Brian Kazungu, 20/05/2023

Have you ever wondered why people do what they do? Have you ever asked yourself why some people do good things while others continue to do even the most despicable things on earth?

The secret to all this mystery is INFORMATION.

People don’t just do what they do, they follow a process. Whether it takes a few seconds, hours or days to do something, the action process remains the same.

The Action Process is made up of the following stages: Imagination, Thinking, Decision, and Action.

When you imagine something and then quickly decide and take action without critically analyzing the information you have, you are likely to contribute towards most of life’s tragedies, blunders and regrets that torment humanity from to time.

Most of the problems that are faced by people from all over the world, be it at work or at home are a result of the failure to objectively and open-mindedly process information before you commit to do something.

I can generally describe THINKING as the open-minded and objective processing of information towards decision making.

As such, when you want to do anything in life, you must think or process the information you have about what you are dealing with so you can make the right decision and take the right action.

Regardless of circumstances, you must be able to master the art of open-minded and objective processing of information since whatever you do, whether it’s a crime or a good deed, it is determined by access to information and the interpretation of that information.

I refer to information as merely a collection of signs and symbols that you use for decision making in the execution of your duties and responsibilities be it at home, at school, at work or anywhere else.

The way how information is arranged, packaged and transmitted determines how you interpret it, and the way how you interpret it determines the quality of decisions that you make and the action that you take.

Education, Religion, Parenting, Past Experiences, and Dreams as well as Gossip (Grapevine), Intelligence Service, Propaganda, Culture and Tradition etc. are some of the predominant sources of information that we have about ourselves and the world around us.

These sources of information determine what you consider to be good or bad or what you consider to be right or wrong. They determine what you choose to do and what you choose to ignore.

As such, the main difference between those who make smart (wise) decisions and those make foolish decisions is Information Processing or Thinking.

Without processing the information, you have through the act of thinking, you are bound to make abrupt and regrettable decisions out of excitement and ignorance, but if you think through a certain matter, you are bound to make an informed decision with lasting benefits.

When it comes to making wise decisions, knowledge on its own is not enough. It must be coupled with understanding in order for you to make informed decisions and act wisely.

N.B: Wisdom, Knowledge and Understanding – Knowledge simply means the possession of information, but wisdom refers to the understanding and correct application of knowledge.

It doesn’t matter whether you are a president, or you consider yourself to be a commoner, your actions are always based on information.

Whether you were forced or manipulated to do something or not – the answer remains the same – you used information to make a decision and that decision resulted in a certain act.

The thoughts and imagination you have are subject to your exposure to some information (knowledge) that you have about the world around you. This information is then used in the response to opportunities and threats as they unfold from time to time.

Please note that your actions are immediately influenced by two things: 1) Opportunities 2) Threats. Whatever you are doing in this life, whether good or bad, is based on whether you saw an opportunity or you felt threatened and thus your action was the response.

It is thus important to understand that it’s the information you have about yourself and the world around you which makes you to perceive something as either an opportunity or a threat.

In this regard, anything that disturbs your peace, joy and development is a threat and anything that promotes your peace, joy and development is an opportunity.

Threats can also be anything which harms you or takes away your life and in response, you can choose to fight or surrender. On the other hand, opportunities also refers to that which gives you a lease of life or which makes your life easy, and is thus worthy pursuit.

When you look at everything that has been said here so far, you can see that it is important for you to carefully think about something before you make a serious decision.

As such, you must understand that your choices, wishes, dreams, aspirations, fears and concerns are determined by the information you have or what you know about:

a) Yourself (your identity, ability, strengths and weaknesses),

b) Fellow human beings (their identities, abilities, strengths and weaknesses)

c) Nature (the benefits and dangers of water, land and air and the contents thereof).

It is this knowledge about yourself and the world around you which then determines your decisions, and these decisions are the ones which determine your actions.

If you have wrong information about yourself as well as about other people and nature, you will develop wrong imaginations which will unfortunately cause you to make wrong decisions and subsequently you will take the wrong actions.

This is why there is a battle for the control and interpretation of information on Earth either by governments, businesses, religions or even families.

Those that are in charge of information in any society do determine the reality of mankind.

You may not have the power to control the flow of information, but you must strive to learn the art of processing any piece of information that you come across before you make a decision.

The Smart Decision Handbook which I wrote is one good resource that can help you to master the art of thinking which I also loosely defined as the open minded and objective processing of information.

It is therefore important to identify mechanisms that help to define and determine the type, quality and quantity of information that is exchanged for decision making since people and their natural environment are always transmitting information.

This information must be correctly interpreted in order for you to take advantage of opportunities and to guard against threats as they unfold.

The sending, receiving and interpretation of information which takes place in any community determines the interaction between:

1) Men and Women 2) Children and Elders 3) Leaders and Followers 4) Natives and Foreigners 5) People and Nature etc.

As such, if you wrongly interpret the signs and symbols transmitted by people and nature, you will unfortunately make wrong assumptions and decisions and subsequently take wrong actions which then results in negative consequences.

Since we use information for decision making, it means that the same information must be scanned for impurities before being used to determine the next move. This therefore brings us to Data Integrity Analysis (DIA).

I describe Data Integrity Analysis as the systemic and systematic analysis of the intention and authenticity of the source, the path taken and the changes in the quality and package of information along the path from the sender to the receiver.

A Data Integrity Analysis is done in order to make sure that the correct information is used for the correct purpose using the correct channel.

Adapted from THE SMART DECISION HANDBOOK written by Brian Kazungu

Author Profile: https://www.amazon.com/author/briankazungu

Twitter – @BKazungu

Twitter – @BKazungu

Brian Kazungu, 13/05/2023

When we are talking about marketing, there are three interconnected words or issues that must be discussed in order for us to clearly understand this important business function.

Marketing – Selling – Sale.

Basically put, marketing means engaging in activities that makes your products and services appealing to your targeted clients.

Having looked at Marketing, let us now focus on the following terms: 1) Selling 2) Sale

Selling – offering or presenting products and services to clients so that they can buy at their convenience.

Sale – the actual exchange that happens between the buyer (customer) and the seller after meeting the conditions of a transaction.

As a component of marketing, we also have the field of advertising which means: to appealingly and accurately present a product or information about a product to your targeted clients in way that enables the selling process to achieve an intended sale.

Advertising can also be described as an appealing generic public display or customised private presentation of data about a product or service to a targeted audience in a way that arouses interest in order to create, maintain and promote a mutually beneficial transactional engagement.

We are looking at marketing because, generally, individuals and corporates engage in business in order to offer products and services to others in a way that enables and guarantees attainment or achievement of business targets at a profit.

As such, the failure to effectively market your products can thus interfere with profitability and hampers the attainment of your set goals.

Marketing on its own is an art that must be mastered, it’s a skill that must be learnt and it’s a profession that must be respected because it is an activity that makes sure that all the other aspects of business continues to operate fluently especially for mutual good.

In order to make the field of marketing clear, simple and easy, we must align it with the Mission Statement of your enterprise.

The main reason for such an alignment is that a Mission Statement helps you to run your business professionally and efficiently since it summaries your whole business and gives you a solid and clear picture that must guide you in your commercial activities.

More-so, a Mission Statement gives your company an identity and defines what your business is all about and what it is going to be in the future.

It is like a blueprint (map) of where the company is going and how it is going there.

The same Mission Statement defines who you want to be and highlights the unique products and services that you are going to offer and how you are going to achieve that.

You should not have a problem with coming up with your company’s Mission Statement because even as an individual you can have your personal Mission Statement in life.

I am going to demonstrate how to design or craft a Mission Statement so that it becomes easier for you to come up with one on your own especially towards helping you in designing effective marketing approaches.

Your Mission Statement should clearly show us three basic components namely:

1. Your target market.
2. The product or service that you are going to offer.
3. A unique way of presenting your product or service to your target market.

Let us say that our company is called SME Consultancy and it specialises in offering training material for small to medium enterprises.

Our Mission Statement would thus look as follows:

Mission Statement for SME Consultancy:

To provide effective and practical training material to the global small-to-medium enterprise community in a customised, easily understandable and practically usable format.

In this case the target market is the global SME community, the product or service is effective and practical training material while the unique way of doing it is to provide it in a customised, easily understandable and usable format.

On the other hand, my Mission Statement as Brian Kazungu is to provide management advisory services to entrepreneurs across the world through identifying, solving and eliminating administrative incapacities across the business sector.

In this regard my target audience becomes entrepreneurs all over the world, my product is management advisory services and I am going to do that by identifying, solving and eliminating administrative incapacities in the businesses that I engage with.

I believe that these examples have helped you to clearly understand the relevance of a Mission Statements in relation to the field of marketing, and I believe that you can now find it easy for you to come up with one for your own company.

We have highlighted that a Mission Statement is made up of three components which are:

1. The product/service – what is it that you want to offer?
2. The targeted market – who do you want to offer this product to?
3. The unique approach – how do you intend to effectively and profitably engage the market with your product?

Based on the above explanation, you can now see that a Mission Statement determines the marketing and selling techniques that must be employed towards achieving a sale.

You must also understand that market identification should precede product formulation and in between these two comes the approach that must be adopted for effective engagement.

Let me help you to clearly understand the logic behind the importance of designing a product after having identified a market as compared to doing it the other way round.

I am going to present a justification for my point based on the assumption that you want to run a professional, civilized and people centric institution.

The basis for saying that market identification precedes product formulation is based on the understanding that people in any environment are faced with two things namely;

1. Opportunities
2. Threats

It is these opportunities and threats that entrepreneurs respond to by crafting products and services that help people to efficiently and effectively react to the prevailing environment.

So basically, effective marketing starts with identifying opportunities and threats that are encountered by people in a given community and then crafting a mechanism (products and services) that enables them to seize these opportunities or to defend against these threats.

This angle helps you to be an effective marketer or salesperson as compared to an angle where you start with product formulation and then market identification.

Unfortunately, some companies correctly engage in business by firstly identifying a market and then designing and offering relevant products but later on end up concentrating more on the product than on the dynamic needs of the market.

Knowing people’s opportunities and threats helps you in coming up with the correct approach since you will be aware of their wishes and concerns in the pursuit of their goals.

This enables you to effectively package your promotional material in a way that quickly captures the attention of the target audience since people are generally emotionally attached to the issues that disturbs them as well as to those that gives them a sense of achievement.

Those issues that disturbs their peace and development are called threats and those issues that promotes their peace and development are called opportunities.

So, on this basis, you can see that marketing calls for you to have an observant mind that recognises various changes in people’s behaviour since it is this behaviour that influences or determines people’s expenditure.

At this point, you have to know that the behaviour which determines expenditure is influenced by what people love or fear relative to prevailing circumstances in their communities.

However, merely identifying opportunities and threats of a given society and then crafting a product in this regard does not automatically guarantee you a sale.

This is because you also need to craft a unique way of interaction and then approach the relevant people with what you have observed (their opportunities and threats) and what you have done about it (the solution).

Let us demonstrate this by giving examples.

If you run a company that offers accounting and company registration services, you need to ask the following questions and then use your answers as a guide in designing your general marketing approach or even in crafting your advertising campaign for that matter.

1. What is this (Product or Service)?

Company Registration

• When and why do people need it (Timing and Purpose)?

You always need a formally registered business if you want to professionally transact with those clients who value proper business procedures and this includes individuals, corporates, NGOs and even the government especially when responding to tenders.

N.B: These entities usually engage formally registered businesses for both insurance, auditing, tax, social responsibility and corporate governance purposes.

• What happens when they do not use this product/service (The Consequence)?

When a client does not use our service, in this case, if the potential customer does not get formally registered, he/she/they may lose out on the possibility of engaging high value clients who have a definite ability to pay and who can also sustainably utilise your products over a long time.

More so, your unregistered (informal) client misses out on eligibility to get loans for expansion and even for order financing. He/she is also likely to miss out on entrepreneurship related government grants and other funding opportunities especially from entrepreneurship centred NGOs and other business investors.

As such, when you approach an inspired and hardworking entrepreneur who is not formally registered, you must be able to enlighten him/her about what he/she is missing out if he/she chooses to continue trading informally.

After that, you must then inform this client that you can offer the service efficiently and affordably at his convenience and more so, you can emphasize that such a move helps them with eligibility for funding, loans and tenders that can help them to grow as a business.

You can actually look for companies that are regularly looking for the services that your potential client offers and then show him/her the requirements or rules of engagement.

When that is done, you can then advise them that once formally registered, they also stand a chance to supply their goods or services to such financially stable and reputable clients who can increase their chances of success and boost their business profile.

In real terms, you must capture the attention of your targeted clients and develop in them an interest to know more about your products and to create in them a burning desire for experiencing the reality of what you said that your product can do.

Adapted from The SME HANDBOOK written by Brian Kazungu

Amazon Book Link: https://amzn.to/3geP4ux

Author Profile: https://www.amazon.com/author/briankazungu

Brian Kazungu, 13/05/2023

Managers are the link between the business owner, subordinates and other stakeholders and therefore, they are instrumental in determining the organisational mood which the subordinates can reflect to those stakeholders in turn.

Before we engage in a detailed discussion of how a manager contributes to the success or failure of an organisation, we need to firstly understand the art of management.

I can describe management as the effective, progressive and harmonious integration of factors of production towards attainment of a set objective.

Management can also be described as a process of accomplishing an objective through planning, organising, demonstrating, controlling, coordinating and continuous maintenance and upgrade of the available systems and resources.

This means that for a goal to be met, someone has to do the planning and this entails putting mechanisms in place in order to take advantage of the opportunities and guard against threats.

After opportunities and threats have been identified, resources have to be put in place in a way that ensures the smooth flow of activities towards achievement.

This brings us to Organising, which is the correct positioning of every resource in its respective place in order for it to achieve its intended objective.

When these resources have been put in their respective positions for generating maximum benefit, there has to be a mechanism to ensure that every resource is measuring up to the set expectations.

If there is a discrepancy, an investigation has to be done to find out the causes thereof and then make the necessary adjustments. This is called controlling.

People with the requisite skill and expertise must be selected to make sure that they set the pace and mood for achievement. This setting of pace and creating the good mood towards achievement of goals is called demonstrating.

The people in an organization and other resources must be made to work together in a way that minimise friction and enhances efficiency regardless of inherent differences. This is called coordinating.

Put simply, a manager is a person who plans, organises, demonstrates, controls and coordinates the activities of a given entity for it to achieve its goals as explained in detail above.

Poor remuneration to such an individual can lead to poor products and services as well as inefficiency which in turn affects the profitability and reputation of an enterprise.

You must always bear in mind that a business’ profitability hinges on increasing revenue and minimising costs but this must not be done at the expense of the relevant stakeholders.

The methods of minimising these costs must be approached with care since sometimes cost reduction in the form of poor salaries for management can lead to poor product quality and poor service delivery as well as unscrupulous activities.

Some entrepreneurs tend to enjoy the good life brought by increased business activities while forgetting those people who make it happen.

As the business grows, the span of control increases and therefore the proprietor should find it worthwhile to proportionally reward those in charge of the business activities.

When the managers feel neglected and deceived from not receiving a commensurate reward, they may reduce their effort or quit the organisation.

When this happens the business will start to feel the pinch as most managers have an influence on staff members and stakeholders.

Poorly paid managers can be the most dangerous people in the organisation since they can engage in corrupt activities and can manipulate organisational data for their own benefit in a way that is difficult to trace especially when there are no proper systems in place.

The three most common routes that poorly paid managers can take in an organisation are:

1) To quit the job

2) To engage in corrupt activities

 3) Poor performance.

Whichever route is taken is equally dangerous and can quickly lead to a company’s closure.

When a manager quits, this can result in losing valuable expertise that was very instrumental in propping the business forward and this might cause you to engage the services of an inexperienced or unqualified individual.

This engagement of a wrong or poor management team is dangerous to the wellbeing of an enterprise because of its lack of the necessary tactics to plan, organise, coordinate, demonstrate and control the organisation towards achievement.

According to David Skok, five time serial entrepreneur turned Venture Capitalist at Matrix Partners, a poor management team is one of the reasons why Start-ups fail as described below.

Poor Management Team: An incredibly common problem that causes start-ups to fail is a weak management team.  Weak management teams make mistakes in multiple areas:

• They are often weak on strategy, building a product that no-one wants to buy as they failed to do enough work to validate the ideas before and during development. This can carry through to poorly thought-through go-to-market strategies.
• They are usually poor at execution, which leads to issues with the product not getting built correctly or on time, and the go-to market execution will be poorly implemented.
• They will build weak teams below them. There is the well proven saying: A players hire A players, and B players only get to hire C players (because B players don’t want to work for other B players). So the rest of the company will end up as weak, and poor execution will be rampant. (Why Startups Fail by David Skok).

So, as an entrepreneur you must learn to value your management team and make sure that you reward them adequately when the business is registering success. Those good managers that you tend to lose because of poor working conditions are likely to end up working for a rival company or they can start a rival company on their own.

In most of such instances these managers have been known to move along with their subordinates and customers in one way or the other.

So, this development has got multiple ripple effects which would be difficult to stop but this situation can be corrected by continually reviewing the benefits of the people who make the business to grow.

When they feel neglected and there seem to be no platform for addressing these issues, these managers can somehow expressly or implicitly connive with the subordinates on a number of issues which would affect the company.

You must therefore be humane, considerate, focussed and disciplined in your business affairs because there are always people who are watching and getting ready to take advantage of your weaknesses and oversight.

Although the issues of management salaries and benefits is overlooked in some start-ups, it must however be noted that it can really affect the business dramatically.

As a business owner, you must understand that when business is expanding it is an added burden to those who manage it and therefore they also deserve a relatively added benefit for the added tasks.

The people involved in overseeing the operations and expansion of the enterprise must also be made to feel recognised in the company’s achievements.

When such people feel neglected in an environment where there is competition they are likely to be lured by either new players or even by big players who would want to expand in the same market.

You must understand that managers are always subject to regular temptation by conmen, rival companies and other various stakeholders.

As such, they should therefore be made to see the benefit of defending the company through thick and thin by receiving their dues and being treated with respect.

Adapted from The SME HANDBOOK written by Brian Kazungu

Amazon Book Link: https://amzn.to/3geP4ux

Author Profile: https://www.amazon.com/author/briankazungu