Kenyan ‘Kollaboration’

I’ve just returned from a whirlwind tour of the US with a quick breeze through London on my return. I did manage to fit a number of new business meetings in, but this trip had a slightly different focus. This time I got to visit my old stomping ground at Dartmouth College along with visits to Harvard, MIT and Boston University business schools. It was a lot of travelling around, but it was really worth it.

Since we started out in Kenya we’ve had a lot of interest both inside and outside the country. Firstly because the whole outsourcing thing was brand new here back in 2004 and secondly because we are trying to do things differently from our global competitors by being much more entrepreneurial in how we operate. Alongside this, KenCall has been a constant force in attempting to catalyse BPO in Kenya – an ongoing but exciting challenge.

The entrepreneurial side of things is getting the most interest so far. In the early days it presented a great story – a little company with a foreign business concept trying to change a whole country’s mindset on outsourcing, customer service and so on. This is what attracted guys like Thomas Friedman to hop over to Kenya and write about our David and Goliath struggle in the New York Times.

Now we’ve seen some real success, we’ve been getting much more interest from the business schools like Harvard, MIT and Dartmouth. This is what my latest visit has been about; trying to convey what KenCall is doing so that MBA students can get some take-outs as to what creates business success in East Africa and other fast-developing nations. I tried but couldn’t write this down as a list so just had to tell them the story start to finish. We’re still learning ourselves but I hope some of our positive moves will filter down into the way these students do business in the future. Hopefully some of it will end up making waves in Africa too – what goes around comes around after all.

I guess what I’m trying to convey, is the importance of sharing knowledge about business failures, challenges and successes in a developing nation like Kenya. It’s all very well being the most successful contact centre in the country, but for real success, strident and entrepreneurial competition is needed. In any sector, businesses need to know that upstarts are nipping at their heels to make them run even faster. This way you continually increase standards, professionalism and innovation. At the same time, this helps to raise the profile of what’s going on. For example, imagine Silicon Valley with just a couple of IT companies – chances are you wouldn’t have heard of it.

In this spirit of collaboration and knowledge sharing, we are actively encouraging student exchanges and welcoming MBA students to visit KenCall. Last year the Harvard Business School covered our early challenges in a case study that is now part of the MBA curriculum and this year MIT plans to visit and develop its own case study teaching resource.

The more people that have access to this kind of information the more positive it will be for Kenya’s development overall – so have a read and tell us what you think!