Labs, has been empowered under Nadella to take risks— and recover from any missteps.

Art credit teekay

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 57

Labs’ general manager.

Nadella’s response: to offer encouragement to Tay’s creators, writing in an email, “Keep pushing, and know that I am with you.” Cheng and her colleagues were moved by the gesture. And push they did: That December, Microsoft launched Zo, another bot similar to Tay, but designed to be more troll-resistant. (She’s available on Facebook Messenger and Kik, but so far not Twitter.)

The CEO experienced his own difficult lesson in growth just eight months into his tenure. Invited to participate in a Q&A at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, a major annual event, he told the largely female audience that women in the tech industry should forgo asking for raises and instead trust that the system would reward them appropriately. The negative reaction was swift, with attendees quickly tweeting out their pushback.

Nadella realized his mistake, and the next day issued an apology. “I answered that question completely wrong,” he wrote in an email to Microsoft employees. Today, he describes his onstage comments as “a nonsense answer from this privileged guy.”

But Nadella did more than deliver a mea culpa; he explored his own biases—and pushed his executive team to follow suit. “I became more committed to Satya, not less,” says Microsoft chief people officer Kathleen Hogan, the former COO of worldwide sales, whom Nadella promoted into her current role soon after the kerfuffle. “He didn’t blame anybody. He owned it. He came out to the entire company, and he said, ‘We’re going to learn, and we’re going to get a lot smarter.’ ” It was a rare public falter for Nadella, but Microsoft got stronger. In the aftermath, one longtime rank-and-file Microsoftie told me, the company stepped up internal messaging that encouraged employees to respect diversity and combat their unwitting biases. Nadella set an example for the rest of the company: We make mistakes, but we can learn to do better.

If you rummage around on YouTube, you can unearth an entertainingly archaic 1993 Microsoft “DevCast” video, produced in the pre-broadband days for distribution to developers via satellite uplink. Nadella, then a youthful technical marketing manager a little

58 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

over a year into his time at the company, appears an hour and 45 minutes into the clip. He sports bushy black hair, and his accent is pronounced. Watching the confident but raw effort today, it’s clear just how far he’s come.

At Microsoft’s Build developer conference this past May, Nadella publicly wrestled with the implications of artificial intelligence. Within the first few minutes of his keynote address, he’d flashed on a screen the covers of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World as he warned of technology’s dark possibilities. It’s hard to envision Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or Google’s Sundar Pichai indulging in anything so foreboding as part of a public address.

Backstage after his keynote, in the bowels of Seattle’s Washington State Convention Centre, I asked Nadella why he chose to bring up his AI fears. “Everyone in our industry should be able to acknowledge that there are unintended consequences of technology,” he says, leaning forward and laughing dryly. “Our company’s identity is fundamentally about creating technology so that others can create more technology. And it’s essential that it is being used for empowering more people.”

Nadella’s sense of responsibility, for Microsoft and global society, has been on display in the political realm this year as well. When President Donald Trump signed his initial immigration order in January, Microsoft called it “misguided and a fundamental step backward,” and Nadella personally critiqued it citing his own experience as an immigrant: “[There’s] no place for bias or bigotry in any society.”

Nevertheless, Nadella traveled to Washington, D.C., in June to participate in the first meeting of the American Technology Council—a group run by Microsoft’s ex-CFO and charged with exploring ways to modernise government services. Along with Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, and others, Nadella met with Trump in the White House’s State Dining Room and participated in breakout sessions. “There cannot be a more important conversation for us to be having with the government, and I’m sort of thrilled to engage in it,” he told me four days later. “Quite frankly, this is not about one administration versus the other. It’s not about one party versus the other. It’s about American competitiveness, and I’m glad to see this administration take that on.”

Most major tech CEOs have been loath to poke at the administration, though some in the industry assert that prominent immigrants such as Nadella have a particular duty to speak out, especially in light of comments former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon made in 2015 expressing concern about the number of South Asian and Asian executives in Silicon Valley. In Hit Refresh, Nadella’s new book melding personal memoir and technological futurism (see excerpt, page 56), the CEO seemingly alludes to Bannon’s remark without mentioning him by name, writing, “Even when some people in positions of power have remarked that there were too many Asian CEOs in technology, I’ve ignored their ignorance.” He adds that it “infuriates” him to think of his kids and their friends having to grapple with racial slurs. Yet that’s as far as he goes. “I was not elected by anybody,” he tells me. “And so I want to make sure that we don’t act like we have a mandate.”

At Microsoft, however, Nadella has certainly earned a mandate, and in the wake of the white supremacist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, in mid-August, he expressed his vision for leadership in the context of the national conversation, showing just how powerful Nadella’s approach can be. In an email to his senior staff and direct reports on the Monday after the weekend’s violence and racial animus, he shared the “profound impact” the “horrific” event had on him. “In these times,” he wrote, “to me only two things really matter as a leader. The first is that we stand for our timeless values, which include diversity and inclusion. . . . The second is that we empathise with the hurt happening around us. At Microsoft, we strive to seek out differences, celebrate them and invite them in. . . .

Our growth mindset culture requires us to truly understand and share the feelings of another person. . . . Together, we must embrace our shared humanity, and aspire to create a society that is filled with respect, empathy and opportunity for all.” hmccracken@fastcompany.com

SUBSCRIBE TO THE AFRICAN NEWS AGENCY FOR EXTENSIVE NEWS FROM SUBSCRIBE TO THE AFRICAN NEWS AGENCY THE AFRICAN FOR EXTENSIVE NEWS FROMCONTINENT THE AFRICAN CONTINENT African News Agency(ANA) is Africa’s first multimedia News-Wire syndication and PR Wire service.

ANA is a commercialised, digital content generation and syndication service providing the very latest Africa’s first multimedia news syndication wire service, the African News Agency (ANA), and breaking news information and developments across all spheres of politics, business, current is now up and running. affairs, lifestyle and sport coverage from the African continent and globally.

Catering for government departments, organisations , businesses, digital and and traditional publishers, Launched on 1 March 2015, ANA is a digital content-generation syndication service television and radio broadcasters as well as content providers and media outlets on the providing solid political, business, current affairs, lifestyle and sport coverageAfrican from the continent and worldwide. ANA has not only filled the gap left by the closure of the South African African continent.

Press Association (SAPA), but we have also greatly improved the service offering at a greatly reduced price.

Catering for government departments, organisations, businesses, digital and traditional

ANA is staffed publishers, by a senior team journalists Southoutlets Africaon with networkcontinent of stringers as wellofasexperienced content providers andinmedia thea African and on the rest of the African continent, supplemented ourPress syndicated worldwide, ANA has filled the gap leftbybyinternational the closure ofnews the feeds South from African partners including but not limited to News Agency of Namibia(NAMPA), News Agency of Association (SAPA).

Nigeria(NAN), The Washington Post, The Associated Press(AP), Germany’s DPA, China’s Xinhua and many others.

ANA is staffed by a senior team of experienced journalists in South Africa with a network

Insert the following URL http://pr.africannewsagency.com/ intosupplemented your browserbytointernational view our Free-toof stringers on the rest of the African continent, news View-Public-Facing-Press Release Wire for the latest Press Releases. feeds from the Associated Press, Germany’s DPA and China’s vast Xinhua news wire

service.

Subscribe to ANA now for access to the latest news from the African continent and globally to reach audiences in sub-Saharan and Francophone Africa.

Subscribe ANA now for option access please to the latest news For more information andtoa tailor-made contact : from the African continent and the globe, and to reach audiences in sub-Saharan and Francophone Africa. For more

Lindiz van Zilla Shaun Kemp information go to www.africannewsagency.com.

Editor-in-Chief Head of Sales and Marketing +27214884411 Office: +27 214884415 For inquiries and to subscribe to ANA,Tel: email editor@africannewsagency.com Cell: +27 845572350 Cell: +27 82 4555 800 or call +27 21 423 3519. Website: www.africannewsagency.com Email: lindiz.vanzilla@africannewsagency.com Email: shaun.kemp@africannewsagency.com

GETTING REAL ABOUT THE DIGITAL WORLD

60 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

Traditional business in today’s digital world is just not good enough anymore. Business problems are also becoming increasingly complex to solve and the pace of change and digital advancement are outstripping the ability of enterpriseto keep up. The market is gearing up for an exponential growth of enterprise disruption. It’s time for a strategic digital intervention, writes Michael O’Carroll, Associate Director - PWC South Africa

To compete in the digital world, large organisations need to review their digital transformation commitment, become more agile and get change ready. Agility and acceptance of perpetual change are the key to unlocking the next wave of opportunity.

One can’t significantly alter what an organisation does, without becoming more nimble and exploring new roads. For enterprise, this means starting with a baseline end-to-end cloud transformation programme for all core business systems (ERP, CRM, productivity or Human Capital Management). Cloud of everything, brings mobility and enables the start of a data-led organisation. Even though it’s a mammoth undertaking for enterprise, cloud transformation is only a license to operate in a digital world, but it’s a good start.

Enterprise executives then need to take a digital reality check, on their ability to truly understand, accept and compete in a digital world. Honest enterprise digital self awareness will highlight shortcomings for future growth and will warrant support for a more radical interventions strategy – a strategy that extends well beyond the traditional business model and even challenges the overarching business purpose set by the current leadership.

In other words, we are talking about a kickstarter intervention programme to accelerate and explore new avenues of growth and business strategy, way beyond the current model. This is no small feat but, required to truly step forward and lead in a digital world. Such a strategy has little value without execution and won’t move forward unless it is backed by the right team, which excludes the current champions of the old business model. The team with the right combination of ideas and skills (digital, creative, strategy, change-ready, and experimental) will carry this unique strategy all the way through the current board and onto execution.

At the centre of any strategy is the organisation’s vision, which traditionally aims for new growth and increased customer value. Although correct, this approach is fundamentally not good enough anymore. A digital world is led by data and algorithms and this should be an enabler to growing new margins and improving customer experience. A retailer, for example, may shift from becoming the biggest retailer to rather a leading data-led distribution organisation, which in turn will lead to increased growth and finding new value for customers. This would shift the dial to a new way of selling products on shelves and would demand the best enterprise cloud data storage, analysis and machine learning APIs, for example Google Cloud Platform.

For traditional enterprise, strategic change of this magnitude doesn’t happen easily and won’t move forward if the team and strategy are hamstrung in mainstream business. They need to be protected, well-funded and be led by a full time executive sponsor that’s deeply involved in the exploration of the new strategy and core projects.

The only way to achieve this is by having direct access and full support from the CEO and COO - empowering and approving the strategic exploration beyond business as usual. Prioritised interventions programmes also can’t only focus on new technology, but need to explore new operating models, alliances, talent practices, training programmes, external marketing, new products/services, and alternative customer experience initiatives.

Data capture, storage and analysis on Cloud also needs to become a core competency for staff - a core skill required for employment. This extends well beyond basic pivot tables and now includes more advanced prediction and machine learning skills.

A new type of culture and leadership will help realise a vision of becoming the leading data business – leaders that are digital savvy who embrace Cloud in everything they do. Mobilising such a force of future digital leaders requires

ongoing training – a digital masterclass, together with agile project management. Put differently, we need talent programmes pushing future leaders to research and exploring the possible enterprise opportunities with new tech and emerging startups.

The business value of artificial intelligence or IoT, for example, may not seem that obvious at first, but digital leaders still need to spend time exploring possible applications. Once key change leaders are identified, hang onto them and retain them at all costs. If they are any good, then they probably don’t fit into the current business model and tend to challenge the status quo.

Enterprise needs these people to help build a culture of staff asking, “what if we did something completely new? What if a telecommunications organisation became a retail bank?

Why not?” It is possible, seeing that we already use their data for mobile banking applications. We need teams that allow themselves to explore what is possible, looking beyond the probability of failure. Believing it’s possible, is the first step to changing direction.

Telling the story and showing the market is critical to transitioning the internal and external perception of the brand. Enterprise can’t rely on internal marketing and communications teams to significantly shift the dial around a strategic interventions programme. A tier one creative marketing agency needs to be engaged. People, staff and customers will see and feel the change and expect new value and transformation to follow.

Enterprises cannot be mislead into believing that they are doing enough in a digital world. Launching an enterprise app is merely window dressing. Enterprises need to get real about how digital transformation and data will lead their future business model. The first step is having enterprise digital self-awareness and acceptance. The future of business will be controlled by those that understand how to store, manipulate and derive new intelligence from structured and unstructured data - the growing power of the algorithm.

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 61

Fast Company Promotion

Taming chaos – the job of an entrepreneur Chaos can be chaotic (pun intended) but it is an integral part of the entrepreneur’s eventful journey.

The good news is, though, that it can be tamed

For the last five years, I have been a full-time entrepreneur, building a company which today, has over 400 people on the payroll. Prior to that, I had been an academic for 10 years, and prior to that, an engineer for 5 years. Other than getting on with ageing over this period, I have found that at some point, without warning, things have moved from being somewhat overwhelming to becoming somewhat easier. I would like to say easy, but that would just be looking for trouble and I frankly don’t need more of that now.

MASTERY Malcolm Gladwell popularised the concept that “mastery” of any field requires 10,000 hours of practice. That is quite a number of hours, and usually equates to about 10 years if you dedicate a few hours a day of practice. Doing the same thing for 10,000 hours can be both boring and fruitless.

You can dedicate more hours to shorten the time to mastery, but it may affect your ability to earn a living and get a date on any given night. So obviously, just repeating the same thing, like a mouse on a spinning wheel, is not enough. Enters the concept of Directed Practice.

DIRECTED PRACTICE Directed practice implies that practice is not just the mindless, repetitive doing of something while your mind wanders to better pastures, which is more or less what I did practicing the piano, and subsequently didn’t have much to show for it.

Directed practice is actively engaging in whatever it is you are trying to master, identifying the bits you’re not good at, finding ways to get better at those bits, and practicing those bits until you’re good at it. It is also constantly engaging with what you are unfamiliar with and getting used to dealing with it, then put it all together as one masterful whole.

And then repeat, until you’ve filled your share of 10,000 hours. And almost in the blink of 10,000 you have mastery.

Entrepreneurship But what does this have to do with my life as

62 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

“ As in the story of Hansel and Gretchel, when you find the first reliable path through a forest of chaos, it reduces uncertainty.”

entrepreneur becoming less difficult? A lot, actually.

I did the calculations and found the following: During my five years as an entrepreneur, I worked at least 8 hours per day (mostly more, but let us just take out lunch and driving). Over a 5-year period, this equates to 10 000 hours.

But that was not all. As entrepreneur and CEO, I was confronted by so many new situations and fields related to the business (such as Legal issues, HR, finance, politics, engineering, mentoring, leadership, sales). Each time I had to figure out what it was, how it works, and practice it by reading books,

talking to experts, experimenting, failing, falling and standing up.

This was very difficult, very time-consuming and mostly painful.

But then at some point, things started to fall in place. I had achieved some form of mastery.

Many day-to-day business issues and problems still lingered, but I had learned how to handle them better and how to tackle the unknowns with a lot more confidence and grace than in the past.

PLAYING OUT IN REAL LIFE Although I developed more expertise about our specific business, the market we play in, how the model fits together, the intricacies of how to sell and how actions link to profitability, it is also true that the market started to notice the business over a period of time. I think the market just started to get used to us being there, and started believing in our staying power, our longevity as a business. I’d like to believe we had built trust with our clients, enough for them to understand how and where to engage with us, and what to expect of us.

WE HAD STARTED TO BUILD A TRACK RECORD, ESTABLISH A REPUTATION. As a business, return customers, account growth, and pipeline management became the norm. We created names for our systems and processes, developed and tested these a bit more. We started to look past cash flow to break-even and profitability. Some of our employees actually received five-year long-term employment certificates! We defined our market into smaller niches which means we no longer shuffle everything around. Our board meetings would make Prof Mervyn King proud.

A MOST VALUABLE RESOURCE All of this made me realise why experienced (or Master) entrepreneurs are so valuable in our country. They are literally worth more than gold and oil. It takes time and a special breed of people to go through the difficult process of mastering such a wide and encompassing field such as entrepreneurship.

It is so much easier and stable to do a specialised job well, get promotion and receive bonuses as part of employment. You can study for it, gain invaluable experience through work and focus on one aspect of business (such as sales or finance).

ENTREPRENEURSHIP MASTERY Entrepreneurship mastery is not achieved by attending a “master class”, doing a degree or reading books. It is also not achieved by doing the same kind of job repeatedly.

These are but a few small components which undoubtedly help. But we have evaluated so many incubation programmes that just provide space, and/or short theorybased courses, and we have found that few good entrepreneurs exit.

Entrepreneurship is a profession, a lot of hard-earned know-how coupled with experience on all aspects of running a business.

Master entrepreneurship requires entrepreneurs who have gone through the whole process of starting a business and growing it to scale. This often requires establishing more than one business to achieve full process mastery.

And this takes time, special people, special circumstances and often includes some financial losses. Master entrepreneurs have played all the levels of the game.

MAKING MAGIC At Resolution Circle, we have seen this over and over again. As our own business matures, we have recognised similar issues in other businesses. We see many innovative ideas and great inventors. As a technology commercialisation company, we also see the severe lack of experienced entrepreneurs driving businesses.

But every so often, we see a magician walking in, and almost instinctively, we just know that magic will be created. And that is our big reward, to help create the magic. And in the process, to see yet another Master Entrepreneur being birthed. Products come and go, businesses will be formed and they will die. But Master Entrepreneurs are valuable.

And that, I believe, is our most important contribution.

CEO and founder of Resolution Circle Professor Willem Clarke possesses a Doctor of Engineering qualification in electrical and electronics from the University of Johannesburg. He has an extensive background in lecturing and working with engineering students. His interest in tech entrepreneurship and grassroots innovation led him to establish Resolution Circle: a University of Johannesburg initiative that offers a range of Ideato-BarcodeTM technology commercialisation services, work integrated learning programmes for engineering students, professional training and business incubation. Clarke can be described as an entrepreneur, innovator, engineer and mentor. He believes in adding value, being innovative, professional, extraordinary and responsible in all his dealings.

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 63

Next

BEYOND CROWDFUNDING Patreon is changing how creative types make a living. Now it wants to help them build media empires.

By Harry McCracken

Photograph by Nicholas Albrecht

In the spring of 2013, musician Jack Conte was frustrated with the challenge of supporting himself as a creative person in the internet age.

Conte, who performs both solo and—with his wife, Nataly Dawn—as part of an indie-rock duo called Pomplamoose, had sunk $10,000 of his own money into a wildly inventive sci-fi–themed music video, complete with a singing robotic head. It soon racked up a million YouTube views. But Conte’s share of revenue from the ads the site stuck on his work amounted to a pittance: about $150.

“It was so weird to see such a discrepancy between the value that I feel like I’m giving to the world and the value that the world returns to me in dollars,” he says. The predicament was hardly Conte’s alone. Thanks to YouTube, Instagram, SoundCloud, and other internet-based platforms, it’s never been easier for content creators to distribute their work.

Fan favorite Musician and Patreon co-founder Conte is helping artists find ongoing support for their work.

64 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

Tech Forward

But even those with large and loyal audiences often struggle to monetize their popularity—or even understand who’s paying attention, and why.

Conte, however, had already come up with a solution: “What if I just ask my fans for a buck a month, five bucks a month,” he thought, “so that I [can] keep being an artist and doing what I’m doing?” That proposition turned into Patreon, the San Francisco startup he founded with Sam Yam, his college roommate, and that he now leads as CEO. (Yam is CTO.) Like other crowdfunding platforms, it allows creators to solicit money from their audiences and share updates about their work. But while Kickstarter and Indie­gogo focus on specific projects—a CD, a book, a card game—Patreon asks fans to give on a subscription basis. That allows everyone from cartoonists to podcasters to turn individual pledges into meaningful, ongoing income.

Launched in May 2013, Patreon quickly found success and is still growing rapidly. It now enables more than 50,000 creators to receive payments from a million-plus

active patrons, double its 2016 base. It’s on track to pay out $150 million this year, 50% more than the total for its first three and a half years combined. Creators receive upwards of 90% of pledges (Patreon keeps 5%; the rest goes to paymentprocessing fees) and net anywhere from a couple hundred dollars to tens of thousands each month (see “Producers Circle,” below).

The bonds the company creates between artists and admirers go beyond financial transactions.

Many creators have used it to reward their patrons with early access to their work: Bay Area technologist Justin de Vesine says that part of his incentive for backing the alt-rock icon Amanda Palmer—who set a Kickstarter record for music projects in 2012 by raising $1.2 million and is now one of Patreon’s top fundraisers—is getting exclusive access to webcasts in which Palmer plays works in progress and solicits feedback. “I get to be more involved with not just the finished product but the creation of things,” he says.

Increasingly, Patreon creators are using funds to pay for employees, equipment, and

“Whether you have a barber shop or you’re a local restaurant owner, there’s lots of tech for you to understand your business.”

facilities. Kinda Funny, a gaming and pop-culture show, available on YouTube and elsewhere, began with a couple of guys broadcasting from a kitchen table. Today, the set features “a glass desk and this huge screen behind them and these giant cameras that swoop in,” marvels Conte. “They would not have been able to build this without the $50,000 a month they’re generating from Patreon.”

This ambition led Conte to conclude that it was time for Patreon to do more for the burgeoning media businesses it helped create. In June, it began rolling out a portfolio of new offerings, including a smartphone app called Patreon Lens that lets creators share video clips and

photos in a way that’s akin to the “stories” on Snapchat and Instagram, but with the ability to restrict viewership to a paying audience. There are also tools for automating the process of giving patrons the first look at fresh content and streaming live video to them.

Perhaps most significant, Patreon’s dashboard provides creators with insights, such as which posts are most popular with the highest-paying patrons.

With these stats, artists can shape future work to appeal to backers, a necessity for the Patreon model to be viable—and something that would be tough to do based on existing resources such as YouTube’s built-in analytics.

“Whether you have a barber shop or you’re a local restaurant owner, there’s lots of tech for you to understand your business,” Conte says. If Patreon can give artists and homegrown media enterprises that same level of insight, it could have as much disruptive potential as the company’s subscription-based crowdfunding—an idea that has already turned so many passions into sustainable livelihoods.

P R ODUCE R S CIR CL E How five creators use Patreon to finance their art

The Singer

The Podcasters

The Animators

The Filmmaker

A M A N DA PA L M E R

CHAPO TRAP HOUSE

K U R ZG E S AG T

D R E W S C A N LO N

S I M O N E G I E RTZ

11,463 patrons* $40,715 per project

15,978 patrons $71,154 per month

8,388 patrons $30,368 per month

3,099 patrons $20,061 per month

1,761 patrons $7,040 per month

Palmer uses Patreon funds for new albums, webcasts, performance art, and documentaries. Fans get exclusive content and a peek into her creation process.

The founders of this leftist podcast raised enough money to bring in additional cohosts by sharing every other episode exclusively with Patreon supporters.

Munich-based design studio Kurzgesagt creates quirky cartoons that explain thorny topics. With Patreon, Kurzgesagt has grown from a oneman show to a team of 11.

Scanlon, a former videogame journalist, creates documentaries about gaming culture as he travels to far-flung locations. Patrons get Q&As and bonus footage.

Fans of the Swedish inventor and YouTuber enjoy access to her videos, which revolve around ill-fated robot builds and deadpan humor, plus raffles and live streams.

Illustrations by Raymond Biesinger

The Builder

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 65

Next

Future Now

POSTING FATIGUE With the information overload of the World Wide Web it’s become impossible to consume all the media we’re exposed to on a daily basis, and then we still have to find time to post about our own lives.

With limited time we’re sometimes faced with a choice – post or chat, and it’s always chatting. In a nutshell, we’re spending more time chatting than posting and brands want a piece of this pie – and they’ll get their fix soon enough.

DARK SOCIAL We’ve been left in the dark by the Dark Social phenomenon for years – how do we know if consumers share our brand stories off social platforms through messages i.e. iMessage from Dan: “Dude did you see those new Nike sneakers on Facebook – just bought a pair in store.”

Eek! This gives marketers the chills when thinking of a dismal click-through rate on a social media campaign that has actually been performing well on a messaging platform.

HIT OR MISS

THE NEXT WAVE – MESSENGER MARKETING You’re about to get swept away - Chatbots, AI, WhatsApp for business and way more messaging mayhem

by Tacita McEvoy “Messaging is one of the few things that people do more than social networking” – Mark Zuckerburg, 2014.

Zucks’ famous quote explains the $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp and the standalone Facebook Messenger app which we’ve been forced to use – why have a stand-alone messenger platform on mobile and not desktop? Well, it’s because they’re gearing for the next wave of Messaging.

66 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

BACK TO BASICS Before we were broadcasting our lives one-way we were engaging in chat rooms and sending emoticons and nudges on MSN Messenger. MSN users were shifted to Skype in 2013, where they stayed away from any social media functionality.

So as our social feeds get more and more overcrowded by sponsored messaging and Game of Thrones memes we’re looking to get back to basics. Not sure if this means the revival of the chat room, but wouldn’t it be nice if we could connect with new people without the fear of being ‘catfished’. One saving grace is that people are starting to use LinkedIn as a means to connect with new people in a professional capacity, as we’re able to view employment references and work experience before replying to an unsolicited message.

So what does the face of messaging disruption look like? We can gain some insight into the future by looking into the past at what didn’t work. Unfortunately, the Mxit craze of most SA millennials’ youth never survived, but why did this golden child of messaging die a quick painful death? Rapid innovation was not possible - Mxit rose during the Nokia era where enabling your WAP settings opened up hours of chat at almost no cost. But with the launch of the smartphone Mxit failed to serve a premium app offering and its loyal users soon migrated to WhatsApp without worrying about their lost moola. Innovating quickly is key, but as former FNB CEO and Mxit chairman Michael Jordaan commented to Fin24: “Mxit could have been WhatsApp if it had acted two years faster”. It had the perfect chat hybrid: one-on-one private messaging and group chats, chat rooms where you could meet new people and a business offering where brands could interact with fans in real-time. The next chat platform that is able to integrate

brand communication seamlessly, without too many bells and whistles, will rule the roost. It’s possibly why WeChat’s all-in-one offering has not monopolised outside of Asia, where the government and corporate sponsorships also play a big part in standardising one platform for all.

WE’RE WAITING WHATSAPP With no sponsored content, no media space, and no place for spammy direct messages from unknown numbers, WhatsApp has kept their offering a true messaging platform.

But there is a business solution in the air and WhatsApp can’t help but tease us in their T’s & C’s: From Whatsapp.com/legal -We will explore ways for you and businesses to communicate with each other using WhatsApp, such as through order, transaction, and appointment information, delivery and shipping notifications, product and service updates, and marketing. Marketing Managers make sure to set some budget aside in 2018 for messenger marketing.

But being an early adopter is key and some brands are already using the basic WhatsApp features to their advantage. Here are some tips to get started.

1. Create and display your WhatsApp number Your WhatsApp number should be included next to your social icons on any communication. You can add the ‘Click to Chat’ link provided by WhatsApp, which opens a chat on mobile or desktop. All you need to do is add your international number (+27) at the end of this link https://api. whatsapp.com/send?phone= 2. Create an engaging persona We gravitate towards messaging for the personal connection, so brands need to do just that – create a personal experience for the user. This can be done by creating a fictional character that represents the personality of the brand. A great example of this is when Absolut Vodka created the fictional Doorman ‘Sven’.

The public had to message Sven on WhatsApp and persuade him that they should be invited to their launch party, and yes, he did receive videos, voice notes and a few indecent proposals as means of persuasion – but he stuck to his persona and nothing really rattled him.

3. Start building an authentic database The Absolut example is great because users went to the brand instead of the other way around. In one go the brand had a cell phone number for their database and the user had the brand’s details saved on their phone without any hard-sell or spam. An authentic database is key to converting users to fans. Be careful around sending unsolicited WhatsApp messages even to an opt-in database; make them come to you.

4. Make use of the ideal customer service tool Within the multitude of app notifications and inbox messages what you check first are your WhatsApps. Customers being able to message a brand and get instant responses is first prize, so when creating a customer service chat number ensure you are adequately staffed as unread/ unresponded blue ticks can put a negative sentiment on your brand and create more frustration.

5. Be careful with groups Many SMEs communicate promotions with fans through WhatsApp groups, but these groups are limited to 256 users – which seems like a little but remember how annoyed you get when you look at your phone after a

2hr meeting and there are 50 messages on Lisa’s bachelorette group.

Creating small groups for departmental communication or your running group can work but when sending promotional material on WhatsApp it’s better to send directly to individuals so that you get oneon-one responses without spamming a group.

MONETISATION The big question on our minds is will the business offering be monetized or will we need to pay to advertise? Or an even bigger question - will users need to pay for WhatsApp – 1 Billion users each paying $5 a year adds up and has surely crossed their minds. With our Facebook feed being a circus at the moment there have been talks of a paid ad-free account. Would you subscribe?

WHATSAPP’S BIG BROTHER - FACEBOOK MESSENGER While WhatsApp seems to be the mobile messaging king with 1 billion users, Facebook forcing us to use their messenger app has put them in the lead with 1.2 billion. Having a stand-alone app enables Facebook to add more features tailored towards messaging only.

Some awesome Messenger innovations include ‘M’ - your virtual assistant on messenger (Coming soon to SA). M recognises what you and your friends are talking about and gives you suggestions to make your life easier. Saying thank you? – M provides some cool thank you emojis. Paying a friend back? – M provides a handy peerto-peer payment button. Chatting about what to have for dinner? – M suggests some local restaurants you might like. Thanks, M!

TO BOT OR NOT TO BOT – THERE IS NO QUESTION What we love most about the FB Messenger innovations are the chatbots. If you haven’t started experimenting with chatbots you’re going to be left behind, but if you’re already in the dark, a chatbot is an automated response on Facebook Messenger. It uses AI to identify a customer’s query and provides an automated response. It can be as broad as sending a standard promotional message to everyone who comments on your page to providing answers to specific FAQs. In the US, chat and e-commerce are already merging with bots.

Through machine learning bots are able to identify what e-commerce items you might like and send you ideas through Messenger – and guess what, you can even check out and pay within a message – wonder what the auto-response would be to ‘Can I really afford these shoes?’

We all know that open honest communication is key to any relationship – and that’s exactly how brands are going to retain customer loyalty. If you’re going to invest in messenger marketing make sure to spend time on the copy, and remember that tone of voice and personality are your new UX and design.

Tacita McEvoy is the founder of the Cape Town–based digital marketing agency Social Media Now, and a partner in the accelerator/incubator Idea Camp.

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 67

Learning to un - e r n l a

68 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

IF YOU WANT TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN BUSINESS IN THE EVER-CHANGING WORLD WE LIVE IN, YOU WILL HAVE TO UN-LEARN THE OUTDATED INFORMATION YOU HAVE ACQUIRED, THEN RE-LEARN NEW SYSTEMS AND PROCESSES AS THEY KEEP EVOLVING.

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 69

“H

AVE YOU JUST WASTED THE LAST 12 YEARS OF YOUR LIFE AT SCHOOL?”

THIS WAS THE QUESTION I ASKED OVER 2 000 OF SOUTH AFRICA’S TOP SCHOOL GRADUATES, AS THEIR KEYNOTE SPEAKER AT THE GIBS BUSINESS SCHOOL’S ANNUAL CAREER EXPO 2017.

70 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

They quickly quietened down when I shared their future reality: • If you think you can choose a career, the trouble is that the top jobs in demand today were not even in existence 5 years ago.

• If you study a technical degree today, and at the rate technology is evolving, the information you learn today will already be outdated in 3 years’ time, leaving you with useless information.

• By the age of 34, you will have had more than 15 different jobs.

• In 5 years’ time less than 9% of you will have jobs relating to your degrees and studies.

• By the age of 35 over half of you with all these fancy degrees will most likely be working for a company owned and run by a someone less smart than you who just made it through school.

• Studies over the last 20 years show there is no correlation between success at school and success in business.

• Ask any successful business person if they believed their school experience gave them the key to their success and over 94% of them they will quickly answer “No!” • To find out what is required to be successful in business, I spoke to some of the top recruitment agencies. I asked them for a short list of the criteria needed for business success.

• Adaptability and the ability to un-learn and re-learn • Communication • Conflict-handling • Integrity • Initiative-taking • Entrepreneurial-thinking Businesses are not interested in the information you have already learnt. They want to know if you are able to un-learn the outdated information you have acquired, then re-learn their systems and processes as they keep evolving.

They are not interested in your school test grades, because to be successful in business you will have to work with others in a team, as opposed to writing a test all by yourself in an exam room.

Being the smartest in a team can also create conflict if you don’t know how to communicate your ideas to those who can’t follow your thinking. Are you able to manage the conflict that arises due to this convergence of different thinking styles and personalities?

To be an entrepreneur you need serious abilities to take initiative and be proactive.

You have to constantly be thinking ahead, and with vision.

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 71

So how can we align our schooling programmes to give us what we need to be successful in business and in life?

The general rule of thumb is that current schooling provides a learner with what was required twenty years ago. So although our education process may seem to be evolving slowly, the twenty-year time lag does not equip our learners for our current times, let alone for what the future holds.

To be better able to predict where our education is going (or should be going) it can be useful to reflect on where it has come from.

The first major expansion of schooling arose out of the growth of the industrial era. With both parents going off to work in the factories, two problems arose. The first is that someone needed to look after the children, and secondly, that these children needed to be taught the skills needed to enter the work force in the factories at a later stage. Solution: schooling for all children.

During the industrial age schooling was about learning specific skills where the emphasis was on what was taught, opposed to what the children actual learnt. As long as a teacher covered all the material, if a child did not succeed, it was the fault of the learner, not the school. Out of this era of schooling, the famous adage sprung: “Go to school so you can get a job”.

With the advance of technology and widespread access to information in the early 1980’s, we entered the information age.

Information could be readily accessed through printed media, and more so through the Internet. The emphasis of schooling shifted to the learning of as much information as possible and it didn’t seem to matter that you just as easily forgot it all soon after.

Terms like “Intellectual capital” and “Lifelong learning” became the buzz words as the explosion of the Internet meant that you did not have to go back to school to learn but could now learn on demand, and at any stage in your life.

Out of the information age, the belief arose that the more you knew (measured as your academic grades), the more successful you would be in business. “You need to get good marks to get a good job!” was the standard refrain.

But the statistics out there don’t agree with this statement. It seems there is no correlation between success at school and success in business. The number of millionaires who were school dropouts nearly out number any other category. But you already knew this, right?

Robert Kiosaki (author of Rich Dad Poor Dad) so cleverly tells the story of comparison

72 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

between his highly-acclaimed academic father who failed at business, and his friend’s rich dad who had dropped out of school and then built numerous multimillion dollar businesses.

It seems clear that we have already entered a different era, and our education needs to catch up.

We have entered into the age of empowerment. Schooling has evolved from the industrial age of people learning technical skills for factory work, to the information age of people knowing things, to the age of empowerment where people, themselves, are the commodity of value.

In the age of empowerment, we see that the internal qualities of attitude, passion and levels of emotional intelligence become the values brought to business.

Success is defined by your self-motivation, your ability to multi-task and the value you bring to the team. Gone are the days where you could be successful just on your own.

In my interviews with successful business people from around the world, these successful people shared two points about their experience of school.

School did not teach them how to make money.

School did not teach them how to work in a team.

Take a look at the success of JT Foxx. I have had the privilege of spending time with him at his house in Florida, as well as traveling with him on some of his tours.

Foxx tells his story of being unsuccessful at school and being broke for most of his life. And through determination and having the right attitude, he is now an immense success being rated as the No.1 World’s Wealth Coach and the highest paid platform speaker worldwide.

Foxx says that it’s not your fault that you may be born broke, but it is your fault if you die broke. That can be quite a tough statement to accept, but what he’s really saying is that the recipe for what is needed for success lies within us, as opposed to depending on external criteria.

Foxx further goes on to state that “success is a choice”. You are either the factor that is limiting your own growth to success, or you are also the solution for reaching that goal.

Schools teach us that making mistakes is wrong. But life gives us continuous opportunities to make mistakes and then learn from them.

Mistakes are just the stepping stones to success.

My personal belief is that the schooling of the future will include core skills that emphasise communication, relationship learning, team building, conflict resolution and personal mastery.

And although many teachers today will quickly claim they are doing this, you will soon see why doing a once-a-year project called “entrepreneur’s day” is just not what it takes.

But don’t get me wrong; the core academic skills will not be side-lined for these other skills, but they will not dominate the school curriculum either. Core academic skills will be seen as one of the tools to develop and support people in their own growth, as opposed to just being the priority of a school day.

Schooling will be a place to experience, grapple with and integrate our ability to work with others, leverage off each other’s strength, work with (and not be threatened by) each other’s differences, manage our own social and emotional wellbeing and know who we are as individuals and who we are in relation to each other.

“ I N THE AGE OF EMPOWERMENT, WE SEE THAT THE INTERNAL QUALITIES OF ATTITUDE, PASSION AND LEVELS OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE BECOME THE VALUES BROUGHT TO BUSINESS.”

On top of this is the scaffold of the academic content and conceptual skills that support children to create empowered lives and contribute to society in extremely useful ways.

“But how do we do this?” you may ask.

To be a successful athlete, you use a coach. To take your business to the next level, you employ a business coach.

To get good grades and succeed at school we employ teachers. But the problem is they are currently trained in teaching content and information. We need them to also be skilled at developing and empowering our learners from the inside out, rather than cramming them full of information.

At the school I started in 2004, all of my teachers were trained as professional life and team coaches. These teachers became highly skilled at being able to empower

and transform the learner’s experience of schooling from the inside out.

A learner who believes they are stupid and can’t succeed is not going to be motivated to explore and learn. But a teacher who knows how to transform that learner’s belief from “I can’t” into “I can” will open up a world of possibility and success.

Today teachers spend more time trying to discipline and get cooperation from a class full of learners, than on actual academic learning.

At my school, because the teachers had learnt the skills of team dynamics and effective conflict resolution, working together as a class became deeply motivating and satisfying. The result was that the academics that took three weeks to learn in a traditional school took only a day in ours.

The teachers in my school spent as much time on academics as on building positive mind-sets and the skills of resourcefulness.

This resulted in a single teacher being able to teach larger numbers, as the learner’s themselves saw each other as a resource, as opposed to just having to wait for their turn with the teacher.

Mistakes and conflict were not seen as wrong but more as opportunities to work on things that were not working and to find solutions to make things work better. Hence the results were people who could solve problems efficiently, independently and successfully.

In the business world we can see a similar shift happening. Human resource departments are shifting from no longer just being “employment recruiters” but now also “human developers”. More and more programmes are being introduced to empower, motivate and develop the potential of employees.

I think back to the 2 000 top school students I was speaking to at their career expo earlier this year. It was not my job to tell them about career choices opening up before them. Each year I get invited back to speak to a new group of top students because I challenge their belief systems and get them to change their mind-sets. My role as a business coach is to get results and to leave these young leaders of our country with the deep motivation and belief that “I can!”

Robin Booth is an international business coach and Key note speaker, with companies in Education, Parenting Skills, and Real estate investment. He is the founder of the Synergy Schooling Approach and is the Founding Director of Worldwide Capital Partners which supports people in creating financial wealth for travel, lifestyle and retirement.

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 73

Next

The Great Innovation Frontier

M i l l s Soko

SUSTAINABLE, NOT SEXY Clean tech went boom and bust in the early 2000s. Now it’s making a comeback. What will it take to keep investment flowing and business booming on the continent?

Poverty is on the rise in South Africa, a new report from Stats SA says. The proportion of people living below the poverty line declined from 66,6% in 2006 to 53,2% in 2011, but increased to 55,5% in 2015, according to the August Poverty Trends in South Africa report.

At the same time, South Africa is facing an increasing population, fuelled by rising life expectancy and high levels of migration. Many of these people are young and unemployed.

This means two things. One, a robust, thriving economy is needed to support the expanding workforce.

And two, the steadily growing population will place additional demands on resources.

A clear solution is investment in clean tech. Two birds, one stone: grow the economy and save the earth. But a little caution is needed.

What can we learn from the boom-and-bust of the early 2000s? Initially, clean tech inspired major optimism abroad. In 2006, Silicon Valley was abuzz, believing it had struck the next big thing. “Seduced by grand visions of making a fortune while saving the planet, venture capitalists invested a then-record $123 million in the first round of fundraising for 16 new companies that year,” reports Green Tech Media. By 2008, this would rocket to nearly $1 billion in over 100 new companies.

Sadly for investors, the bubble didn’t take long to burst. After 2009, barely 25 new clean tech companies were funded by venture capitalists. The harsh reality was that clean tech start-ups just could not deliver the outsized returns found in other sectors.

Wired sums up the initial mistakes. Comparing the early buzz around clean tech to the failed Internet bubble, Juliet Eilperin writes: “What followed was yet another Silicon Valley gold rush, as the firms on Sand Hill Road were pulled along by the promise of new fortunes and the hope that they would be the ones to wean America off fossil fuels… Never mind the fact that green technology had been struggling to achieve critical mass for decades.”

Therein lies the crux. Eilperin points out that for clean tech to succeed, patience, realism and investment in heavy industry are essential. Of all the energy start-ups that received their first VC funds between 1995 and 2007,

74 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

“ E specially in Africa, sustainability must be at the forefront of future efforts.”

only 1.8% achieved “unambiguous success”, or an initial public offering on a major exchange, she notes.

The average time from founding to IPO was 8.3 years.

“If you’re signing up to build a clean-tech winner,” she adds, quoting venture capitalist Matthew Nordan, “reserve a decade of your life.”

Despite a series of sobering realisations, clean tech is today experiencing a revival. Patience and perseverance have resulted in some key scientific breakthroughs, and enterprising companies that have stood the test of time are – as Business News puts it – “sitting pretty” at the centre of the clean tech boom.

But clean tech is still not a silver bullet. And, especially in Africa, sustainability must be at the forefront of future efforts.

Rather than investing in solving risky and “big, scientific problems” that start-ups aren’t ideally positioned to fix in the first place, Fortune magazine argues, the next wave of clean tech investment should – and will – focus on taking now-existing clean technologies and combining them with software and sensors to build new and useful products and services that solve human problems and disrupt markets. “By itself a battery does little, but with battery-enabled propulsion, we can completely rethink transportation, mobility, robotics, drones, and much more,” writer Peter Shannon argues.

The only limit here will be the entrepreneur’s imagination, he continues. The creative combination of technology, software and business models holds great potential for those who are willing to step up and take them. Policy is aligning to support this.

In August, Olawale Ayeni, regional head for Africa investments at IFC Venture Capital, confirmed that the International Finance Corporation was “pushing the envelope” across Africa, including in the clean tech sector. And the South African Select Committee on Trade and International Relations expressed excitement about new industrial zones that will include green tech hubs. Plans are also in the pipeline for green phone towers across Africa.

A new approach can lead to big changes. With careful investment, savvy management, and targeted innovation that seeks out the sustainable rather than the sexy, the next phase in clean tech in Africa may just boost economies, create jobs and build the climate resilience we need and hope for.

Mills Soko is the director of the UCT Graduate School of Business and an associate professor specialising in international trade and doing business in Africa. With a career that has spanned business, government, civil society and academia, he is uniquely positioned to understand the role these sectors have to play — collaboratively and individually — in addressing the critical issues of Africa’s development and competitiveness.

DISRUPTION ON A GLOBAL SCALE HOW ENTREPRENEUR SAURABH KUMAR AIMS TO INNOVATE FOR THE GLOBAL MARKET

CLEAN TECHNOLOGY TODAY INSIDE THE WORLD OF EFFICIENCY AND DISRUPTION IN THE GREEN SECTOR

R35.00

THE FUTURE OF FOOD AID

How the United Nations is using tech to bring stability to the lives of refugees

MICROSOFT CEO

Satya Nadella rewriting the code

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.ZA

16014 7

“We understand that technology is the enabler, but innovation is the advocate.”

SAURABH KUMAR

CEO and Co-Founder of In2IT Group

9 772313 330006

INNOVA TION IS A CEO and co-founder of In2IT Group Saurabh Kumar shares how he has steered his company towards global recognition.

CULTURE

By Evans Manyonga

20

FASTCOMPANY.CO.ZA OCTOBER 2017

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.ZA

21

I T IS MORE THAN A M AG A ZINE, I T'S A MOV EMEN T The Digital version of Fast Company South Africa is now available on Apple iPad and Android tablets

Fast Bytes Fast Company SA takes a look at the innovative new ideas, services, research and news currently making waves in South Africa and abroad

Secure your Android device

The Machine

For a mere R109 per month now you can connect to public Wi-Fi without exposing your device to sketchy reception. Android presents its new ExpressVPN, said to be one of the most trusted, secure brands in the virtual private network industry. ExpressVPN is super-fast and extremely safe to use, boasting an SSL-secured network with 256-bit encryption and with unlimited bandwidth and speed. Because ExpressVPN has servers in 78 countries (including Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and others) covering over 100 locations around the world, you can be sure that there will be a location near you to ensure that you get the best experience possible.

During the recent iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X launch, a new game, The Machine, was announced by the Shanghai-based studio, Directive Games.

The Machine is powered by ARKit and is said to be the world’s first competitive augmented reality game. The game features two factions – the rebels and the dominators – in on-screen battles with a sci-fi aesthetic, not too dissimilar to the Warhammer 40K games. Making use of the top-down perspective, one can battle a friend in the same room, or any other place of your choosing. The game is now available in the App Store.

WhatsApp co-founder leaving the team WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton has decided to leave the WhatsApp team. Acton and Jan Koum, a Ukrainian immigrant, co-founded WhatsApp and developed it into one of the biggest messaging apps in the world to date, with over one billion users globally. Acton became a billionaire over night from the sale of WhatsApp to Facebook for a reported $22 billion. According to Forbes, his net-worth now stands at $6.5 billion. Several new changes have been introduced to the messaging app, with the introduction of features like revamped status and video calling, among others.

76 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

Fast Bytes

Tea break Mmbatho Mokgadi, from Soweto, Gauteng, is living testimony that you can achieve anything you put your mind to. Her love of tea led to her opening Colorsofthearth in 2015, specialising in organic, loose-leaf tea, sourced both locally and internationally. Her range includes fruit tea blends and herbal tea, using spices, herbs and dried fruits.

Taking over the events trade

Brands taking over in 2017

A breakfast launch in Cape Town on 8 September saw the announcement of Messe Frankurt as the new organisers of trade events in South Africa, stepping into the shoes of the LTE, leaders in trade exhibitions. With operations in more than 50 countries, Mess Frankfurt is the 3rd largest trade fair company in the world. Messe Frankfurt organises over 134 trade fairs, involving over 90 000 exhibitors and about 3.5 million visitors.

This comes as the local clothing, textile and footwear industry is making its mark on the international stage like never before.

“These events are a great addition to our current portfolio of fairs in South Africa. We believe we have the resources, skills and experience, globally, to grow the events,” says Konstantin Von Vieregee, Managing Director, Messe Frankfurt SA.

Being a brand that can break through in today’s unapologetically-crowded market is not an easy task.

Traditional rules of marketing have in recent times been discarded, in the face of digital transformation. Brands like Uber and Airbnb have made a massive impact in the market in a relatively short period, while others take decades to do so.

Technology, it seems, is king. Providing products and services that can develop into a meaningful business almost overnight is no longer but a dream, thanks to the proliferation of smart phones, cloud computing and fast, free, and universally accessible digital tools. A survey by http://fortune.com/ places the following companies in the top three: Airbnb, Instagram and Slack.

Google On 11 September Google launched a legal challenge to the record EUR 2.4 billion fine imposed on it by European antitrust authorities for favouring its own shopping service, lodging an appeal at the EU Court in Luxembourg.

Google was given 90 days to comply, or face further fines.

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 77

Fast Events Local conferences, talks and meetups we think are worth attending

Project Design Date: 12 - 13 October 2017 Time: 08:00 AM - 17:00 PM Venue: Indaba Hotel, Fourways, Sandton Cost: R8 999 More and more funds are being injected into a vast range of African projects in all spheres of life, but despite this, little success is recorded. In Africa, projects are often positioned to be the great achievers of socioeconomic development, which is why so much money is invested into them. The question remains, however: If millions are invested and thousands of professionals register and qualify to head up projects annually, why is there still such minimal success?

The Project Design workshop is set to equip project managers with the necessary tools to ensure that their projects operate efficiently, so as to increase the rate of project success.

Lula Build Construction Software Public Training Course Date: 12 October 2017 Time: 09:00 AM Venue: Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC) Cost: (Public) 1 Seat - R2200 per single person, 2 Seats - R3740, 3 Seats - R4950, 4 Seats - R6160 (R1540pp) and 5 Seats - R7425. Pay only for 5 seats when reserving 5 and more (max 10) All prospective, new and existing users of Lula Build Construction Software are invited by MUTUA Construction Professionals to join them for a one-day course on learning how to use the software. An A-Z overview approach will be used to cover all aspects, as well as the functionality of the system. Reserve a seat online or email your name to info@mutua.co.za

Masterminding The Business Function/Event

SAIPA National Conference 2017

Date: 25 - 27 October 2017 Time: 08:00 AM - 16:00 PM Venue: Sandton Sun Hotel, Johannesburg Cost: R8 999

Date: 19 - 21 October 2017 Venue: Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC) 1 Lower Long St Cape Town, Western Cape 8001 Cost: R2 553.60 incl. VAT per person from 15 May - 30 September 2017. Seats are limited to 400.

Event planners, coordinators, PAs secretaries and other personnel involved in the events industry are invited. The event aims to cover all important aspects when putting together an event.

Attendees will learn how to plan an event efficiently, time management, and how to strategise to ensure that everything is set and ready in time.

78 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

Hosted by SAIPA every five years, the National Conference gives members and stakeholders in the accounting industry an opportunity to come together and network, share knowledge and get updates about the industry.

A 10% discount will be offered to SAIPA members only, when booking a car rental online to attend the event, which is sponsored

by Europcar and Tempest. Visit https://www. saipa.co.za/conference/

Fast Events

Cape Town International Boat Show 2017

Photo & Film Expo 2017 Date: 26 - 29 October 2017

Date: 20 - 22 October 2017

Time: 09:00AM- 18:00PM

Time: 10:00 AM– 17:00PM

Location: Coca-Cola Dome, Corner of Olievenhout Avenue & Northumberland Road, North Riding, Johannesburg, South Africa Cost of tickets: R80 day pass and R40 pensioners and under 16

Location: V&A Waterfront, Breakwater Boulevard, Cape Town Cost of tickets: R100

South Africa’s premier boating and water sport show is set to take place at the V&A Waterfront.

Now 17 years running and as the only exhibition endorsed by the Marine Industry Association of South Africa, the show promises to only serve the leisure sector of the industry. The show often referenced to as ‘the granddaddy of boat shows on the African continent’ has over the years attracted thousands of boat-mad visitors.

The Alphen Antiques and Collectables Market Date: Every second and fourth Sunday Time: 10:00 AM - 16:00 PM Venue: Alphen Centre, Constantia Main Road, Cape Town Cost: Free Every second and fourth Sunday of every month, the Alphen Antiques and Collectables Fair draws visitors from far and wide. With a range of items to choose from, including jewellery, glass, ceramics, silver, toys, watches, coins, medals, books, and paintings, the event promises to have something for everyone.

Ample parking and refreshment are available.

New dealers are also invited to be part of the market and if interested can contact Des on 083 626 7499.

Africa’s leading photographic event is a mustattend event for anybody interested in photography or advancements in technology in the imaging and printing industries. Since its inception the expo has grown rapidly with attendees from all over South Africa as well as from 30 other countries. Also on the menu will be widest range of photographic gear from cameras and lenses to cell phones, safari trips, course bags and more.

Stephen Clarke Seminar Date: 24 - 26 November 2017 Time: 07:30 AM - 17:30 PM Venue: Manor D’Or, Johannesburg Cost: R570 Judges, coaches, riders and dressage enthusiasts are invited to the prestigious Stephen Clarke Seminar. Presented by probably the most highly regarded and popular dressage judges in the land, this coaching clinic attracts enthusiasts involved in all aspects of the sport. Callaho Warmblood Sport Horse (www.callaho.com) has joined the team as a major sponsor of this event, and Callaho horses will also perform at the seminar.

OCTOBER 2017 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 79

Next

Gje r mu nd Ne sl a nd

WHY CHALLENGES AND PROBLEMS ARE IMPORTANT IN LIFE Many people live a life where they try to avoid challenges and hope for a life without problems. This mentality and attitude can, however, end up becoming a disservice that does more harm than good.

In 2006, together with two business partners, I started a property company. The company grew exceptionally in its first year. However, in 2007 when the global financial crisis struck, the property business and our company took a major hit. For the next year we encountered an endless number of problems and worked day and night to keep control of the company and our property portfolio. These problems were tough and tiresome, and in the darkest hours we wondered if they would ever end.

We managed to work ourselves out of the problems by never giving up, by facing them head on, instead of ignoring them, and by always looking for new ways to deal with the problems. In retrospect, the problems and the way we dealt with them became important and valuable experiences, both personally and in business.

In 2014, when the global oil crisis struck, I worked as a senior manager in a major international company within the oil industry. Companies in the oil industry around the world were struck hard with the sudden and brutal drop in new orders.

Through 2015, my management team and I had to downsize from 120 to 45 people. This was a 62% reduction in the staffing, with several exceptionallyskilled people losing their jobs. It was a tough challenge both practically and emotionally. Instead of seeing it as a problem, I decided to see it as the most important and rewarding leadership challenge and experience I had been given so far.

There are not many ways you get to test your leadership skills in a more challenging way than to be responsible for a major downsizing and complete it in a proper and respectful manner. This change of mind-set, which I saw as a unique leadership experience, made me

80 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A OCTOBER 2017

“ I n retrospect, the problems and the way we dealt with them became important and valuable experiences, both personally and in business.”

place a high degree of focus, dedication and energy into making the process as fair and good as possible.

The downsizing process was inevitable, so the problem was just as real, but by making a positive mental shift and focusing on the things I could still control, I dealt with the problem and process in a much better way, which strengthened me as a person and as a leader.

Challenges and problems are important parts of life that give you experiences, make you learn and help you to become wiser and stronger. Problems make us grow and shape us. The biggest problem people have is that they hope for a life without problems. This is an impossible goal, and would lead to a boring life without character. We will all have problems – small or large – the difference is how we deal with the problems and challenges that occur.

So don’t run away from the problems and challenges you are facing in life. Don’t ignore them or try to hide from them. Face them. Deal with them. The greatest growth in life and the most important lessons you will learn will come when you face and deal with a serious challenge or problem. Regardless of the result, value the experience and personal growth.

Gjermund Nesland is a Norwegian entrepreneur, businessman and former elite athlete.