Manu Chandaria, CEO of Comcrat, the multibillion-dollar Kenyan steel, plastics, and aluminum company, is a longtime observer of the African business landscape. His views in this Wharton<\/a> interview are well worth reading in their entirely. He\u2019s bullish, for instance, on Nigeria, and thinks Western companies entering African markets should focus less on establishing political ties and more on winning hearts, as the Chinese do, by building roads, airports, and sports stadiums.<\/p>\n But when asked about his greatest leadership challenge, Chandaria turns personal. \u201cI used to have a lot of conflicts with my older brother about managing our businesses,\u201d he says. \u201cI had to ask myself\u2026’Am I going to win this man over, or am I going to fight him?’ What he did was carry out his brother\u2019s ideas — with a vengeance. His brother started realizing, \u201cMy God, he’s doing exactly what I wanted him to do — but even better.\u201d Many people face this kind of choice — to step into the mold or break it, Chandaria says. \u201cBut if you don’t get inside that mold, you won’t break it.\u201d <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n NEVER, EVER GIVE IN<\/a><\/p>\n \n Through a constant stream of lawsuits in defense of patents 5,715,314, and 5,909,492, Soverain Software was making excellent progress on its goal of extracting a 1% toll on the revenues of every company on the planet using e-commerce shopping-cart technologies. It settled lucratively with Amazon and beat Victoria\u2019s Secret and Avon in court. But it overextended when it pursued computer retailer Newegg, which went to trial and lost, but would not give up. On appeal, Newegg argued that Soverain was trying to patent something obvious that had already existed since the time of CompuServe Mail. Its policy of never, ever settling with patent trolls was vindicated when the appeals court agreed that Soverain’s patents were not valid (nullifying previous judgements in Soverain’s favor).\n <\/p>\n \n WHAT MAKES TEAMS TICK<\/a><\/p>\n \n Two McKinsey researchers asked 5,000 executives to conduct a thought experiment in which they envisioned the conditions necessary for peak team performance. Turns out there are a lot of them. People needed to be clear about their roles and objectives. They required sufficient resources. They had to like one another, laugh together, and trust and respect team members enough to have constructive disagreements. What\u2019s more, to really get in the groove, they needed a sense of excitement, and a feeling that what each person does will matter and what the group is doing will make a difference — and hasn\u2019t been done before. Is that all?\n <\/p>\n \n BONUS BITS:<\/a><\/p>\n \n Meet Truth Teller, An Automated Political Fact-Checking App (ReadWrite)<\/a><\/p>\n Is AdWords Prone to Racial Profiling? (Technology Review)<\/a><\/p>\n You Won\u2019t Believe What KFC-Japan Has Come Up With Now (The Globe and Mail)<\/a> <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \t\t<\/p>\n \n<\/p>\n Manu Chandaria, CEO of Comcrat, the multibillion-dollar Kenyan steel, plastics, and aluminum company, is a longtime observer of the African business landscape. His views in this Wharton interview are well worth reading in their entirely. He\u2019s bullish, for instance, on Nigeria, and thinks Western companies entering African markets should focus less on establishing political ties […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-641595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=641595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641595\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=641595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=641595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=641595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}How One Company Saved On-Line Retail for Everyone (Ars Technica)<\/a><\/h4>\n
Conjuring Up the Perfect Team (McKinsey Quarterly)<\/a><\/h4>\n
Wicked Cool and Just Plain Wicked, Maybe <\/a><\/h4>\n
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