And I’ll Form The Head. A case for a Voltron company
No, I am not looking to run any particular company or be at the top of any organisation. What I do certainly enjoy is working with people to achieve a collective goal which is generally what happened in the Voltron cartoon series. Some bad character was vanquished, some evil repelled, some danger averted.
The problem in the Nigerian context, and in any context where you have a dearth of resources, human or otherwise is that the head, or other part of the body, is left to act alone. It is bad enough when you are a head carrying a dead body, it can even be more traumatic when the head cannot communicate with the hands or legs. It simply does not work.
I recently said to some of my friends that we all need to come together to form one company, a la Voltron. I added it would be difficult as we would have to suppress our own egos, put aside individual dreams to do this. Very, very hard. As expected, we all agreed we should work together and of course the conversation ended.
My logic is simple. We are in one of harshest entrepreneurial environments IN THE WORLD. Nothing you read, none of the self help books, none of the workshops you go to prepare you for your manager telling you there is no reason for him or his team to be accountable for their time. For an employee trying to claim earnings for a day that the time and attendance system showed she didn’t clock in or out, and the email and phone systems did not register her sending any emails or making any calls. You have to deal with these issues without slaps or offensive abuses. On top of this, you are expected to grow your company and become profitable.
Folks, IT SIMPLY CANNOT WORK. We keep pointing to companies in our space, especially in the West, as examples of lean mean, engines that could. The reality is they have a huge support system that they take for granted, plus the lean teams they have are made up of like minded folks. Smart, enthusiastic, driven folk who believe in the cause and are not just looking to make a quick buck every 4 weeks or so.
Some of my friends are lucky, they have a great partner or colleague, but all are struggling. When you have to make all your decisions alone, when you have no one to trust, when evil is at your door step, when you have to defend the universe of the dream you have decided to make reality, you know the answer is Voltron. I am hoping we will do it sooner than later and create something that will be a success by all standards, not the mediocre ones we are forced to accept because we feel we have no choice.
