The month since I last wrote has been an extremely eventful period – possibly the most eventful I have had all year so far. We had local council elections in Uganda at which I participated, rain that has not let up since February of this year, a week long work trip that turned out to be quite intense, my daughters getting serious about swimming, and France winning the world cup (yey!!). Without a doubt though, the most significant event for me was the History Makers Training (HMT) – a 4 day boot camp I attended on building value-based, no excuse leaders for national transformation. I do not recall a time in my life that I have done anything more rigorous that what this boot camp entailed. I read 3 books cover to cover, watched 4 educational movies, attended 9 lectures, did 15 deeply analytical assignments that included reports on each book I read and movie watched – all of this on no more than 7 hours of sleep for the entire 4 days. It was a thrill, though I definitely used far less enthusiastic words to describe it by the morning of day 3. The boot camp is the final session of a leadership training program, the Oak Seed Executive Leadership Course, offered by the Institute for National Transformation Uganda – which was the most eventful thing I did last year. I had been warned beforehand that the boot camp was no joke; and quite frankly, I did not have to do it. It only became a mandatory part of the course from the 21^st class; mine was the 20^th class. I deliberately chose to go through the training, at an extra cost, just so I could examine whether I had prepared sufficiently for the mission I have embarked on – exercising people in the discipline of organization for national transformation. I wanted to leave no room to make excuses about what I knew or did not know about what I am capable of in the future towards accomplishing this mission. I was exercising what I have since codified into a key behavior that will characterize the enterprise I am now building – prepare for the end you expect.

A recent survey I reviewed on the nature and scope of 1,839 micro, small and medium enterprises in Uganda reported that over 80% were involved in 5 or more activities, 70% did not maintain full financial statements, over 80% were not affiliated with any industry or trade association, 86% did not offer training to their workers; 65% reported stagnant or decreasing sales year on year, or did not know!! These numbers tell a story – the majority of our enterprises do not behave as though they intend to become regional behemoths or influencers within the next 20, 50, 100 years. Their organization stats suggests that they have not prepared to scale beyond subsistence level for the foreseeable future.

If you are like me (and I kind of think you are if you’re reading this), you have a yearning to do works of grand scale and noticeable impact on the life of your community or nation; something your children’s children will look at as the standard to beat. You are probably not too far off from your starting line – the day you first opened your kiosk, started your consultancy practice, opened your own law firm, built your first property for sale, imported your first bale of clothes for re-sale, name it. Perhaps some of you have been in your trade for years now, still working out of that one location, with the same number of staff you opened up with, and are beginning to get restless about your enterprise not scaling. It’s not going to happen by accident. You have to prepare your organization to scale from as early as possible in your entrepreneurial journey. Building for scale will require you to build more than just a product or service for sale; you will need to build a system that enables your organization prosper far beyond the presence of any single leader and through multiple product cycles. It will involve no tiny bit of mindset change especially for us in Uganda (and much of Africa) – a transition from a conditioning towards running enterprise or initiatives for survival and subsistence to one of building legacy and philosophically inspired enterprises; a switch from time-telling to clock building as Jim Collins (Built to last) stated it. This will require you to learn how to build systems whose specific purpose will be to deliver your aspiration over the time period you foresee. We need to get from the place where your greatest creation is your product or service to the one where it’s the company itself. The general elements of the system you should be seeking to build to deliver such growth include the governing values/ behavior you intend your organization to be recognized by, a defined purpose/ general goal of the organization, the operating environment – selecting or building the right people, establishment of the right policies and standards aligned to your behavior; determining your medium term strategies and the infrastructure you will need to deliver them, establishment of the short term measures and disciplines (control system) to get you to those medium term goals. In his book “The four obsessions of an extraordinary executive”, Patrick Lencioni identifies this system building and maintenance to be the core preoccupation of executives who desire to build extraordinary enterprises. In his telling, such an executive is preoccupied with building and maintaining a cohesive team, creating organizational clarity, over-communicating organizational clarity and reinforcing organizational clarity through human systems. I recommend you read the book to learn more on this.

You may be wondering now, “how on earth do you expect me to spend time on such luxuries when it’s all I have to do to make rent each month, save enough to pay my children’s school fees, keep my home functional day to day and just barely avoid bankruptcy – not to mention meeting my supplier and tax payments and paying my staff?” In “Built to Last”, Jim Collins recounts how Hewlett Packard’s (HP) founders started their business working out of a garage, trying to make ends meet (and figure out what product to produce) but with an already established philosophy about the company they wanted to build that continually informed the system they constructed and reinforced as they grew. Sony Corp. had a similar tale. A few others he mentioned happened to be in more comfortable positions to have this conversation. But not one of the visionary companies he studied achieved that distinction without this preparation. To build like this takes time, persistent focus and a significant level of discipline to not be distracted. The starting point is with you now though. If you have acted on the conversation we last had on the importance of clarifying the purpose/mission/vision that informs the existence of your enterprise, you have taken the first steps towards the building of your system. Think more (and write as you go) on just how large and influential you wish your enterprise to get. I have set myself a goal of leaving an inheritance for 200,000 Ugandans at the time of my passing – in form of business enterprises directly employing and, through their trade, creating growth opportunities for other enterprises along their supply chains. Teaching the discipline of organization is one way I intend to make this possible. I have already outlined the core behaviors that will characterize this enterprise, thought about the individuals I would want to invite to hold shares in it, what its pricing and dividend policy will be, what kind of individuals I will invite to its Board, and what character of staff it will need and how I shall go about finding them. I have also designed one of the services I plan to offer. I expect the execution of this to take me about 10 years. Once I have done this, I will simply replicate this system for every other venture the enterprise will engage in until I have achieved the scale I have ambition to hit. I should be in position to project the enterprise to a distinct regional influence 20 years from now. For today, I have all of this written down so I never forget what I have set out to achieve. Doing this will take no small level of discipline – which is why I did the HMT. You can copy this too, and write down yours. Then we shall hold each other to account as to whether we are making good progress towards our goals.