Digital Transformation Isn’t About Digital. It’s About Transformation.
Over the past 20 years, I’ve been asked to rescue quite a few ‘failed’ implementations—projects that were supposed to revolutionize pricing, operations, and finance (sales-to-cash). As you may have guessed if you read my first article in this trilogy: the problem never was the tool. In fact, a lot of companies don’t need a new […]
You Think You Have a Pricing Problem? You Don’t.
Why your pricing isn’t just a number — it’s your business model, your operations, and your customer promise rolled into one. Pricing is funny. It’s the one number everyone sees, the one decision everyone wants to weigh in on, and somehow, the one thing that gets blamed for everything that’s not working. Margins are down? […]
The End of Big Companies Could Be the Start of Big Opportunities.
Throughout history, industrial revolutions have reshaped the way we work.The Third Industrial Revolution led to manufacturing giants shrinking into smaller, more automated firms.Today, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is doing something similar to the corporate world. AI and automation make having large teams working in finance, marketing, sales, and even IT unnecessary.Multinationals can now drastically reduce […]
Innovators are overrated – let’s fund the makers, doers and fixers.
We love to talk about entrepreneurship as the engine of Africa’s future.Governments say it. Donors fund it. Ecosystem builders design programs around it. The message is everywhere: that young people must create businesses, build solutions, and leapfrog into the future. But underneath all that energy is a very specific story about what kind of entrepreneurship counts — […]
Do Your Operations Feel Stuck? Welcome to the Way My Brain Works.
You Can’t Fix What You Can’t See Many African value chains aren’t broken because we lack ideas, ambition, or funding. They’re broken because no one has taken the time to trace the flow, spot the friction, and redesign the process for performance. Over time, we’ve normalised systems that are held together by workarounds. A delivery […]
The AI Field Guide: What to Use When, and Why It Matters
AI means many things these days. What we call “AI” often refers to a mix of very different tools — with very different purposes. If you’re building, improving, or rethinking how things work in your organisation, you need to know which tool fits which kind of job — from decision models that have been around […]
Whatever Happened to Operations Research? The Silent Engine Behind AI’s Shiny Façade
There’s a question that’s been nagging at me for a while now: whatever happened to Operations Research (OR)? In the age of artificial intelligence (AI), OR seems to have quietly faded into the background, forgotten amid the deafening hype around machine learning, large language models, and generative AI. And yet, as I reflect on the […]
What AI Thinks of Entrepreneurs — And Why That Matters
This refelction started out as an exploration of the biases built into AI — how algorithms like ChatGPT inevitably feed us stereotypes, reflecting the collective consciousness of the internet, especially when it comes to entrepreneurship. But as I was writing, I realized the story I was telling wasn’t just about AI. It became a story […]