My Amazing Note from China

What a valuable lesson I learnt from a stranger through a loss making transaction

There are those that buy things and sell them at a profit. Most of the world does business this way. They just handle inventory and make sure that they get rewarded for the changing of hands. But then there are those very few beautiful souls who have turned business into an art form. I came across someone like that two days ago.

My pen from China - with Cindy's note

All my friends know that I’m inordinately fond of fountain pens. Essentially I have only used fountain pens since I was 15 years old. And as it goes with life long passions, one always seems to be after the perfect instrument. In this case, the perfect pen. It so happened that I chanced to come across a nice-looking fountain pen on Ebay a while ago.

It was seconds before closing time and nobody had made a bid yet. I took a chance and entered my bid – mostly out of curiosity, I suppose. And so it came that I bought myself a nice new fountain pen for – all of one US cent. Yes – US$0.01 – or less than ZAR8c in our own money. When shipping cost of US$4.98 was added, the total came to US$4.99. What could I have bought for that kind of money in South Africa? A hamburger, if I was lucky. Or a dozen free range eggs maybe.

I could not believe my luck. This, for a heavy, exceedingly well-crafted pen with a suction cartridge and a nice golden nib? Too good to be true, you might think. Well so did I. But on Ebay a gentleman’s word is his bond, plus my curiosity had to be satisfied. And more than anything else – a deal is a deal. Accordingly, I paid the money and waited.

Mail from China normally takes about three weeks. But in this case we had a postal strike so I knew it was going to be long – if the package arrived at all. Yet, sure enough, two months later it was in the mail. South African Customs made me pay R15,00 for it.  We all know the feeling – when you must pay US1.88 tax for an item that cost US0.01 then there is only one way to put it – you have just been raped by your own government.

But what can you do? Caesar must also live, even if by means of immoral gain. I therefore paid the ransom and curiously opened the package. And there it was – not quite a Mont Blanc, to be sure. But still – I was exceedingly satisfied. It felt like real quality and wrote beautifully. Now, in the world of fountain pens, each pen has a soul and a character. Like a woman. Each one is unique in the way it handles and writes. I thought about my new pen and decided, if this one was a woman, it would have been Marlene Dietrich. Smooth and sophisticated right to the tip.

The next morning I woke up in a foul mood. I was in a hurry to tidy up before leaving for work, but just before I threw away the box that the pen had shipped in, something caught my eye. Inside the package was a small note – intricately folded in origami style. When I carefully unfolded it, I saw that it was a hand written message. And there – in the neatest Western handwriting, were the following words:

“Hello dear friend. Thank you very much for your purchase!

I’m so glad that the item reached you finally. Hope it did not keep you waiting tooo long. Your purchase really a big support on me and give motivation to make me keep offering best products and service. Thank you very much again!

If there is any problem make you unsatisfy with the transaction please contact me and give me chance to solve it. And if you satisfy with it please leave me positive feedback.

Thank you very much!

Best regards

Cindy

Share. Enjoy”

In neat Western handwriting, her words were written

Now I really must say – I had been in such an annoyed mood right up to then. But at that very moment, it felt as if the sun was shining into Africa all the way from China. I realized something very important then. For one US cent, this surely must have been a loss making transaction for a Chinese small business. There was no way they could have shipped that product economically. Surely most businessmen around the world would have sent the product with sour reluctance. Some would even have looked for justification not to send it at all. And yet, here was one who honoured a commitment not only with dignity, but with joyful pleasure.

How often would you encounter that in life?

In life, there are so many things we do simply because we have to. We have to buy something and sell it at a profit in order to make a living. We think nothing of the process, but rather treated as the necessary protocol that we have to hurriedly follow in order to collect our money so we can spend it.

But we forget that sometimes the little things we do can have a big effect on the lives of others. In my case, it was an event that gave me a smile that lasted all day long. I told all my colleagues this story at work – and showed them the note. I and then I decided to tell the world.

So every time I use this pen, I will remember among the 1 billion people who live in China – there is one person whose name is Cindy – who has taught me something about business, and caused the sun to break through on the other side of the world when it was just another cloudy day.

Yes, I will remember Cindy – and I will remember her business at http://stores.ebay.com/shareenjoy . Business is about business for the most part. Yet most of all, business is about people. We must never, ever forget that.

"My goal is to be a rock star. And my backup to be be an astronaut"

Reality should never be be the enemy of dreams

Yesterday I stumbled across the listing of a 15 year old boy on the website of a US adoption agency. The description stated that his "vocational goal is to be a rock star, but his backup plan is to be an astronaut." 

I read it again. Slowly. All night and all day long now his words have been playing over and over upon my mind. It gave me several emotions from sadness to excitement. But more than anything else I felt deeply pleased to hear those words. I recognized the language of big dreams. And the language of dreams is spoken by the rarest of men. In fact, the language of dreams is often spoken most fluently by the young. And we should listen to that voice as often as it is heard - for it is the voice that shapes the future.

Once upon a time almost all of us had big dreams. Fireman, pilot or astronaut - there was a time that you and I had every conviction that this dream would become reality one day. But as the years pass, things change. Surrounded by the examples of men who have given up before reaching their goals, we start to water down our dreams. Diminishing our goals. Miniaturizing our beliefs. We grow older and more cautious. We listen with close attention to the caring voices of those who had long since abandoned their own hopes.

They who show themselves so helpful to protect us against disappointment and disillusionment by cautiously reminding us to rather pick more reasonable dreams. Achievable ones. Sensible dreams that will more properly fit into the moulds of mediocrity. "Your dreams are false," they argue. "They are not real," they whisper. Those are the voices we hear the most. And in time, those are the voices we end up believing.

There is a story about diamonds that I was once told. It was about a man who grew up on the border of Lesotho. Over the years, the mountain inhabitants often brought brilliant stones from the mountain streams to his family - believing that they were diamonds. His father knew that diamonds were harder than almost anything. And so, to test whether they were real or not, he used to smack them with a hammer. In this manner, without fail, every single stone was crushed to powder.

Only many years later, when this boy saw some of the most exquisite diamonds in South Africa coming from those same mountains, did he realize that many of those diamonds had probably been real. For hard though they may be, even diamonds shatter between the cold steel of a hammer and the hard iron of an anvil.

This to me, is how it often is when seemingly unlikely dreams are shattered beneath the deadly hammers of preconception. And so, one by one, most people end up dropping the diamonds of their dreams into the molten lava of disbelief. Just as if someone had convinced us them that they were in actual fact never real diamonds, but merely ordinary fragments of glass. I could not help but wonder how many good dreams have been  lost in this way across the ages? It must be millions without number.

At what point then, do most of us abandon our dreams? At what point do we believe the voices that tell us to walk away from dreams that are too big? For example, one must grant that indeed, the odds of actually becoming an astronaut are small. Some might say minuscule. I believe that the odds of becoming an astronaut are 1 in 320 million. These odds are very nearly the same as winning the California lottery.

But as we all know - more new astronauts go to space every year. And somebody wins the lottery all the time - however small the chances. Clearly there are always those who dream about seemingly impossible things, who nevertheless still attain them in life.

I know of one such man. The biggest dreamer of them all. And the owner of more diamonds than anybody who had ever lived until his time. Some thought of him as the king of diamonds. But I think of him as the king of dreams. He it was, who used to say, "I measure a man by the size of his dream." I would take those words seriously from a person who started with nothing and made himself into one of the richest men in the world.


"I dream in continents," he told his friends. And that, indeed, he did. Quite literally so.

To those who knew him well enough, Rhodes was a scoundrel by every unit of measure. But he also set the benchmark for marrying unlikely dreams with ultimate reality. However lacking his character might have been at times, there is a lot that we can learn from his spirit.

Cecil John Rhodes - one of the biggest and most successful dreamers who ever lived.

Like so many other great men, he had a humble origin. Cecil Rhodes began his life as the somewhat sickly son of a British parson. He came from the bottom end of a large family. He was not an overly gifted scholar. He did not really excel at sport. And even his social skills were limited, for he he had a squeaky, almost girlish voice. Neither did he come from wealth or class. In fact, his life seemed destined to mediocrity.

He was already flowing into the mould of ensured social insignificance, but for one important thing that happened to him. His doctors advised him for the sake of his health to relocate to South Africa. And so it was decided to send him to the other side of the world in order to attempt to prolong his life.

In 1871 he arrived in South Africa. He was, as one author described him, "a tall, lanky, anaemic, fair-haired boy, shy and reserved in bearing." And he was still a mere boy of only 17 years old. To all reasonable expectations, young Cecil should have had a life of perfect insignificance. In fact, the farming venture that he attempted with his brother soon turned into failure.

But in this fateful decade South Africa had become the country of dreams. To dreamers and adventurers around the world, this was the land of golden opportunity. A land of mineral rushes unlike any the world had ever known. And it was one of the fewest places on earth where a nobody could have the hope of becoming a somebody with just a little bit  of luck and a lot of hard work.

Young Cecil's experienced many serious setbacks. But he never gave up trying. His wanderings eventually lead him to the diamond rush of Kimberley. In stead of finding rivers of diamonds here, he discovered thousands of men who already had a head start on him. Men much cleverer than he. Much older and stronger. Vastly more experienced. Far better equipped to survive and prosper in a cruel world where one man would step onto his neighbour just as sure as a hungry dog would eat another. What mattered most, however, was that Cecil had one thing that was bigger than any other man - the size of his dreams.

What followed in Cecil's life reads like a story book. In his relatively short life, the unassuming boy from Hertfordshire consolidated the mad world of Kimberley into the biggest diamond company in the history of the world. He founded and directed one of the greatest gold mines on the planet - still producing gold over 120 years later. He even had a country named after him. He floated companies, founded industries, determined the course of history, and either built or destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of men, women and children.

He, who had no special education, went on to obtain an Oxford degree. He then became the Prime Minister of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope. He became the friend of monarchs and the partner of international bankers. These achievements would have satisfied even the most ambitious men. But Rhodes' dreams were bigger yet. All of these were merely stepping stones on the way to his real dream: that of building a railway from the Cape to Cairo - and then to go on to unify the entire English-speaking world into one great empire. And after that, his dream was to unite the world under the British flag.

In fact, these were not just fantasies. To Rhodes they were real. Because, as he once told his friends, his dreams are backed with plans. "There is a difference," he insisted.

It is an irony of history that Rhodes did not live to realize his ultimate dreams. But it did not matter. He came further than much more talented men could have reached in generations. He, who had once been given only 6 months to live, died at the age of 48. His dying words were, "so little done. So much to do."

There are many reasons why Rhodes came so far in life. But in my mind, one of the most important was the fact that he dreamed bigger than all, and remained child enough to believe in the reality of every one of his dreams.

Mark Twain once said that where Cecil Rhodes stood in the Cape, his shadow fell across the Zambezi

Rhodes had been brought up to become a parson like his father. Or a barrister, if his mother had allowed it. But destiny pointed him onto a different road. On that road, Rhodes ignored small ambitions. He paid attainable goals little attention. In stead, he chose only the biggest of dreams, and never allowed himself to be convinced that they were impossible to reach. He never tested diamonds with a hammer. He tested them with light - and if they sparkled - he kept them for his treasure.

Lesser men would have kept their dreams private, for fear that others would laugh at their size. But not Rhodes. Just as he was never shy to show his treasure of diamonds, he was never shy to share his dreams with anyone would might admire their glitter. And indeed, many a friend did tell him that his dreams were unrealistic. That someone in his position had no hope of reaching them. Rhodes did not listen to small men. And he never allowed the voices of doubt to cloud the light of his dreams.

And so I think back at the boy who would be a rock star. I may never meet him. But we all meet boys and girls who are like him. For my part, I choose to believe that boy will become a rock star. And if not a rock star, then an astronaut. And if not an astronaut, then I hope that he will still reach whatever dream he sets his mind to. Because dreams are the reflection of reality to those who have the faith to believe in them.

My choice does not have to be a rational one. I'm a believer in dreams. We dreamers speak differently.

Credits: 
All images by courtesy of Wikipedia
Astronaut image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f9/CecilRhodes.jpg/170px-CecilRhodes.jpg
Portrait of Rhodes: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ec/Punch_Rhodes_Colossus.png/170px-Punch_Rhodes_Colossus.png
Rhodes the Colossus: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/88/Astronaut-EVA.jpg/250px-Astronaut-EVA.jpg

Do you know the amazing power of FREE?

A tribute to Netscape Navigator - a superior product who practically vanished in time because it did not realize the amazing power of Free

Here is a story, in which the characters will only be remembered by older internet users.

Once upon a time, not so long ago in a world before this one, there used to be two internet browsers. One was called Internet Explorer and the other's name was Netscape Navigator. Both were required to browse the internet, and soon there was a struggle for world domination between them. That was how the world's first browser war began.

As the battle raged, the creator of both browsers fought back hard and bitterly on all fronts. Netscape Navigator was often considered to be the superior of the two products, but in price and functionality the two were in a deadly race, made more difficult by the fact that the two products were roughly similar.

But then one of the two contestants pulled the ultimate trick: it made its product free. The effect was that of detonating an atomic bomb on a medieval battlefield. It simply wiped out the opposition within months. Who can ever win a sales war if the opposing party is giving its product away at no charge? By the time the court cases were over, it was too late already. Internet Explorer emerged the undisputed winner, and it remains the world's dominant web browser to this day. It wasn't the better of the two products. Only its business model was. And that's all that counted.

As for Netscape Navigator - when was the last you heard its name? Probably not in a long, long time...

This little story already illustrates the amazing power of Free.

But there are more facts to consider: How much does Google charge for a service which has streamlined the internet beyond comparison? The answer? Nothing. How much does the most popular social media service of all time - Facebook - charge for hours of entertainment? Nothing at all. The same goes for MySpace, and Twitter.

Or what about one of the world's most popular email service, Gmail? And have you considered the incredible amount of content that millions of users receive via YouTube or the unbelievable magic of Google Earth and Skype? What do these companies charge for their immensely useful content? You guessed it. Nada. Zero. Zilch. One hundred percent nothing!

But have the companies behind these services made millions, or even billions of dollars? The answer to that question is an unhesitating yes.

So how is it possible that businesses can make oceans of money by giving things away for free?

The answer to that question lies in the simply fact that they create revenues streams that accompany the main benefits that they give away for free. Historically, this kind of an economic model is rather rare. But not entirely. In a way, it as always been practised. And the proof of it can be found from any fisherman who will tell you: if need bait if you want to catch fish. You need to give in order to get. And if you want to get much, you have to be prepared to give a lot.

The question then is, can you think how your business can use the amazing power of Free?

Perhaps your business cannot benefit from the power of Free, but I do suspect that that kind of a business would be a very rare one indeed. It may not be practical to give away luxury cars for free, which would run on a proprietary fuel, from which the manufacturer would over time make much more money than he would ever make from mere car sales.

But there is a principle involved. Can you see that at least? If you can, then you may just be holding the key to your next million - or billion.

In our company's case, we deliver future technology to today's world. But in our industry, as in many others, there is also currently a war raging. It is called the "Bandwidth war." Everywhere in the world internet is getting faster and cheaper as different service providers are continuously forced to try and outdo each other in a competitive market.

So we have to ask ourselves - in dealing with a commodity of constantly declining profit, what will happen when somebody figures out a way to give away bandwidth for free? Or, as often happens, at a price that is so low that it is almost free?

Sometimes it is easier to predict the outcome of wars than people might think. And we believe that the outcome of his war would be something along the line of internet that costs so little that it is almost regarded as free. We are already planning of that world today. The power of Free can be your enemy or it can be the difference between owning a mill or owning a market. In the end, it is every  business' own choice whether he wishes to make use of the principle of free or not. Free is fun, but it is not for the feint-hearted.

I wonder how many people have ever thought about it this way.

The success story of how one maths teacher changed the lives of many

How one South African school is bringing the benefit of first class maths tuition to less sophisticated schools, using standard technology

Nobody can deny that mathematics is a key that unlocks some of the greatest career possibilities in the world. A good mathematical grounding can literally be a ladder to sky: the better the understanding, the more rungs in your ladder. The more rungs, the higher you can climb. And the higher you can climb - the more stars you can pick from future worlds.

Stars are like diamonds. And diamonds are money.

So how seriously is maths taken in schools? The sad answer is - not very. Unfortunately mathematics is often regarded like taking your car for a service. It is merely the unpleasant thing you have to go through in order to get good results further down the road.

Like millions of other kids around the world, I was in a good school who battled to get good maths teachers. And so for years we were taught maths by frustrated biology teachers, physical education teachers and even a language teacher. For the most part, these substitute teachers had very little love or appreciation for the beauty of mathematics, struggled to understand it themselves, and certainly did not manage to instil any kind of passion in us.

It stands to good reason that as the years went by our results became less and less inspiring. By the second-last year of school our results were in tatters. We had sunk to a hopeless depth. We were tired, uninspired and despirited. Mathematics had become a slow-motion nightmare from which we saw no escape. It was a quicksand of despair which was in the process of sabotaging our career dreams.

In my last exam I scored 37%. It looked hopeless.

But then something changed. Only about one in 2,000 oysters contains a pearl. And among a hundred teachers, there always seems to be one that is different. In my last year it was our good fortune to end up with such a teacher. Her name was Riana van Heerden - a very small, soft-spoken woman with a soft heart and an iron will.

When we walked into our classroom that first day, she told us these words that were inscribed on my mind:

"I know your records are dismal and that you probably have no hope of passing your final examinations. But I will make you a deal: If you do everything I say, and work very hard, then I will make sure that you will pass. Whatever it takes, you will pass mathematics - and you will very likely do well too. But I must warn you - you will work harder than you have ever worked before in your lives."

I never forgot those words. They haunted my mind for months as the last year of high school dissolved into endless nights of homework and extra classes. When the final examinations drew closer, we had done practically every exercise in the very thick standard issue maths handbook. We also did all the exercises in the old one from previous years. We had done all the exercises in all past examination papers. We did more exercises from other textbooks. And then we did some that the teacher invented herself. We did them all.

By the time the final examination dawned, we were more ready for it than for any other subject in our entire lives. Every problem seemed like an old friend - we recognized its type and nature, smiled, and solved it with quiet confidence. As far as I know, we all passed mathematics with exceedingly good grades. We walked out of school with grades that yielded bursaries and unlocked careers.

In one year one teacher took us from a class of spectacular losers to a class of impressive winners. Even those who had no mathematical talent at all.

And she taught us a lesson which has guided and shaped my life ever since: you can achieve almost anything in life - if you are prepared to work hard. But you may just have to work a lot harder than you can possibly imagine.

What this has given me over the years, is an unshakable belief that the unlikely is possible to those who believe. It is a matter of will, more than a matter of ability. It has enabled me to take on bigger challenges in life with self-confidence, because of that one lesson.

But she did more than that. By giving us a solid grounding in mathematics, she made it possible for us to become what we dreamed of becoming. How many people can claim to have dramatically changed the careers and future lives of a child?

This was my story. But every school has its own story. Most children still suffer with maths. And many teachers even struggle to either fully understand mathematics, or to teach it effectively and in a away that will inspire.

When I was at university a professor of hydraulic engineering made us first do exercises with chemical calculations. We could not understand why we had to do chemical calculations in a first year physical engineering class. His explanation was: I want to see if you understand the principle of percentages. Not one of us did. The system was trying to build walls where there were on foundations.

What the professor tried to show us, was that there are principles of mathematics upon which the entire universe is built - even life itself. If you understand the principles, then there is so much less you have to learn in life. You can figure a lot of it out yourself as you go along.

I have been in technological careers all my life. I have since seen that that everything in life is underpinned by mathematics: work, business, banking, personal finances. To the extent that children are equipped with good mathematical backgrounds, their lives can improve. Poverty can become prosperity. Struggling countries can become winning nations. And ailing economies can be made robust again.

But what do you do if only 1 in 100 teachers are unusually gifted in passing on the knowledge and inspiration of mathematics? The answer lies in technology. Today technology enables that one in a hundred teachers to be cloned and shared with dozens, or even hundreds of classrooms around the world. Through the use of video conferencing technology, a teacher like I had could rescue the grades, and turn around the lives of many other young minds.

Fortunately that kind of technology is already in use, it is affordable, and it is effective. And companies such as ours are excited at being able to help deliver it to school and learning institutions. Because that is the way to connect this world with the future, one bit and one byte at a time. Today a child can sit in a rural farm school classroom, and ask a question to a live teacher in another city. And a hundred other scholars in five other schools can benefit from the explanation given by the teacher.

With smart technology, the teacher can save the whiteboard solution with the click of a mouse, store in in the Cloud for future download, email it to her students, or let them copy it on flash disks. At home these children can replay the solution one step at a time - and refresh their minds to the logical progression of problem solving.

This is the future today. And for schools to have it now is not a matter of ability. It is a matter of will. All they need to do is ask for it. It may take a little bit of work and planning. But that was the lesson after all - almost anything is possible if you are prepared to put in a bit of work.

An example of how a maths lesson could be delivered with standard technology in use today. This is the kind of tools I wish I had when I was a kid.

How British schools are outsourcing maths tuition for better results

Further reading:
South African teachers battle to understand maths.
How online teaching is changing lives

How our company started: over a cup of coffee

Premium wireless telephony offers so much more than old-fashioned landlines. Here  we have a webcam's live video feed streaming onto our receptionist's touch screen display on her office phone. Have you taken your phone to the Cloud yet?

How do new business ideas start? This morning I heard the story of a multi-million dollar business that was started because a customer simply wanted to take revenge for having been humiliated. Another million dollar a year business started when someone bet a friend that he wouldn't be able to sell something useless.

Our company started in a coffee shop. Visit Coloroso coffee shop in Meade Street, George - and you will always find a selection of businessmen who are meeting to discuss some idea or project. It seems there is always someone demonstrating something to a customer or a partner on an iPad, or pointing to a graph on a laptop.

I had been frustrated by bad connectivity on the Garden Route for years. When I sold my previous business I was left with a few months to decide what I wanted to do next. I really did not feel like being bound to a traditional office environment again. I was looking for something new. I wanted my office to be wherever I was.

But there was a problem. Connectivity in George as slow and expensive, and aside from cell phone telephony, communication was still land-based. I wanted a customer to phone a switchboard and reach me on my cell phone as a phone extension, just as if I was in the office next door. Added to that, I have always been techno-fascinated. I like information. I consume large amounts of it. I needed a next generation of connectivity. Unfortunately that kind of solution did not exist.

I had been discussing this problem with everyone who had ears to listen. Even though the terms were hardly known back then, what I really wanted was cloud connectivity - and cloud-based telephony. The technology itself wasn't new. It had all been done before. Just not in our local market. I knew that if I wanted it, others would want it too. I knew it so strongly that I could not stop thinking about it.

One afternoon I meet for one of our friendly technology talks with one of the most experienced brains in the local IT industry. Francois Redelinghuys had been involved in wireless communication since the early days when he pioneered a long distance wireless solution between international drilling platforms at sea. And he had by far the most knowledge and experience of wireless telephony. He was also a businessman who had an unusually good imagination.

As we drank our Coloroso's superb South American coffee, we kept pouring out our frustrations.
"The market is being screwed," Francois grumbled.
"I know," I replied. "We all are. Why isn't somebody doing anything?"
I hesitated for a while and then pitched a question that had long been on my mind.
"Don't laugh now," I said, "just hear me out before you say something, even if it sounds dumb."
Francois listened keenly. I still remember it well because that conversation became engraved on my mind later. I have replayed it many times since.
Then I asked: "If money or regulatory restrictions were not an obstacle, what would it take to somehow uninstall and fix the  internet, and then roll out something that would be of international standard?"
Francois thought it over for a while, and then gave a surprising answer: "You needn't even go that far. The essentials are already in place."
I smiled. Francois smiled. And then we finished our coffee.

That might have been the end of that matter as many brainstorming sessions go. But ideas are like stars. Some streak through the night and leave but a brief show of light before burning out into a puff of gas. But some ideas are destined to live. They are the ones who actually reach earth and sometimes punch great big craters into the landscape. Two days later Francois called.

I can still hear his voice: "I have been thinking about it. We can do it..."

That is how our company started. Over a cup of coffee.

Since then, we have rolled out the most sophisticated network on the Garden Route, offering by far the fastest and most stable connectivity available. And it is delivered at the lowest cost in the market. We built the business on one pivotal principle: Give the market the kind of deal and the kind of services that we would have wanted ourselves. And that has worked ever since.

So where does a business that started over a cup of coffee end up one day? The sky is no limit. We are living in times of opportunity. It is a time in which the world is thirsting for ever more advanced ways to communicate and use the internet.

We still brainstorm business ideas at Coloroso. And there is no doubt that coffee will continue to fuel them to higher and higher levels. Beyond the stratosphere of today's limitations lie the stars. And we aim to be among them for a long time to come.

Where 14 Of The Top Internet Businesses Got Started

Be careful of trusting the "experts"

 (or should you?)

David Freedman is interviewed on the problems with expertise, specifically in the medical field

Years ago I often used to listen to the economic discussion hour on Classic FM while driving home from work. One night the presenter said something that I have remembered almost verbatim to this day:

"Research has shown that the experts are wrong 70% of the time. By that measure, wouldn't it make sense to subscribe to the very best advice - and consistently do the opposite? And with that thought I bid you all good night..."

Whether the statistic is correct is probably impossible to say for certain. I have lived long enough, however, to have come to see that the experts are wrong very often indeed. And that in many cases, contrarians are the ones that perform the best. They are the salmon that always swim against the stream of popular thought, of mass migration, and of accepted thinking. Those are the fish which, if not caught and eaten by bears when they clear the rapids, often tend to reach the choicest spawning grounds.

In this book, Wrong: Why experts keep failing us - and how to know when not to trust them, David Freedman makes some startling claims. For instance:

• He asserts that economists have found that all studies published in economics journals are likely to be wrong. 
• Similarly, he claims that tax returns that are completed privately contain far less significant errors than those prepared by professionals. 
• And about two-thirds of the findings that are published in renowned medical journals are refuted within a few years. 

This does tend to make one think. When asked when the right time to buy is, Lord Nathan Rothschild once made this famous reply: "When there's blood in the streets." In other words, doing the exact opposite of what everybody else would be doing.

I remembered this quote one day when I met a fairly young and very substantial landowner and asked him how it was that he was able to acquire such vast land holdings. He told me that when he was younger, he had a little bit of a capital surplus one season. It was around the time of South Africa's change of government in 1994 and a lot of people were selling out at rock-bottom prices in anticipation that the country would collapse.

He felt that it was worth taking a chance at least once. He did not really know much about investment, but he knew that hanging on to cash was a good way of losing it. So for lack of better options he bought land. And that was when he discovered that the best time to buy was when everybody is telling you that you'd be crazy to do so. In fact, by this rule, the more your bank manager advised against it, the greater your chances might be of being right.

And so it is with technology also. At www.cloudconnect.co.za where we deal with future technology, we often come across customers who insist that it is dangerous to dare to break with convention. Copper cables have delivered connectivity to the world for so long, they argue, that it must be good, even though it is ridiculously expensive and the service is shockingly bad. Land-based telephony is safer because that's what everybody uses, right? And why take the risk of doing more business online? Don't you still remember the dotcom crash in the world markets just a a few years ago?

How easy it is to see ghosts when one wishes to believe in them!

Plentiful are the fearful, and narrow is he vision of those who do not understand the future. The truth of the matter is that the future has always been a shark's tank. But it is often no more dangerous than the deadly quicksands of long-established convention. The only difference is that by chaining oneself to old-fashioned thinking in business, death comes far more slowly. In the end, it is in most cases a completely assured end.

That is not to say that one must abandon all good sense and reason. The principles of successful business and innovation have never changed since the beginning of time. The forces of economics never change. Only the application thereof. There is a very big difference, and those who do not understand it are destined to suffer an unexpected awakening.

But then there is also the matter of fun. Staying within the comfort zone that is created by the presence of a large herd of old-fashioned beasts may be many things, but it certainly lacks the fun factor. Being a bold adaptor of new solutions, new thinking, new technology, new way of applying old theory - this holds an element of excitement which simply cannot be had in the mud wallows of mindless convention.

In life it is a fact that anything that stops growing starts dying. Economics know that. Biologists affirm it also. Why do we so often forget it? What is it in us that makes us so desperately afraid to be contrarians? Perhaps that is why we attach such morbid value to the muttered prophecies of experts. After all, expert opinions so often support our own fears and give us all the reasons we need not to try something new.

I often think of myself as a salmon. And when I do, I'm sometimes reminded of at least one expert who admitted the truth to me. It was around a campfire one night when a good friend of mine - a medical specialist - leaned over and whispered to me: "Just between me and you - we don't have a cooking clue what we're doing..."

But that's OK. I have learned in life it's OK to not always know what you are doing. As long as you are doing something. 

Why close the doors when there are still shoppers?

These are recessional times. Unique economic times in which the vast majority of businesses are desperate for more sales. And yet, sometimes I get the impression that poor sales are well-deserved. Why close shop when there are still shoppers around?

I was at the local mall yesterday. The mall closes at 6 pm and I could not help but notice that at many shops the door keepers were standing by the entrances15 minutes before closing time already. Motivated and ready to slam the doors shut precisely at 6. In fact, so eager were several of these stores that they already had half their folding doors closed. This was despite the fact that the mall was still alive with shoppers.

Which made me stand back and think: "And I thought times were bad...?"

Possibly the mall has regulations about punctual closing of shops. Possibly the unions, overtime pay, and employee work hours had something to do with it. But that is not my main concern. My greatest concern of all is the symbolism of the act. In other words the desperate significance of the principle of minimum input. You know? The principle so popular among losers, which dictates that the best policy is to put in the smallest mount of effort, in order not to waste one's energy and risk not being rewarded for it. Who still thinks like that? Evidently many.

Who can still afford in these uncertain times to say no thank you to a few extra sales? Obviously a lot of businesses.

It made me think about all the stories my grandparents used to tell about the great depression. Times were so hard that my grandmother remembered collecting the sheep wool that was caught on barbed wire fences. This they carefully made up into bundles and sold to he wool merchants. No, they were no so desperate that they had to scrounge in order to live. But times were lean and wool prices were high. They simply believed in capitalizing on opportunity, even if it was small. It was a principle that they followed in life, and that principle made them prosper over time.

I know it makes little sense to keep a big store open for a few bucks in extra sales. However, symbolically-speaking at least, my belief is that when times are hard I would be open for longer than the opposition. I would encourage shoppers to stay beyond regular trading hours, in stead of switching the lights off and making that dreaded announcement: "Attention all shoppers. Please note that this shop is now closed. Our regular hours are from 9 till 6 and we look forward to seeing you again tomorrow. Please be so kind as to make your way to the checkout counters now..."

I don't want to come back tomorrow. I want to spend my money with you NOW!

There are businesses that close up in recessions. And then there are those that emerge from it stronger. Our business involves unique technology. We provide solutions that nobody else does. We deliver it by means that few people have tried. And we continually look for even more original ways than that. We like disruptive technology and disruptive ways of sharing it with the market. We believe in being part of the latter category of businesses: those that will grow and thrive even when times are bad.

When people are inconvenienced by the economy they will slam doors shut precisely at 6. But when they are hungry one day, I suspect they will close at 6:15. It will not be the act, as much as the symbolism of it that will impress me. The day I see that, I will know that the fundamental psychology of what is wrong in our economies maybe  be ready to change. That will be my signal of hope.

Why would stores be eager to close early when shops are closing at a rapid rate all around the world? The minimum input principle is symbolic of a cancer in the very thinking model of capitalism.