The Secret Gloo Master Plan (just between you and I, don’t tell anyone).

Jeff Bezos Photo credit: Steve Jurvetson

I have 5 MAIN role models for what I believe is pristine, visionary leadership. And I tend to draw a lot of business inspiration from each of them from time to time. (Of course, my longstanding and dependable source of inspiration remains The Word/Message of God — Christ/the Gospel.)

These are:

1. ) Jeff Bezos: the Founder, Chairman & CEO of Amazon.
2. ) Elon Musk: the Founder & CEO of SpaceX and Tesla.
3. ) Carlos Alves de Brito: the CEO of AB-InBev.
4. ) Mark Zuckerberg: the Founder & CEO of Facebook.
5. ) Leonidas: my personal favourite of these lot, is the iconic Warrior-King of the Greek city-state of Sparta, who led 300 Spartan hoplites to the Second Persian War, the epicentre of which was the Battle of Thermopylae, made into 20th century folklore by the popular film, 300.

I have watched this film over 300 times!!!

Those who KNOW me or have visited the Gloo office or have had an opportunity to interact with me on any measurably deep level can readily attest to the tones of commonality in me, my person, my carriage, my mien, my mindset, my outlook or even how I dress, that shows I readily draw from these. However, the most important things I really draw from them are so much more on a deeper order of magnitude than these seemingly superficial ones listed above.

One especially unique thing I found about the first two on the list above — Jeff and Elon — was that they basically made PUBLIC their long term vision and plan for the organizations they were building decades! ahead. It initially took them between 2–3 years to come into full view of such vision and strategic plan — the same way it took me 3 years to come into the full view of God’s given-vision for Gloo, the venture I established with my team (Seyin, Malik and David), which has now grown to be Nigeria’s Biggest Online Supermarket. I came into this full view about this same time in June a year ago (2015), which marked the three years since I started on this Gloo journey. I now have more confidence, on the occasion of this fourth anniversary of commencement of that journey, as well as drawing on inspiration from these two I have just mentioned, to also now make my vision and long-range strategic plan for Gloo PUBLIC.

For Jeff Bezos, he PUBLICLY laid out his vision and plan and, trust me, this is pretty much the same vision he has been prosecuting these 20-LONG-YEARS, irrespective of the ways and means he may have adopted between then and now that may be different from what he knew then. (As he popularly says, “the HOW is always negotiable.”) Nevertheless, he remains EVER TRUE to the SPIRIT of his 1997 Letter to Shareholders, which was the document he used to communicate this publicly. That point is further validated by the fact that his 1997 letter to shareholders has always been Appendix I to ALL the subsequently Amazon letter to shareholders ever released since that 1997. And below is the paragraph that relays the CORE of that strategic vision and plan.

The paragraph in the 1997 letter that captures the essence of Jeff’s mindset, vision and plan

Elon Musk on the other hand used a blog post he did in 2006, as I am now doing in 2016 with this blog post, to lay down his own vision and strategic plan for Tesla. The title of this my blog post above shamelessly copies the same title as his, essentially only inserting “Gloo.ng” where he had “Tesla.” The essence of Elon’s vision and strategic plan for Tesla was encapsulated in the last paragraph of that fateful blogpost, as seen below:

Model 3 brings this strategic plan to full circle, with focus now shifting to zero emission (Gigafactory & Powerwall)

The inspiration for me taking this step of PUBLICLY emulating these role models came largely as a sequalae to a mini-tweet-storm I did between the day before and yesterday, talking about my 20-year plan for Gloo.

In addition, inspiration also came at the same time from staying awake all through day before yesterday, to monitor the migration to the fresh new technology platform we did yesterday, as communicated to our customers via a newsletter yesterday, which I posted to my blog on Medium.

And this is it:

Above is all driven by The Purpose we are pursuing at Gloo, of “OWNing the word ‘supermarket’ in Nigeria” and The Vision of “BEing Nigeria’s BIGGEST Supermarket. Period.” And you can see from above that it is, as Jeff said then, even for us, still DAY ONE. In the coming months, we will be expanding to new fulfilment centres to accommodate the growth making our current fulfilment centre burst at the seams, which in essence begins the second part of the Phase 1 indicated above. DAY ONE indeed it STILL is.

P.S: please this is still a secret. Keep it that way!!!