About 15 years ago, when I was a university student in Mexico City, I was going to the dentist one day, and I got a text on my phone. It said I had won something and should respond to the text to claim my prize. I was super naïve, and I responded to the text. While sitting at the dentist’s office, I got a call from this guy saying congratulations. I was a winner in some promotions I didn’t even participate in (the first clue, this was a scam).
I speak with Entrepreneur and Philanthropist Mr. Kevaughan Graham this week on Dropping Bars. In this episode, Kavaughan dropped some incredible nuggets of wisdom with us, such as “You cannot do great things with basic people.”
I believe the best way to bring out a lesson and illustrate something is to tell a story. That’s why I like telling stories, especially stories of people who are doing great things. It is my hope that someone will consume those stories and get inspired. Maybe they have been on the fence about an idea for a long time and reading about someone who was in the same place as them and overcame can be the impetus they need to move forward. That’s why I am committed to seeking out Caribbean people doing great things in my eyes and sharing their stories.
About three weeks ago, I was at JFK International Airport awaiting a flight to Toronto. Since I had some time to spare, I decided to look around. I went into a store, and I saw a lovely bracelet. If I were a cartoon at that particular moment, everyone in the store would have been blinded by the brightness of the lightbulb that went off above my head. I thought to myself; my wife would love this! Satisfied by my excellent choice, my movement appeared to mimic that of Will Smith in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as I gleefully bounced with the bracelet to the store’s sales representative to make the purchase. She took the bracelet, looked at it, skimmed through a stack of papers, then said to me, “I don’t know the price of this.” At that point, I knew exactly how the Wile E Coyote feels when one of his anvil traps for the Road Runner backfires and gets him instead because I was crushed.
I wrote a post recently about the five domains of digital transformation, with customer behaviour being one of the five domains of strategy that is changing because of digital technology. In this post, which you can read, I spoke about how digital technology is changing how we connect and create value for customers. Traditionally customers were seen as mass markets; we made one communication message and sent it out to a broad cross-section of people. There was no level of differentiation; however, in the digital era, we are moving away from mass marketing to customer networks.
Ok people, big man and big woman thing now. At which point do we start seeing beyond the “Likes”? Hold on let me back it up like a dumper truck for a moment.
In the not so distant past, let’s say a mere 15 years ago, a few men and women controlled our access to the media. They decided what we saw, listened to and read, and it was a one-way conversation. If we wanted to get something out, we had to go through these gatekeepers.
As I look back on my life, I realized that at each stage I had some unique encounters that when put together with how I was able to come over helped shaped me into the person I am today. Today I want to share with you three of the most important lessons I learned in the last few years.
If you are Grenadian and have a Facebook account or WhatsApp on your phone, by now, you would have come across one of two songs or both. One a song by King Scholar called Pum Pum with the punch line being “Seethahall, he don’t like pum pum at all.” The second song, by a young soca artist, is called Vagina and the punch line is “Vagina me love, vagina me crave”.
Today on #HowTheyDidIt I talk to the award-winning Dominican entrepreneur Oudin Samuel. Oudin built a successful website management platform across the Caribbean region and North America. He has also won two regional awards one of them being the OECS 30 Under 30 Award. Read more about Oudin story.
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