Editor’s Note: This article was featured in Ventures Africa magazine February/March issue.

Lessons learnt from the digital revolution appear, on the surface, easy enough to catalogue, especially when writing about the successful disruptive strategies of entrepreneurs and startups in Silicon Valley and technology hubs across Europe. At this point, the world has heard so much about the market niches exploited that the resulting lessons seem obvious. Now that the digital revolution has advanced, creating complex business environments, I would assert that emerging markets also have numerous valuable lessons to teach the rest of the world.

As a restructuring consultant, reorganising underperforming companies back to profitability, I find myself working more and more with technology companies in mature markets, globally. Tech companies, online media, and software companies in particular, used to be the darlings of industry, somehow immune to the declining revenues experienced elsewhere during economic downturns. The industry was growing fast and, for many companies, profits were either abundantly present or on the visible horizon.

Today, this is no longer the case. Tech markets are crowded, and while profits accrue they are localised to a diminishing pool of major players. Many mature tech companies, once champions of flexible operating models, have now become rigid, believing that predictable processes (read overheads) help to contain order and deliver financial results.

As a consequence, overheads such as large management teams, excessive management pay, and large general administrative or finance functions, have outstripped the costs and financial benefits of research, development and innovation. These companies are now forced to restructure.

Cutting costs alone only buys limited time for companies needing to increase profits, and this is almost never the complete answer to performance improvement. An example comes to mind, which we will call “Company X” for the sake of anonymity.

Company X, an online technology company previously experiencing explosive growth, was now beginning to face heavy competition while the cost of customer acquisition increased, biting into profits. It had become clear that if nothing else prevailed, revenues and profits would continue to decline to a point that would precipitate further operating cuts and thus further headcount reductions.

While it is generally advised that tech companies focus 75 percent or more of their resources on the product and getting it to market, at Company X, 40 percent of the fixed costs came from overheads and non-core activities such as finance, admin, HR, IT and other management profligacy, due to an inability to work efficiently.

The bottom line: executives at Company X seemed more interested in building empires within their functions than on supporting the efficient release of top-notch products and services. This should never be allowed to happen.

Recently, I came across the jugaad principle – a simple concept bottled in India for world export. Colloquially, jugaad means “a creative idea, or a quick workaround to get through commercial, logistical, or law issues”. Its key principles include seeking opportunity in adversity; doing more with less; thinking and acting flexibly; and continuing to keep things simple and creative, even as companies mature.

This jugaad principle could have been coined in Africa, where entrepreneurs are increasingly finding ways to access and deliver services and products in the most creative and resourceful ways. Start-ups in Africa, such as Sproxil, which works to creatively eliminate the problem of counterfeit drugs, or Mobiashara, which provides an innovative mobile platform for commerce in areas with inadequate commercial infrastructure, are good examples of companies seeking opportunity in adversity. These entrepreneurs in Africa are sending out clear jugaad-principled messages: we can complain about a lack of commercial and financial vehicles or we can seize the opportunity in adversity and creatively service the landscape with a mobile platform; we can complain about poor health services and access to authentic drugs or we can help by reducing avenues for counterfeit drugs. This inspired approach can and should be extended into larger mature companies and industries globally.

While getting slow moving, monolithic companies to strip down their empires, go back to basics and embrace jugaad principles remains a challenge, here lies another opportunity for others to develop technology-enabled, competitively-priced services that entice the monoliths to exchange non-core services offered internally for superior outsourced ones. If the price and service is right, you could be killing two birds with one stone: creating the entrepreneur and simplifying the monoliths. Ideas anyone?

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