Managing my Psychology

I read and re-read the post by Ben Horowitz today: What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology. I kept reading it over and over because I finally realized that I was not alone. As an African entrepreneur, I am confronted with challenges that CEOs in developed countries don’t even know exist. But they have their own challenges and in the end, the psychological ‘condition’ and the internal struggle are the same. Horowitz says:

‘The first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is don’t talk about the psychological meltdown.’

This is so true. Because who do you talk to? As well meaning as they might be, friends, even employees simply cannot understand. It is like a White person not knowing what it is like to be Black. I mean, they feel for you. Intellectually, they understand that it might be different but in the end, they really don’t know. As a result, I spare my friends and my family with the gory details of entrepreneurship in Africa and I save them for my blog.

I remember one time, I had several members of my American family together for Thanksgiving and they really wanted details about my life in Africa. So I started to tell them a story and seeing their bewildered look, I stopped and brought the story to an end. Even then, they were wondering why I just didn’t come back to the US where I could lead a more ‘normal’ life. Another time, I met with members of the World Bank’s “Doing Business” staff as they were getting background information on my country to compile their yearly report. After three hours, they looked at me and said: “Why are you still there?” A ‘normal’ person simply cannot understand what drives an entrepreneur, nor understand, as Horowitz so perfectly describes, the loneliness of being a CEO.

But my favorite quote from Horowitz’s article is:

Tip to aspiring entrepreneurs: if you don’t like choosing between horrible and cataclysmic, don’t become CEO.

I often say that leadership involves choosing between bad and worse and you will be judged on making the bad choice. Few, if any around you understand that you had few options when making an important decision or that all of your options were bad ones. In the end, they will simply conclude you made a bad choice. Having made some over the more than 11 years since I started my company, I have a soft spot for all leaders, be they business or political when people second-guess their decisions.

Horowitz ends with some nice suggestions on how to manage your psychology. His final advice:

'Don’t Punk Out and Don’t Quit As CEO, there will be many times when you feel like quitting. I have seen CEOs try to cope with the stress by drinking heavily, checking out, and even quitting. In each case, the CEO has a marvelous rationalization why it was OK for him to punk out or quit, but none them will every be great CEOs. Great CEOs face the pain. They deal with the sleepless nights, the cold sweat, and what my friend the great Alfred Chuang (legendary founder and CEO of BEA Systems) calls “the torture.” Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it. Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a variety of other self-congratulatory explanations. The great CEOs tend to be remarkably consistent in their answers. They all say: “I didn’t quit.”

I will re-read his advice every time I feel overwhelmed and the very next time I feel like a mad woman. I still think that being an entrepreneur in Africa is harder than it is in the developed world. Last week, Columbia University held its annual African Economic Forum and one of the speakers said that to be an entrepreneur, you had to be a little crazy. I responded: ‘To be an entrepreneur you have to be crazy. To be an entrepreneur in Africa, you have  to be raving mad.

Well, after reading the article from Horowitz, I am still convinced that I am raving mad, but at least I know I am not alone.

Bidding for World Bank Financed Project: An Exercise in Futility

Any company or organization that has submitted a bid for to a large organization, especially when the funding comes from international sources, is aware that the results are often decided before the RFP is even drafted. The Request for Proposal (RFP) is generally designed so that only a pre-determined bidder can meet the requirements. This does not only happen in Africa. We have seen this occur even in the US and Europe. I remember a seminar for Federal government contractors in the US during which the main speaker said that “if you’re not 70% sure that you will win, don’t bother to bid.”


Usually though, there is some pretense that this is a real RFP and that all bidders have a chance. This way, they can justify awarding it to the “pre-selected” company by showing that X number of companies responded but none met the technical requirements.

I remember finding this out the hard way, working round the clock for weeks to finish a proposal on time, getting the bank guarantees, audited financial statements to respond to a very complex proposal. When it became clear that from a technical and financial standpoint our proposal was the best, they simply cancelled the process. When the new RFP came out, we did not meet the administrative requirements. :)

Still, even when we know we have little or no chance, we sometimes respond anyway. The process is important for our team to go through for practice and from a marketing standpoint, our company name should come out from time to time. So, when we recently saw a notice in the official newspaper for an RFP from a government owned agency for a system we have lots of experience with, we decided we would bid.

This decision was not one that the agency was very pleased with. According to the notice in the newspaper, anyone could consult the bidding document between certain hours. However, when we tried, during those very times, we were never able to see the document. The person who had the document seemed to always be gone as soon as we showed up.

Not to be discouraged we decided to blindly purchase the bidding document. The newspaper indicated a bank and account number to deposit the equivalent of roughly $50 to buy the document. So we went to the bank to make the deposit. Account number invalid. Indeed, the newspaper showed an account number with just 6 digits when all account numbers here have 13.

Then we tried to get information by attending a meeting announced in the newspaper notice for which there is a date, but no time. We sent someone who spent all day. The meeting was never held.

Finally yesterday, we were able to get the right bank account number. We deposited the funds and took the receipt to the agency to get the RFP. They are unable to give it to us because their copy machine is out of paper! I am not making this up.

We have lost already three precious weeks while the agency continues to play games with us. We are only more determined than ever to respond. Since this is a World Bank financed project, we will certainly get the RFP (which we paid for) just in time for our name to be added to the list of expected bidders but too late to obtain the required bank guarantee and to meet the other administrative conditions listed in the document.

The World Bank is meant to be a development organization but most of their funded projects are awarded through a process that is often less than equitable and is sometimes the result of blatant corruption. The World Bank seems to be aware of this. They have an elaborate system of reporting on the procurement process: http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/PROJECTS/PROCUREMENT/0,,contentMDK:20251613~pagePK:84269~piPK:84286~theSitePK:84266,00.html. But under what category would you put Copy machine out of paper?

It's the About the Application of the Law Stupid!

The Managing Director of the IMF recently visited the country I am in. I read and re-read his concluding statement and it seemed very on-point:

"...Creating an environment conducive to private sector development is another priority area. In this context, strengthening governance, including a sound and predictable legal and regulatory framework, and an efficient judiciary is important."

It sounded almost as pertinent as the New Year speeches our President makes every year. Just as the Director of the IMF, our President really does seem to understand what is wrong with the country. The problem with him is the same as the problem with the Director of the IMF, they are either powerless to do anything about it other than making speeches that give people like me a half an hour's worth of hope that things will change, or they want to look the other way.

A few years ago, our President, in his New Year's speech announced the passage of a law eliminating taxes and duties on all information technology products. I was still living in the States then. About a month after his declaration, I landed in this country with computers, printers and other equipment for our local subsidiary. The customs officers were quick to tell me that we had to pay an inordinate amount of customs duty. We reminded them that the Head of State had announced that there was no more customs duty. They said that they had heard the speech as well and the law had been passed but that the “texts of application” of the law had not yet been drafted so we still had to pay. Of course, they offered a "discount" to keep it off the books. I thought that the receipt would be a weapon to use in the struggle to improve the business environment so we paid up.

A month later, the “texts of application” were published. Before anyone had a chance to take advantage of the new law, they repealed it. Taxes and duties were back on. No speech, no announcement, just those nasty “texts of application” that cancelled the law. Imagine the consequences for a company that placed a large technology order from overseas that had not yet received its merchandise? Not a nice surprise, especially not when the taxes and duties are about 50% of the value of the technology.

Back to the recent IMF visit. Of course, high on the list of the discussions was the fight against corruption. As in the President’s New Year’s speech and in many other political speeches, the government reiterated its commitment against corruption. But that little problem of the “texts of application” of the law creeps up again. In their Letter of Intent following the visit of the IMF, the country stated:

In April 2006, the government enacted a law defining the modalities for application of [the law], which refers to the disclosure of assets by senior government officials. Nevertheless, the commission that was to have been set up under this law to receive the asset declarations has not yet been established because the legal texts governing the application of the law have not yet been prepared. Similarly, the National Commission to Fight Corruption, created in March 2006, is not yet operational as its members have not yet been named, given the considerable time needed to ascertain the integrity of potential members.

Given that corruption is the government’s top priority, you start to understand why nothing changes here. And every time the World Bank, the IMF or US Government officials come in, our government will proudly display the laws on the books to fight corruption, to improve the environment for the private sector, to fight poverty, improve education, etc. And the World Bank and friends will have their conscience relieved that their admonitions were effective and that finally the Country is "behaving." The laws are well written and sound great. The problem is not just that they are not applied but that there is no consequence for not applying them. The judges can see the laws and chose to ignore them with no consequence, same with the police, the custom agents and all other public servants. Until the Country has to account for the non-application of its laws, it will not establish mechanisms to enforce them.