Part 1: Boring Economics

I dropped economics in secondary school and chose further mathematics instead. At the time, economics felt abstract. It bored me to death. I have since had to take courses on economics at post-graduate level. And I think it is one of the most practical subjects to understand.

A few days ago I overheard a conversation in a supermarket. Someone was complaining about the price of petrol. The price had gone up again, and the explanation came quickly.

“Dangote is at it again.”

Their reasoning was simple. What does a war in Iran have to do with petrol refined in Lekki? The conclusion was that the usual suspects were simply taking advantage of the masses.

You hear this kind of argument everywhere.

It is not confined to the beer parlour or the street corner. You hear it in supermarkets, in taxis, in WhatsApp groups, and sometimes even in places that are supposed to be centres of learning and policy.

We argue constantly about the economy, yet we rarely understand the mechanisms that shape it. And that misunderstanding is not harmless. When people cannot see the system that produces economic outcomes, they begin to look for villains instead. Price increases become conspiracies. Currency movements become manipulation.

The difficulty with these explanations is that prices rarely exist in isolation. Even when fuel is refined locally, the forces that shape its price remain global. Crude oil prices are set in international markets. If they had to import crude oil, shipping costs move with global logistics conditions.

This is not unique to Nigeria. The economist Bryan Caplan argues in The Myth of the Rational Voter that economic misunderstanding is widespread even in wealthy democracies; voters routinely misunderstand trade, markets, and price mechanisms.

Advanced economies possess a stabilising layer. Independent central banks, credible statistical agencies, professional civil services, and policy institutions anchor economic decisions in reality. Even when public opinion drifts, technocratic institutions can pull policy back toward economic constraints.

In many developing countries that corrective layer is weaker than it should be. Politicians are as economic-illiterate as the people they lead, and they keep interfering with technocrats who might otherwise stabilize policy. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson make a related point in Why Nations Fail. When elites misunderstand how economic institutions function, development suffers.

Economic development depends not only on resources or geography. It depends on whether a society develops a shared understanding of how its economy actually works.

This is where Nigeria struggles most visibly. Public debates frequently swing between contradictory instincts, higher government spending with lower taxes, more jobs alongside policies that make business increasingly difficult. Individually these preferences are understandable. Together they violate the constraints of the economic system.

Nigeria’s economy is complex. But complexity is not the same as mystery. The economy is not chaos. It can be understood as a set of interacting systems that govern the flow of production, money, labour, and capital.

Once you see the structure, economic events stop feeling random. They begin to look like symptoms, traceable back to causes.

Part 2: Two Engines

Nigeria’s economy runs on two engines at the same time. The domestic engine is what happens inside the country: production, employment, credit conditions, government spending, and the decisions of the Central Bank of Nigeria.

The global engine is what happens in the wider world: oil markets, international capital flows, and the interest rate decisions of the Federal Reserve.

Most Nigerians focus on the domestic engine when thinking about the economy. That instinct is understandable. But the global engine is equally powerful, and it operates whether or not anyone is paying attention.

A decision made in Washington can influence the cost of borrowing in Lagos. A shock in global markets can reduce the capital available to Nigerian businesses.

Both engines feed into the six systems that actually drive the economy.

Part 3: Six Systems

System 1: The Production System

The production system is the real economy, where goods are grown, made, and delivered, and where services are provided.

The broadest measure of this system is GDP, the total value of goods and services produced in the economy over a given period. When GDP grows, the economy expands. When it contracts for two consecutive quarters, economists call it a recession.

But GDP is an average, and averages are deceptive. The economy can be growing on paper while most people feel poorer. If growth is concentrated in one sector while agriculture and manufacturing stagnate, the headline number flatters the reality on the ground.

This is why economists also track sectoral growth rates; how fast each part of the economy is expanding or contracting relative to the whole.

Agriculture employs the largest share of Nigerians and determines food supply. When farming is disrupted by insecurity, infrastructure failures, famine or shortages of inputs, food inflation often begins there, in the farms.

Manufacturing converts raw materials into finished goods. But Nigeria’s manufacturing base has long been constrained by unreliable electricity, high logistics costs, and dependence on imported inputs that become more expensive whenever the naira weakens.

Services: telecommunications, banking & finance, retail, transportation, healthcare, and education, account for the largest share of GDP. But service activity depends heavily on household purchasing power.

Beneath all of this sits the informal economy, which employs the majority of Nigerians. Street traders, artisans, transport operators, and small-scale service providers form the real labour market. Most are there because formal opportunity is scarce.

System 2: The Employment System

Employment is the bridge between economic activity and everyday life. Production creates output, but employment converts that output into income and distributes it across households.

Nigeria’s labour challenge is not only unemployment but underemployment. Many people work, but not in jobs that fully use their skills or generate stable income. A university graduate selling phone accessories is technically employed. The economy has not absorbed their full potential.

Real wages, adjusted for inflation, determine whether workers are actually gaining or losing ground. If wages rise ten percent but inflation rises twenty percent, purchasing power falls even when the payslip shows more money.

Employment is the human summary of everything happening elsewhere in the economy.

System 3: The Money and Credit System

Money and credit form the circulatory system of the economy. Without them, production cannot be financed, businesses cannot expand, and economic activity stalls.

When credit flows freely, the economy moves. When credit tightens, everything slows.

The Central Bank of Nigeria sets the Monetary Policy Rate, the benchmark from which commercial lending rates are derived. When inflation rises, the central bank typically raises interest rates to slow demand and stabilise prices.

But higher rates also make borrowing more expensive for businesses and households. It means that investments are deferred and hiring slows. The tool that fights inflation also restrains growth.

In Nigeria inflation is often driven by supply-side forces such as currency depreciation, fuel costs, or agricultural disruption rather than excessive borrowing. When rates rise in response to supply-driven inflation, businesses feel the pressure even though credit was never the original problem.

System 4: The Fiscal System

The fiscal system is the government’s financial architecture, how public money is raised, allocated, and managed.

In Nigeria it is dominated by oil.

When oil prices are high and production is stable, government revenue rises and public spending expands. When prices fall or production is disrupted, revenue contracts sharply across all levels of government.

Federal allocations get shrunk. State governments struggle to pay salaries. Nigeria’s spending has historically been dominated by recurrent costs such as salaries and debt service rather than capital investment. So when revenues decline, infrastructure spending is cut first.

Public debt adds another pressure. When Nigeria borrows in foreign currency and the naira weakens, the local currency cost of repayment rises automatically. Debt service already consumes a large share of government revenue. Currency depreciation makes that share even larger.

System 5: The External Account

The external account describes Nigeria’s economic relationship with the rest of the world, particularly the flow of foreign currency into and out of the country.

Nigeria requires foreign currency to import many of the goods its economy depends on: fuel, machinery, pharmaceutical inputs, food commodities, and industrial materials. Most of those dollars come from crude oil exports.

When oil revenues are strong, dollar supply is adequate, foreign reserves accumulate, and the central bank has the capacity to stabilise the naira.

When dollar inflows weaken, reserves fall and the naira comes under pressure. The exchange declines. A weaker naira raises the cost of imported inputs across the economy. Those costs move through supply chains and eventually appear in the prices people pay.

Remittances from Nigerians abroad provide a second important source of dollars. Unlike oil revenues, remittances tend to remain relatively stable and often increase during difficult periods.

The opposite movement also occurs through capital flight, when businesses and households move savings into dollars or foreign accounts during periods of uncertainty. Individually this behaviour is rational. Collectively, it reduces the dollars available in the economy and intensifies pressure on the naira.

System 6: The Global Capital System

This system operates largely outside Nigeria but shapes its economic conditions continuously.

Global investors move capital across countries in search of returns. Two signals strongly influence those movements.

The first is interest rates set by the United States Federal Reserve. When American interest rates rise, investors can earn higher returns on safe US assets. Capital that had previously flowed into emerging markets begins to move back toward the United States.

Countries like Nigeria experience this as reduced investment inflows, higher borrowing costs, and additional pressure on their currencies.

The second signal is global financial uncertainty, often measured by indicators such as the CBOE Volatility Index. When uncertainty rises, investors tend to move their capital into safer assets and withdraw funds from riskier markets.

Economists increasingly describe this dynamic as the global financial cycle. Capital expands and contracts in waves, often driven by financial conditions in major economies.

Part 4: How the Systems Connect

These systems do not operate independently. They form a chain.

When global financial conditions tighten, foreign investment slows. Dollar inflows weaken. Reserves come under pressure and the currency depreciates.

A weaker currency raises import costs and inflation rises. The central bank raises interest rates to stabilise prices. Borrowing becomes more expensive. Businesses slow investment and hiring.

Household incomes stagnate. Consumption weakens. Demand in the production system falls. If oil revenues are also declining at the same time, government finances weaken just as the shock arrives.

What appears to the public as disconnected economic events is often a transmission mechanism moving through the system.

Nigeria has experienced this sequence repeatedly across economic cycles. The actors change. The mechanism does not.

Seeing the structure changes how you read economic news. Most economic headlines are signals about one of these systems. Once you know which system is moving, and why, the noise begins to resolve into something legible.

The economy is not a conspiracy. It is a system. And systems, once understood, become readable.

Production creates value. Employment distributes income. Capital finances activity. Fiscal policy allocates public resources. The external account stabilises trade. Global capital determines investment flows.

1. Silicon Valley: An Ecosystem View

Most startup analyses begin and end at the firm.

Did they raise capital?

Did they survive?

Did they become profitable?

How much was the return to investors?

What about founder outcomes?

These are the primary lenses. And they are very important. But when we move a step further they are incomplete.

When we talk about Silicon Valley, we point to trillion-dollar companies. But few people have heard of how the Valley was actually built. An older man born in 1957 in that area told me the story a fews ago. And I have was fascinated.

In 1957, eight engineers left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory and formed Fairchild Semiconductor. Fairchild did not just manufacture chips. It concentrated talent. Inside that firm, people learned how to scale semiconductor production, raise venture capital, and run high-technology organizations. Then they left and did it again.

From Fairchild came Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.

But more importantly, from Fairchild came the capital foundation of the Valley. Eugene Kleiner, one of the original Fairchild founders, started Kleiner Perkins. Don Valentine, Fairchild’s head of sales, started Sequoia Capital.

Before them, technology startups relied on East Coast bankers. Bankers understood balance sheets. They did not understand silicon risk. Kleiner and Valentine were the first VCs local to the valley. They were operators funding operators.

Kleiner Perkins seeded Sun Microsystems, Netscape, Genentech, Amazon, and Google.

Sequoia backed Apple, Cisco Systems, Oracle, Yahoo, Paypal, Airbnb, Stripe and WhatsApp.

They took the operational density of a single company and turned it into the circulatory system of a geography.

Fairchild eventually declined, but Silicon Valley thrived. The ecosystem is a different unit of progress.

Forty years later, PayPal received early backing from Sequoia and carried that operator-led capital model into the internet era. It survived fraud wars and operational chaos before being acquired by eBay in 2002. But the acquisition was not the story. Its alumni went on to found Tesla, LinkedIn, YouTube, Palantir Technologies, Yelp, SpaceX, Affirm, Yammer and others. PayPal is valued today at $60-70 billion. The companies founded by the early alumni are valued at roughly north of $1.5 trillion dollars.

The ecosystem view is that the firm matters. But in the long term, its impact on the ecosystem matters even more.

2. E-commerce in Nigeria: An Ecosystem View

When we evaluate Jumia or Konga, we default to the same firm-level questions.

But in the early 2010s, large-scale e-commerce was not operationally real in Nigeria.

Customers were skeptical of remote payments. Last-mile delivery systems did not exist. Digital demand generation at scale was new. Marketplace coordination across multiple cities was largely untested. Early platforms had to solve problems that did not previously have local playbooks.

They had to train customers through repeated transactions. They had to experiment with logistics models under poor infrastructure. They had to design trust mechanisms like payment on delivery. They had to build internal operator density from scratch.

That learning did not disappear.

Employees left and joined logistics firms, fintech companies, retail chains and new startups. Customers who placed their first successful online order did not revert to pre-digital behavior. Operational templates were discovered. Failure patterns were mapped. Trust baselines shifted. The environment changed.

So much has been written on the Jumia Mafia, but here I will focus on customer education and the building of trust.

3. Schwartz’s Pyramid of Awareness & The Education Tax

Markets do not begin fully formed. They have to be constructed in the mind before they function in reality.

Eugene Schwartz described this progression through what is often called the Pyramid of Awareness. Customers move through stages:

Unaware.

Problem-aware.

Solution-aware.

Product-aware.

Most aware.

In mature markets, most consumers are already solution-aware. They know e-commerce works. They are simply choosing between platforms.

In early markets, the constraint is different.

When large-scale e-commerce launched in Nigeria, the dominant constraint was was awareness and trust.

Customers had to move from:

“This sounds risky.”

to

“This might work.”

to

“This works for me.”

That transition is expensive. It requires marketing intensity, operational reliability, repeated successful transactions, and public absorption of failure.

Millions of Nigerians placed their first online order through early platforms. That first successful delivery permanently expands behavioral possibility.

E-commerce moves from abstract theory to lived experience. Future companies inherit that shift. They do not need to prove that online ordering works. They only need to prove that they execute it better.

4. Payment on Delivery: Engineering Trust in a Low-Trust Market

In low-trust environments, innovation is behavioral before it is technological. Payment on delivery was not a convenience feature.

It acknowledged reality. Customers feared fraud. Digital payments were uncharted territory.

Consumer protection systems were weak. And there was always a risk of bad actors.

Rather than demand full upfront trust, early platforms absorbed operational complexity.

Deliver first. Collect later.

This simple design choice did three things at once.

It reduced perceived risk for first-time users. It accelerated category education. It created repeated successful experiences that gradually normalized remote commerce.

Trust was engineered through the process. And once customers experienced reliable delivery enough times, the baseline shifted. Subsequent companies entered a market that was already more trusting than the one that existed before.

5. An Ecosystem View: Capability Compounds

Capability compounds.

Jumia built scale on Payment on Delivery. That decision unlocked trust. It moved customers. It expanded the market. But scale built around a solution creates dependence on that solution.

Customer expectations harden. Operational systems optimize. Fraud controls, routing logic, working capital cycles, all adjust to that architecture. This is path dependence. The bridge that delivered trust is no longer temporary. If Jumia removes PoD, revenue will likely fall.

Meanwhile, new entrants enter a partially educated market without carrying that legacy structure. They push upfront payments and they inherit trust without inheriting constraint.

Today, even a random foreign seller can enter the Nigerian market, demand upfront payment, and operate at scale, because the customer has already been educated.

Thousands of SMEs sell through WhatsApp and Instagram. Delivery across cities is normal. Remote payments are routine. None of this was structurally normal fifteen years ago.

Someone moved first. The pioneers absorbed the skepticism and they absorbed the cost of education. Now the firm’s financial return is one metric. The market that becomes possible afterward is another.

Part I: The System

W. Edwards Deming argued that 94–96 percent of performance comes from the system, not the individual. It is easy to gloss over his argument.

A friend of mine was a rainmaker in a second-generation bank. Starboy. Targets bent around him. Corporate deposits. Structured deals. Big clients. When numbers were tight, management called him. He understood credit. He understood politics. He knew how to move files through committees. He could close.

Then a fintech recruited him. Higher upside. Faster growth. Less bureaucracy. He was bored, so he moved.

Six months in, the magic slowed. Same man. Different results.

What changed?

At the bank, he was backed by a strong balance sheet, flexible pricing, deep product suites, brand trust, and institutional gravity. At the fintech, margins were thinner. The cost of capital was higher. Credit models were rigid. Risk tolerance was tighter. The brand carried less weight. Product options were narrower.

His skill did not disappear. The system changed. In one case, he had system leverage. Talent matters, but it converts into outcomes only within an enabling system.

The system always wins.

Part II: Five Dimensions, Not Two

Most people divide work into two categories: strategy and execution. That division is too crude.

Work is layered.

Some work sets direction. Some work is design. Some work aligns movement. Some work builds new capability. Some work runs existing capability. These are not job titles. They are dimensions.

Hierarchy distributes authority. It does not determine the layer of work being performed.

There are five dimensions of work. Strategy. Design. Coordination. Projects. Operations. When we collapse all of that into “strategy versus execution,” we lose precision. And when leaders lose precision, they mistake activity for progress.

A CEO can spend a day doing operations. A product manager can spend a day shaping strategy. Labels do not determine the dimension.

Performance is the movement of intention across five dimensions. Failure is distortion across them.

Part III: The Upstream Layers

1. Strategy: Direction Under Uncertainty

Strategy is constrained intent. It answers: What are we trying to achieve, and what are we willing to sacrifice to achieve it?

If nothing is eliminated, there is no strategy.

Strategy defines the playing field. It sets the boundaries within which every other dimension operates. When strategy is vague, downstream functions invent their own meaning. Fragmentation begins at the top.

Strategy shapes the work before the work begins.

2. Design: Form and Architecture

Design converts intent into structure.

Externally, it defines what we build: products, services, value propositions.

Internally, it defines how we deliver: workflows, incentives, structure, policies, decision rights, information flow.

Design encodes behavior. Incentives shape choices. Structure shapes outcomes. Culture is repeated architecture.

The governing design principle is simply to make the right action easy and the wrong action hard. Most downstream pain is design failure, wearing an execution mask.

3. Coordination: Alignment of Purposeful Agents

Organizations are not machines. They are collections of intelligent, self-directed humans. Alignment is not natural. It must be constructed.

Coordination synchronizes timing, sequencing, dependencies, and decision rights. It subordinates local optimization to system optimization.

Strategy sets direction. Coordination sets rhythm. And without rhythm, direction collapses into noise.

Part IV: Two Kinds of Execution

Every organization runs two paths at once: running the business and changing the business.

4. Projects: Building New Capability

Projects are temporary risk containers designed to produce permanent capability.

A new product. A new system. A new market entry. A new structure.

Projects absorb volatility so operations can remain stable. And when projects never land, you get innovation theater. When operations absorb unfinished change, you get burnout.

Projects build the future.

5. Operations: Running Existing Capability

Operations delivers consistency, cadence, quality, and feedback.

Strategy operates at the level of intent. Operations operates at the level of constraint. If operations struggles, something upstream failed. And when leaders ignore operational feedback, they drift into narrative delusion.

Operations is where system-truth becomes visible.

There are two coherent flows of work.

Strategy → Design → Coordination → Operations.

Strategy → Design → Coordination → Projects.

One flow runs current capacity. The other creates new capability.

Part V: System Coherence and Upstream Correction

Last week I argued that functions are a myth. A strong sales team cannot rescue a broken portfolio. A disciplined finance team cannot compensate for an incoherent strategy.

When a result is missed, the instinct is to exert pressure on the operations layer — the Starboy. Work harder. Stay later.

But if performance is a translation problem, failure rarely originates where it surfaces.

The leader’s job is not just to intensify pressure downstream. It is to diagnose the distortion upstream. Most organizations lack the discipline to move upstream. Causality flows downstream, and correction must move upstream.

When operations fail, examine the operations layer, but also check the design. Are incentives misaligned? Are tools inadequate? Is the workflow fighting the worker?

When projects stall, examine coordination. Were dependencies synchronized? Were decision rights clear? Was the sequencing disciplined?

When coordination breaks down, examine design and strategy. Is the structure ambiguous? Are priorities conflicting? Did we attempt to align around a direction that was never truly chosen?

When Design produces a misfit, examine Strategy. Did we define trade-offs? Did we choose what to sacrifice? Or did we attempt to be everything at once?

So, the real question is not always who missed the number.

It is which dimension broke first.

Part I: Local Optima

I recently came across an email from Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott explaining internal tensions at OpenAI. And what led to the ousting of Sam Altman. He wrote:

“I could tell you stories like this from every place I’ve ever worked, and it boils down to, even if you have two important, super successful things you’re trying to work on simultaneously, folks rarely think about the global optima. They believe that their thing is more important, and that to the extent that things are zero-sum, that the other thing is a cause of their woes.”

That dynamic is universal.

Large systems are built from smaller systems that work. But strong functions do not automatically translate into organization-wide performance.

I used to wonder why.

The culprit is the Myth of Functions.

It is counterintuitive. But when competent people optimize for their local goals, they constrain the business. Sales optimizes for top-line revenue. Finance optimizes cost control. Marketing optimizes lead volume. Operations optimizes for unit efficiency.

Each leader defends a pristine dashboard. Each function improves its own metrics.

Locally, performance rises. Globally, coherence falls.

What is optimal for the part is often parasitic for the whole.

Part II: Local Optima and Politics

Local optimization persists because it is politically rational.

Power is vertical. Career progression is vertical. Functions are not only skill containers, but are also power structures. Within that context, it is rational to win locally even if the system suffers.

I recently reviewed a business where the friction was visible from the parking lot.

Consider what was happening inside their order-to-cash cycle, the subsystem that carries a customer from signed contract to collected revenue.

Sales closed deals with non-standard payment terms to hit quarterly targets. Finance, protecting margins, flagged those contracts for review, adding three to five days before invoicing even began. Operations, measured on unit efficiency, batched fulfillment weekly instead of processing orders as they arrived. Logistics, optimizing route density, held shipments until trucks were full.

Each decision made sense locally. Together, they broke the promise. The customer who signed expecting delivery in two days received their order in ten. No one violated policy. No one failed their KPI. Every function did its job. Yet the system failed.

Then we looked at how their OKRs were structured. Sales targeted quarterly revenue with no constraint on deal structure. Finance targeted DSO reduction to 14 days, penalizing slow-collecting contracts. Operations targeted a 15% improvement in fulfillment cost per unit, rewarding batching. Each OKR was reasonable in isolation. Together, they created a system where the customer’s needs became an afterthought.

The incentives required internal competition. For one team to hit its targets cleanly, another team had to absorb friction. Star performers were emerging by exploiting bottlenecks, not by resolving them. A star performer in a broken system is often just a symptom of a deeper design failure.

Leadership had engineered it. Because what you measure is what you manufacture. What you reward is what you reproduce. If you want folks to optimize for the system, you must bake in incentives that reward that behavior.

Part III: Containers vs. Subsystems

The deeper issue is not that functions behave tribally. It is that we have misidentified what functions actually are.

We have confused functions with subsystems.

Functions are containers. Sales, marketing, supply chain, finance, HR, product, engineering, design. These are not systems. They are containers of specialized skill. Capability clusters. Professional tribes.

A subsystem is something different.

A subsystem is a sequence of interdependent processes that produces a defined outcome. It serves either a customer or another internal unit.

Procure-to-pay is a subsystem, from identifying a need to paying the supplier. Order-to-cash is a subsystem, from customer order to revenue collection. Lead-to-revenue. Issue-to-resolution. Concept-to-Launch. Customer Retention.

These subsystems cut horizontally across the organization’s functional silos. And they depend on coordinated handoffs. When you treat a function as a subsystem, you strengthen the department and weaken the delivery. You cannot optimize a container and expect a subsystem to improve.

Part IV: Designing for Flow

Businesses are organized around departments, but they win or lose on how value moves. Customers do not experience your structure; they experience a journey. Throughput is governed by the narrowest constraint in the value stream, not the weakest department.

Leaders often obsess over functional excellence and ignore subsystem integration. The result is a disconnected enterprise. The Myth of Functions is the illusion that increasing capacity automatically increases output.

It does not.

You can strengthen every function and still fail to improve global performance. Most inefficiencies live in the white space between functions, the handoffs that the org chart does not show.

Big systems are built from smaller systems that work. But those smaller systems are not departments. They are value streams. If you want systems thinking to work, you must design around those streams.

1. Map the Journey. Trace the full path from trigger to outcome, ignoring departmental lines. A lead-to-revenue stream, for example, begins not when Marketing qualifies a prospect but when the first signal of intent appears, and it ends not when Sales books the deal but when Finance collects the cash. Until you draw the full path, you cannot see where value stalls.

2. Assign Stream Accountability. Give someone the authority to fix the handoffs. Someone whose incentives are tied to end-to-end cycle time rather than any single function’s dashboard. Without this, handoff failures become orphan problems that every function acknowledges, and no function owns.

3. Measure the Flow. Prioritize cycle time, quality, and throughput over how busy each function appears. Utilization tells you how much of a team’s capacity is occupied. It says nothing about whether that activity advances the journey. A team running at 95 percent capacity can still be the bottleneck.

4. Align Incentives. Reward shared outcomes so that “winning locally” feels like losing. For example, the VP of Sales is no longer measured on booked revenue but on collected revenue. Now she shares accountability with Finance and Operations. The Head of Operations is not rewarded for unit efficiency alone but for delivery time and customer satisfaction. Now efficiency cannot come at the expense of experience.

When incentives shift from departmental metrics to system outcomes, behavior follows. If compensation and prestige are tied to flow health, collaboration becomes rational. If they remain tied to silo performance, tribalism will persist. You cannot preach alignment and reward fragmentation.

Design influences behavior.

When you do this, functions assume their proper role. They become service providers to subsystems. Functions contribute expertise. Subsystems create outcomes. In the end, the market does not reward siloed excellence. It rewards synchronized execution.

The tragedy of the “Myth of Functions” is that rational behavior at the desk level often creates irrational outcomes at the enterprise level.

How did Elon build the most technical startups in the world and fail at a government job?

Most of what we call systems thinking in business is quietly built on a mechanistic view of systems.

It assumes the system is a machine with compliant parts. Find the bottleneck, elevate it, subordinate everything else, repeat. That logic works beautifully when the system is mostly physical flow, stable constraints, and low politics. So it gets you results in a factory line or a call center. This is why the Theory of Constraints is such an effective model in those regimes.

Now go use TOC in a government agency. Goodluck.

You see across scientific fields, we recognize that systems differ fundamentally. And each kind of system requires different kinds of laws.

Physics, non-purposeful systems. Physics studies objects with no will and no preference. Planets do not negotiate gravity. Causality is stable. If you repeat an experiment a thousand times, you expect the same outcome.

Chemistry, constrained interaction systems. Chemistry studies substances that interact in predictable patterns but with more complexity than physics. But still, no intention. A reaction either has the required activation energy or it does not. Chemistry is a world of reliable rules, only more conditional.

Biology, adaptive purposeful systems. Biology breaks the pattern. Biological systems respond rather than behave. They adapt. They compensate. They pursue survival. And they respond to their environment. And this means the laws become probabilistic. You predict tendencies, not certainties.

Social sciences, fully purposeful systems. And then you reach social systems. Clubs, markets, governments, and businesses made up entirely of purposeful agents. Individuals with goals. Teams with incentives. Managers with fears. Leaders with biases.

Here, nothing behaves. Everything responds. Causality becomes conditional. Effects depend on context, interpretation, history, power, trust, and incentives. Physics gives you universal laws. Social science gives you moving targets. The laws of one domain do not translate cleanly to another. What holds true in a mechanistic system often fails to apply in a social system.

I have a friend who’s an engineer, and he tried to explain everything through that lens. When conflict showed up, he’d reach for Newton. Every action triggers an equal and opposite reaction. Not a bad instinct, honestly, just incomplete.

When people weren’t performing, he called it inertia. “They won’t move unless you push them.” And when a process was slow, he blamed friction and went looking for ways to lubricate it.

But the more he pushed and lubricated, the more the system changed shape. People didn’t just “move.” They interpreted. They resisted. They complied on the surface and defected underneath. They protected status. They conserved energy. They negotiated meaning.

He wasn’t dealing with particles. He was dealing with purposeful agents. He was importing laws from one domain and demanding they behave like universals in another.

That’s why someone can send rockets into orbit with breathtaking reliability, yet struggle to reform a ministry. A rocket is obedient. A bureaucracy is not.

And even within social systems, the rules differ. Markets, bureaucracies, political arenas, and firms do not run on the same mechanics. There are at least 8 kinds of social systems.

First-principles thinking wins where constraints are physical. It struggles where constraints are political.

Most business leaders make the same mistake as Elon. They apply the logic of mechanistic systems to social systems. They assume that if they pull a clean lever, business outputs will change proportionally. If they add pressure, performance will rise automatically. If they tighten the rules, behavior will stabilize.

But organizations do not behave like machines. They are made up of people. And every person is a purposeful part, responding, interpreting, protecting, and optimizing for their survival. A rocket responds to equations. A company responds to incentives, fear, power, identity, meaning, history, and interpretation. That is the nature of the systems we lead. Even under extreme coercion, human beings retain agency.

Once you understand that organizations are social systems, your approach to systems thinking will change.

Work is not the task on paper. Work is the translation from strategic intent to action through purposeful agents. It passes through interpretation, incentives, capacity, coordination, local tradeoffs, competing priorities, fear and ambition, negotiation and conflict.

This phenomenon is why outcomes often surprise leaders. They erroneously assume that they are managing a well-oiled machine. But in reality, they are leading a network of purposeful translators who would optimize for themselves when incentives are not aligned.

Once, a leader called me crying, “Our best salesman just quit.” So I empathized with him first. And then I picked up my notes.

Ontology. The system changed. Team composition and structure shifted overnight.

Dynamics. Execution capacity took a hit.

Ecology. The talent market and competing offers enabled the exit.

Teleology. The exit revealed meaning. When your best people leave, it is rarely only money. It is often misalignment on value, growth, fairness, or what the work is for.

He did not find it funny, but we must learn systems thinking.

In social systems, events are not incidents. They are signals. And if we refuse to read them as system feedback, we will keep treating symptoms and calling it management.

In strategy, most traditions are supply-side. They focus on what you must own, build, or control, resources, capabilities, and the industry structure you compete within.

Demand-side strategy flips the lens. It starts with the buyer. The job they are trying to get done, the frictions that lead to nonconsumption, and the price they are willing to pay to make progress.

The Chowdeck story cannot be explained by the usual supply-side stories we tell. We will have to understand it from the demand side.

Demand finds the beachhead. Supply builds the fortress.

Scene 1: Understanding the Food Delivery Market

In one of my earlier essays, I argued that to understand a thing, you had to look at it from multiple perspectives. The market has four moving parts: restaurants, food types, riders, and customers. Platforms sit in the middle, but the real product is coordination in a very volatile environment.

Lens 1: Demand clusters, who is ordering, and what job they are hiring delivery for

Demand in Lagos is not one market. It is pockets with different jobs-to-be-done, different urgency, and different substitutes when you fail.

Table 1: Customer’s Job-To-Be-Done

The student versus young professional split matters. Students can walk into a café, buy a snack, or wait it out. They have more immediate substitutes. Young professionals often cannot. When delivery fails, they improvise with Indomie, bread, or skipping the meal, and that pain makes them care about reliability differently. This is why a platform can dominate one occasion and collapse in another. A lunch promise is not a late-night promise.

Lens 2: Restaurant tiers, the supply side is not equal

Supply is not one thing. Some restaurants need you. Some do not. Some will bend to your systems. Some will break them.

Table 2: Restaurant Type

Goliath starts where the supply is clean (R1). Nothing screams low platform dependence like the way Chicken Republic has terminated partnerships with these startups. David starts where supply is dependent on his platform (R3/R5).

Lens 3: Food travelability, because food is not equally deliverable

Even with perfect dispatch, some meals degrade faster than others. Travelability is how food behaves under travel stress.

Table 3: Travel-ability of food. How well it keeps when delivered.

Scene 2: Goliath’s Playbook

The giants came in rational. They came in with a supply-side playbook. Coverage. Brand anchors. Marketing spend. Subsidised volume. It is the instinct of a company that already has distribution muscle.

Jumia

If you are Jumia and you are early in the category, your first job is market education. So you start with the safest supply.

You anchor the catalogue with national QSRs and big brands that already have standard menus, brand names, packaging discipline, and predictable prep. You make the category legible. You tell people, order what you already trust, now delivered. And because you already have a marketplace with a broad consumer reach, you can blast the message at scale and manufacture early volume. That is rational.

Bolt Food

Bolt’s logic is also rational. Bolt already owns trips. It already owns urban movement. Food delivery becomes an adjacency, and the fastest wedge is premium density.

So you start where the order values are higher, where people can pay for convenience without negotiation, and where the restaurant supply is already concentrated. That is why Bolt Food’s initial Lagos rollout focused on Lagos Island corridors, Ikoyi, Victoria Island, and Lekki, with over 100 restaurants at launch, before expanding into the mainland.

Glovo

Glovo came in with a different hedge.

From day one, the company positioned itself as more than restaurant delivery. It leaned into quick commerce, not only meals. That matters because groceries and essentials create frequency, and can subsidise learning in food if needed. In Nigeria, their later Shoprite partnership is a clear signal of their posture.

Part B: David’s Playbook

Scene 3: Flank Attack

David does not have the money to subsidize three sides of the market. So he does the most rational thing.

He serves the type of customers that his seniors cannot serve. He partners with suppliers that are too local. He pays his bikers more than the competition to keep them. And he needs to make margins while doing this.

If David had the resources and size of Goliath, this strategy would look irrational. Under constraint, it becomes the only rational path.

They went to Yaba. Partnered up with local kitchens. The team would sometimes advance money for ingredients and help merchants organise supplies. Then they sold Eba and Amala, foods that do not travel well, but sit at the centre of how people actually eat.. Pizza is tiny by comparison.

This is non-consumption on four axes.

1. Suppliers (Supply-Side Non-Consumption). These were vendors that no one else could work with. They were outside the digital economy. You technically had to ‘invent’ them as digital suppliers before they could be valuable to you.

2. Food Types (Product Non-Consumption). I do not even buy takeaway Eba. I just buy soup and go home because Eba and soup travel so poorly. Nkwobi, Amala, and Ewedu - these are foods core to our culture, but they are ‘logistically difficult’. By delivering foods the giants avoided (Table 3, Tiers 3-4), Chowdeck built operational muscle where competition was weakest.”

3. Customers (Demand-Side Non-Consumption). The giants looked at the average income in Akoka and looked away. But the students were not unwilling to buy. They were just non-consumers of expensive, corporate fast food. By offering them local vendors, local portions, and a price point that made sense, Chowdeck did not steal customers from KFC. It created customers out of thin air.

4. Riders. Make riding attractive to folks who would never have driven a delivery bike.

From my rough calculations, Jumia Food made a loss of $2.2 per order in FY 2022. And $0.7 per order in FY2023. The giants rented customers. Chowdeck earned customers. Subsidized demand hides the truth about product-market fit.

Scene 4: Selling Trust

I have compared prices on my app. Glovo comes out cheaper almost every time. Cheaper food. Cheaper on logistics. Cheaper on Prime.

Chowdeck was the first to raise prices in 2023 when the petrol subsidy was removed in Nigeria. And they raised it by over 50%. Their CEO revealed that Chowdeck made a decision not to compete on price.

Why do people still choose the more expensive option? Why Chowdeck?

Because in Lagos, speed is not the product. Reliability is. And reliability is made of two things: low variance, and decent recovery when things break.

Sentiment is one proxy for that.

Anselem Kadiri’s review-based sentiment analysis (300 Google Play reviews each for Chowdeck and Glovo) shows Chowdeck ahead on overall satisfaction, but also shows the industry is suffering from the same trust killers: wrong orders, payment issues, delays, and weak support. (3)

Here is the clean comparative snapshot from his write-up.

Source: Kadiri, 2025.

Chowdeck still messes up, but support shows up, and that changes how failure feels.

And for Glovo? 33 complaints on customer service. Worse on every sentiment, including delivery.

Now the paradox.

TechCabal ran a real-world speed test ordering the same meals from the same restaurants at the same time, and Glovo beat Chowdeck in both the morning and evening tests. The same piece points to a key reason: order batching.

A spot test can show who is faster on a Tuesday. Customers do not live inside the average. They live inside the worst 10% of outcomes. Average delivery time is a weak signal. Tail failures define perception.

In a market where every platform is imperfect, the winner is not the one with zero failures. It’s the one whose failures don’t feel like abandonment.

So Chowdeck’s edge is not “fastest on average.” It is cheap enough, fast enough, things break less often, and when they break, “customer service” shows up.

That is what people pay for.

Scene 5. They did not act their age.

The ‘Dean of Valuation,’ Aswath Damodaran, argues that ‘More value is destroyed by companies not acting their age than by any other single factor.’ In emerging markets, this takes a specific form - the imported playbook.

When a global startup enters a new category or an untested country, it becomes early-stage again. The old brand travels. The old cap table travels. But the thing that matters does not travel, proven fit inside the new constraint system. New customers. New unit economics. New supply realities. New failure modes.

So the laws of the early stage apply again, whether we respect them or not.

That is the first mistake the giants make. They enter acting like late-stage companies because that is what they are back home or in their core category. But in this new market, they are still searching. And in search mode, burn is not an investment. If you spend too much, too early, you don’t buy learning, you buy illusion.

This is where Goliath becomes fragile. The giant’s biggest problem is path dependence. The initial investments then harden a flawed strategy into structure. Headcount. Partnerships. Vendor contracts. A sales org trained on the wrong promise. A product roadmap built for the wrong buyers.

Then reality shows up and invalidates the model. A pivot now costs reputation internally and cash externally. So the giant keeps going because stopping would force the truth.

David is different for one reason. He cannot afford illusion.

He starts small because he lacks the luxury of being wrong at scale. So he is forced to respect early-stage physics. He tests in tight loops. He stays close to the ground. He learns the terrain, the people, the edges, the true frictions.

And he targets what the giants ignore. Non-consumption. The people who are not consuming at all because existing solutions are too expensive, too unreliable, too slow, too complex, or simply not designed for them. But David still does not scale until he validates both demand and supply. Only after both loops hold does scaling make sense. Before that, scaling is just multiplying an error.

And this is the dangerous part. David’s advantage is not eternal. It is conditional. If Chowdeck scales by spreading coverage too early, batching too aggressively, underpaying riders, or expanding into new categories before the loop holds, it will recreate the same tail failures it once exploited.

Acting your age is not a one-time strategy. It is a discipline you must keep renewing. The real test is whether David can grow up without becoming the next Goliath.

I am here to remind us so we do not forget.

References

Christensen, C. M., Ojomo, E., & Dillon, K. (2019). The prosperity paradox: How innovation can lift nations out of poverty. Harper Business.

Chukwu, N. (2025, 2 June). What is Lagos’ fastest food delivery app? I tested Chowdeck, Glovo, and FoodCourt to find out. TechCabal. https://techcabal.com/2025/06/02/the-fastest-food-delivery-app-in-lagos/

Kadiri, A. (n.d.). Nigeria food delivery apps: Sentiment analysis of Glovo, Chowdeck & FoodCourt. Medium. Accessed 28 January 2026. https://medium.com/@anselemkadiri/nigeria-food-delivery-apps-sentiment-analysis-of-glovo-chowdeck-foodcourt-9911ab68af3b

Oladunmade, M. (2023, 3 November). How YC-backed Chowdeck hit ₦1 billion in monthly order value. TechCabal. Accessed 28 January 2026. https://techcabal.com/2023/11/03/chowdeck-1billion/

Sometimes, startups act like we have nothing to learn from business history. And every once in a while, gravity reminds us that we do.

My master’s thesis was on the impact of price wars on markets.

A price war is not a promotion campaign gone slightly too far. It is a breakdown in the rules of the game. I have watched them play out across industries and across countries. Each one, unsurprisingly, resolved into one of five patterns.

1. Mutual destruction: Incumbents crater margins, then quietly pay for it by cutting the other things customers notice, reliability, quality, and support. Customers feel cheated, and substitution becomes easy. Everyone bleeds, and the category becomes cheap.

2. War-chest victory: The richest player “wins” the war of attrition, but inherits a broken category. There is a reset of anchor prices, and customers expect low prices. You win the war, then inherit the ruins. If meaningful competition remains, you risk becoming a cheap brand. If you truly lock in demand, you can later recoup through pricing power.

3. Refusal advantage: The player who refuses the subsidy war can use the chaos to reposition around dependable value. While others burn cash to buy volume, they build a reputation, consistency, trust, and premium perception. They do not just survive, they become the obvious alternative when the market sobers up.

4. Truce (tacit coordination): The war ends because everyone gets tired. Prices drift back up through discipline or capacity constraints.

5. Rule change: The war ends because the rules change. Regulation, platform governance, or market structure shifts that make subsidies unsustainable.

We’ll look at two examples.

The UK Newspaper Price Wars

Act I: The Caste System

Before 1993, the British newspaper market was not just an industry. It was a social hierarchy with price tags.

At the top sat the “Quality” broadsheets: The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, and The Independent. Serious, expensive, and purchased by the establishment. They competed on prestige, not price.

In the awkward middle sat the Daily Mail. It was too serious for the tabloid crowd, too brash for the elite.

At the bottom sat the “Red Tops,” The Sun, and The Mirror. Cheap, loud, and built for volume.

Act II: The Race to the Bottom

Murdoch’s Times was struggling. It had prestige but was losing the circulation race. So he chose the nuclear option. He severed the link between cost and value.

The Times dropped its price from 45p to 30p on the 6th of September 1993. The Daily Telegraph, the market leader, matched the prices on 23 June 1994. The Times retaliated with a further cut to 20p (weekdays) a day later. Competition shifted from journalism to endurance. The Independent did not have a war chest. It tried to hold the high ground, even raising its price. It entered a long decline that eventually ended in a sale for £1 sixteen years later.

Act III: The Mid-Market Miracle

Under Paul Dacre, the Mail executed a strategy of disciplined aggression. It did not cut prices to follow the broadsheets into the trenches. It did not cheapen the product. And because it was not funding a loss-making ego contest, it invested in better coverage and better print.

Then the inversion happened.

The tier 1 broadsheets, trapped on razor-thin margins, started cutting costs. They thinned out foreign coverage, printed smaller magazines, and started covering sensational angles. Meanwhile, the Daily Mail began to look and feel like the premium product. Confident. Thick. Glossy. Culturally fluent. Not elite, but dominant.

The Outcome: A New King

By the time fatigue set in and prices began to climb again, the landscape had been permanently terraformed. The top tier had eroded its own prestige just in time for the internet to arrive and complete the devaluation.

Murdoch won the battle to keep The Times alive, but he turned that top tier into a cheap category, clearing the path for the Daily Mail to inherit the premium tier.

The Mail captured the aspirational class that the broadsheets abandoned in their race to the bottom. It became more than a newspaper. It became a political force that prime ministers learned to fear.

That is what price wars do. They do not just change prices. They change the hierarchy of power.

B. The Nigerian Food Delivery Price Wars, David versus Three Goliaths

Act I - The Caste System

Jumia Food entered early, in 2013, with the halo of Africa’s first unicorn. But first-mover advantage is not protection. It is simply an earlier start to learning hard lessons.

By 2020, the pandemic shifted consumer behavior, and food delivery moved from novelty to routine for many urban customers.

In mid-September 2021, Glovo launched in Nigeria, backed by Delivery Hero’s balance sheet. It came prepared, expanded into groceries and quick commerce.

A few weeks later, in October 2021, Bolt Food entered, drawing on the resources and operational muscle of a global ride-hailing company. These were the three giants.

That same month, Chowdeck was founded in Lagos. It did not have the pockets for a war.

There were three big boys and one small kid who did not stand a chance.

Then Nigeria’s macroeconomic reality turned hostile. Between 2020 and 2023, the economy absorbed shocks that punished any model built on permanent discounting.

GDP contracted in 2020 after COVID and the oil crash. Inflation climbed. The naira weakened. Food inflation surged above 20 percent.

By 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine spiked wheat and energy prices globally. Inflation rose further and food inflation worsened.

Act II: Quality Decay

2023 was the year of reckoning.

In Q1 2023, I was away on a business trip, enjoying the subsidies from the food delivery price wars. After a long day, I ordered jollof rice and chicken from Chicken Republic through Jumia Food. The delivery time promised was 45 minutes. It arrived almost three hours later.

The rider showed up as a passenger on a commercial tricycle. No insulated carrier. He had a regular school backpack. He barely spoke English. I paid and went upstairs to my room. And when I opened the pack, the chicken had clearly been half-eaten. Teeth marks, unmistakable. We both know it was not eaten by a staff member of Chicken Republic.

I took pictures, recorded a video, escalated to customer service, and asked for a refund. No one responded.

We were in the quality decline phase of the price war.

Two weeks later, back in Lagos, I signed up on Chowdeck.

Act III: Tinubu Shock-nomics

The decay had already started. Tinubu’s reforms simply removed the last cushion and forced every player’s hand.

On May 29, 2023, President Bola Tinubu announced the end of petrol subsidies. Fuel prices jumped, transport costs surged, and delivery economics tightened overnight.

In June 2023, the Central Bank unified exchange rates, and the naira weakened sharply. Every imported input cost more, and every operational inefficiency hurt more.

By August 2023, Chicken Republic announced a partnership with Glovo and ended its partnerships with Jumia Food and Bolt Food. The signal was clear. The market was tilting toward reliability and reach, not endless promotions.

By December 2023, two giants fell close together. Bolt Food shut down in Nigeria. Jumia Food announced it would exit multiple African markets, including Nigeria, by year’s end.

Jumia’s CEO described the market as driven by deep-pocketed, aggressive discounting, which is often a signal that the fight was not winnable on those terms.

Act IV: King David

The irony is sharp.

Bolt retreated from Nigeria but remained in Ghana. Jumia, the pioneer, walked away from food delivery. Glovo, which exited Ghana later, chose to stay in Nigeria. And in the background, Chowdeck survived and kept building. It had focused on unit economics. It paid riders well. It delivered what it promised.

By April 2024, Chowdeck raised $2.5 million in seed funding. In May 2025, Chowdeck expanded into Ghana. And by August 2025, it raised a $9 million Series A.

Jumia was early, but early did not save it. Bolt was global and well-funded, but Nigeria punished permanent subsidy models. Glovo exited Ghana but stayed in Nigeria. Chowdeck refused the subsidy war, then won anyway.

Just like the UK newspaper price wars. The fighter with the greater willingness to burn money won the price war. But they won a degraded market and a cheap brand. The deeper winner was the one who refused the wrong fight.

Chowdeck, like the Daily Mail, won because David does not beat Goliath by fighting on Goliath’s terms.

History rhymes most times.

But every now and then, it repeats in uncanny ways.

In my previous essay, I argued for simple models. But simple does not mean easy and cheap. There is a minimum viability to what passes as a useful model.

Aristotle taught something that can sound like a burden. If you wanted to explain a thing fully, you had to explain it in 4 distinct ways. Not one. Four. It reads like a checklist, and checklists sometimes feel like punishment.

1. The material cause. What it is made of?

2. The formal cause. What pattern makes it what it is? How it is structured.

3. Efficient cause. What makes it happen?

4. Final cause. What it is for?

But he was not being complicated. He was forcing intellectual rigor. He was trying to prevent a common human error. Mistaking a fragment for the whole. Seeing one slice of truth and acting as if the slice is the whole object.

And when you extend his 4 causes, you could have a universal model for explaining almost anything. And for understanding any system.

I. Ontology, what is it?

Ontology is identity, not just naming. Ontology answers two Aristotelian questions: what it is made of, and what form makes it what it is.

It is the Ship of Theseus question applied to real systems: when parts change, what still makes it the same thing.

In practice, ontology includes three elements.

Material, the raw stuff of it. What is it made of?

Form, the organizing pattern that makes the substance into a coherent thing.

Boundary, the edge that separates this from that. What counts as inside, what counts as outside.

II. Dynamics, how does it work?

This is Aristotle’s efficient cause, the source of motion, what initiates change.

Dynamics is the physics of change. It is not only how things move forward. It is how they keep their shape against decay.

Dynamics includes three elements.

Drivers, the engine, the catalyst, the trigger.

Constraints, the limits that bound capacity.

Maintenance and replenishment. What must be continuously supplied to keep the system from degrading?

III. Ecology, How is it shaped by its environment?

Ecology is the surrounding field of causes that shapes a system from outside. The actors and forces that load, control, feed and push back on it.

In practice, ecology reduces to four checks.

Agents, what the system is coupled to, the other bodies or forces it interacts with.

Dependencies, what it relies on from its surroundings but does not fully control.

Flows, what crosses the boundary.

Feedback loops, what amplifies or dampens behaviour over time.

IV. Teleology, What is it’s purpose?

Teleology is the logic of direction and significance. Aristotle’s final cause.

Teleology has two regimes.

Regime A, natural systems, direction without intention. Here, teleology is not moral purpose. It is convergence. Systems move toward attractors and drift towards stable states. The system does not want anything.

Regime B, purposive systems, direction with intention. Here, teleology is purpose. The system is for something. It can succeed or fail relative to that end.

In this regime, teleology has an internal structure.

Telos, the why.

Goals, the what we are aiming for.

Evaluation, the judgment loop that detects drift and corrects courses.

So people end up with an original sin. Reductionism. Treating purposive systems as purely mechanical, ignoring self-interest, status, fear, and ambition.

Let’s get practical.

In order to fully explain the circulatory system in biology, we would need to understand all four. And it takes years of med school.

Ontology (anatomy, what it is). Heart, arteries, veins, capillaries, blood, valves, chambers, vessel walls, and blood composition.

Dynamics (physiology, how it works). Pressure gradients, heart contraction cycle, flow rates, resistance, oxygen exchange at capillaries, regulation, adaptation under stress, failure modes (shock, clotting, arrhythmia).

Ecology (the external causal field). The surrounding systems and conditions that load, constrain, and regulate circulation. Lungs (oxygenation), kidneys (fluid and electrolytes), nervous and endocrine control (signals and hormones), temperature, hydration, altitude, and activity level, etc

Teleology (purpose/function, what it is for). Deliver oxygen and nutrients, remove carbon dioxide and waste, distribute hormones, regulate temperature and pH, and maintain internal stability so the body can function.

When a doctor says a heart is failing. What does he mean?

So, when a leader tells me “our systems are failing”.

I ask “What do you mean?”.

And now I wait until they and the team can answer it in four ways. Because if you cannot articulate the system or its issues in depth. You do not understand it. And you are not ready; you have no business improving what you do not understand.

Welcome to systems thinking.

My father was a professor of physics, a fine mind who lived to teach. Teaching was his calling.

Last year, I spent five unbroken weeks with him. It was by far the longest time we spent together since I left home. We had a million stories and memories to trade, and in the simplest ways, he made my year.

One afternoon, he noticed I was deep in thought and asked what I was wrestling with.

I told him I was trying to build a conceptual model that fused strategic management and development economics to explain business outcomes in emerging markets.

He listened quietly, the way he always did when a student was overcomplicating things. Then set down his cup of water, smiled, and said something simple but profound.

“All models are wrong, but some are useful,” he said. He was quoting George E.P. Box.

And then he continued, “A useful model is more powerful than an elaborate one. All scientific models aim to simplify reality. Complexity is only justified if it improves utility.”

Newton’s laws of motion dominated physics for centuries. Even after Einstein revealed its limits, it remained the default tool because it was useful in the right regime. Physicists do not abandon simple models when complexity exists; they use the simplest model that serves the question at hand. Relativity did not kill Newton’s law; it drew the boundary.

F = ma is not powerful because it captures every nuance of nature. It is powerful because, within its regime, it lets us build cars, design aircraft, and, paired with his law of gravitation, put satellites in orbit.

Months later, my professors would echo the same truth in different words. And I have come to realize that this principle is not confined to physics or academia; it defines the work I am called to do.

I see it everywhere now.

A mid-sized manufacturer I recently worked with maintained a 30-metric scorecard that required two full-time analysts to update. Yet the leadership team did not know the handful of drivers behind performance. The dashboard was elaborate. It was not useful.

The opposite is also true. A startup founder I know runs his entire sales operation on a single-page visual. Twelve boxes. One page. His team knows exactly where they are winning and where they are stuck.

In business, we have developed an addiction to elaboration. We chase novelty, layering new frameworks upon old ones. We build dashboards that track hundreds of metrics and craft strategic plans so detailed they collapse under their own weight. Leaders end up with tools they cannot wield, while the real drivers get lost in the noise.

This is not a call for simplistic thinking. Some problems genuinely require complexity. But in business, we have inverted the default. Physics does the opposite: start simple, add complexity only when utility demands it.

The real task of modern leadership and scholarship is to distill theories into useful models. Because often, the models that work in the global north do not translate properly in our own context. So our problem is not a lack of knowledge. It is the scarcity of useful models.

A useful model is not a universal truth. It is a thinking tool, one that collapses complexity into clarity and turns scattered knowledge into a single, answerable question.

What is the most important thing we can do right now?

My writings are dedicated to Prof. A. A. Ubachukwu, father, mentor, teacher, and friend.

John 1:22 (NKJV)

This question echoes through generations: Who are you?

It’s not just a question of name or title, it’s a call to define essence and assignment.

John the Baptist’s response wasn’t about status or self-image. He didn’t explain where he was from - he explained why he came.

He said, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness…” (John 1:23)

Because in the kingdom of God, identity is revealed in purpose.

You are not simply known by what you’re called, but by what you’re called to do.

And just before this moment of questioning, Scripture had already introduced him with a divine clarity:

“There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.” (John 1:6)

He was sent. That’s the weight of identity in the eyes of God—you are not random, you are assigned.

Not just born but commissioned.

You are the answer to a need in your generation.

You are God’s response to a cry in the earth.

So when the world asks, “Who are you?”,

Don’t point to your résumé. Point to your reason.

Let your answer be this:

“This is why I came.”

Selah.

This is not just a poetic plea - it is deep.

The Psalmist declares, “If You, Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with You, that You may be feared… O Israel, hope in the Lord; for with the Lord there is mercy, and with Him is abundant redemption.” (Psalm 130:3–4, 7 NKJV)

To be consumed by mercy is to be overwhelmed not by judgment, but by the kindness that flows from God’s nature.

It’s to say: “Let Your mercy be so tangible, so real, that it overtakes every fear, every failure, every shortcoming in me.”

It is to be reminded that mercy is not God turning a blind eye - mercy is God choosing to love in spite of what He sees.

And it is with Him - in His presence, in communion with Him - that mercy is found.

So we pray:

Consume us, O Lord, not with wrath but with mercy. Let it saturate our hearts, heal our minds, and remind us we are Yours.

My father is a professor of physics and a thoroughbred physicist in every sense of the word. Growing up, it amazed me how he could apply universal laws of physics to almost everything. Concepts like the conservation of energy, Newton’s laws of motion, or Einstein’s theory of relativity weren’t just scientific principles to him - they became lenses through which he understood the world.

And to be fair, physics is a powerful discipline. Some of its laws are so fundamental that they echo in fields far beyond science. But even the most universal theories begin to break down when stretched beyond their natural domain. Eventually, mental models that once offered razor-sharp clarity start offering no more judgment than common sense, or worse, they mislead.

That’s when I began to understand something deeper: good judgment isn’t just about being smart or mastering a specific field. It’s about knowing how to understand problems. It’s the ability to discern what kind of problem you’re facing, and then knowing whether your toolbox fits the domain or whether it’s time to admit you need different tools entirely.

We often fall into the trap of treating our expertise like a Swiss army knife: good for everything. But in truth, most solutions collapse when applied outside their native context. The real danger is not in having a narrow expertise; it is in refusing to acknowledge its limits.

Good judgment lies in that space between confidence and humility. In having a mind flexible enough to learn across domains, and wise enough to know when to call for reinforcements.

And yet in the storm of stars being born, in the rhythm of light exploding from His word, He turned.

Not as if surprised, but as if waiting for me.

No name had yet been spoken, but somehow mine had always been in His heart.

I wasn’t an afterthought on the edge of infinity, but a whisper woven into the first breath of creation.

He saw me not as I am now, but as I would be, broken and brilliant, wandering and beloved.

And in that look was a promise: that the One who flung fire into the void would one day wrap Himself in flesh just to find me in the dark again.

The stars did not shine brighter than His gaze. The heavens did not stretch wider than His grace. The light that was and the light that would be all bent their beams toward me.

And I, undone by wonder, knew: To be made by Him is glory. But to be known by Him is love.

He moved.

Not with hands, but with intention. The kind that splits the void and teaches silence how to sing.

“Let there be” The words were not shouted. They became.

Light didn’t ignite; it obeyed. As if it always knew that its reason for being was to respond to His voice.

Time shivered into existence. Space unfolded like a scroll. The laws of physics bowed in line, dancing to melodies they’d never heard but somehow remembered.

And still, He stood not apart from it, but above it and within it, like the breath in every flame, the pulse in every atom.

Worlds spiraled from His thought, each star a syllable, each planet a pause, each breath of wind a lingering note from the song He never stopped singing.

And yet as galaxies stretched wide in worship, He looked ahead to you.

To hearts, not yet formed, to names, not yet spoken, to a cross not yet raised and smiled.

Because greatness is not in what He made, but in what He loved before He made it.

That your baby boy was God incarnate?

John, did you truly understand

That the child you baptized was the Maker of the universe?

Did His brothers in the natural even know at first?

And the apostles—when they followed—did they perceive the weight of His glory?

This was He foretold in the garden:

“Your seed shall bruise the serpent’s head.”

He, of whom the prophets prophesied—

To whom belonged the throne and sceptre of David.

Yet He was before David,

And David called Him Lord:

“The Lord said to my Lord…”

Christ, the Son of the Living God.

The Word who was with God from the beginning.

The Light and Image who reveals the Father.

The Wisdom and Power of God.

The Eternal Word.

By Him all things were made,

And without Him, nothing was made that was made.

All things were made for Him—

To bring Him pleasure and glory.

Yet He emptied Himself of deity,

Took on the form of a servant,

And walked the earth as an example—

A new kind of man.

Then, as a sacrifice:

He shed His blood,

His body broken,

And descended into hell,

Where He made a public spectacle of Satan.

He rose again—the firstborn from the dead,

A new kind of being.

He ascended, not alone,

But with His body—the Church—

That she might fill all things in Him.

That He might bring us into His fullness,

Into the glory He shared with the Father from the beginning.

That He might have many brethren,

That we might be joint-heirs with Him,

Partakers of His divine nature,

Seated with Him in heavenly places.

He was made the Head of all principality and power—

For our sake.

For the sake of His Church,

His Body,

Whom we are.

In You, Jesus, we find:

Our Being,

Our Essence,

Our Purpose,

Our Identity.

We need an anchor for the soul

‘Cause when the dark clouds are heavy

When storms come

We need someone who’d be there when we still have strength

And a helper we could tell —

“Daddy, I’m out of strength now…

Please help me.”

When the winds scream louder than our prayers

And fear knocks louder than faith

We need the One who calms the seas with a whisper

The One who holds us when we can’t hold on

We don’t need perfect words

We need presence

Not just answers —

But arms that wrap around us

A Father who sees

Who knows

Who stays

So we say:

Even when the night lingers,

Even when the tears blur the page

We will trust in You,

Our hiding place,

Our ever-present help in trouble

For when we say,

“Daddy, I’m out of strength now”

You say,

“My strength is made perfect in your weakness.”

We often come to God hoping that faith will clear the path, remove the mountains, and silence the storms. But more often than not, faith doesn’t eliminate the struggle — it gives us strength to endure it.

Faith didn’t stop the fire for the three Hebrew boys, but it ensured they weren’t alone in it.

Faith didn’t cancel the cross for Jesus, but it guaranteed resurrection on the other side.

Faith is not a shortcut; it’s a lifeline. It is what holds us when reason fails, what steadies us when the waves rise, and what pushes us forward when nothing else makes sense.

It doesn’t promise ease - it promises presence, power, and possibility.

So today, even if the journey feels hard, remember: it’s not ease you need, it’s faith. Because with God, possible is always on the table.

The GOAT? The rainmaker?

I’ve played in corporate for a decade and a half

I know the rhythm of the standing ovation,

The slow clap that turns to silence.

Let me tell you

The applause of men lasts only as long as you’re giving them what they want:

Value. Results. Performance.

That’s the real scorecard.

And when - not if - you stumble, pause, or stop,

The applause fades.

The spotlight shifts.

And if your identity was rooted in that applause,

You’ll lose your footing - and your peace.

I’ve seen it too many times.

The entrepreneurs once headlining every conference

Forbes cover, CNBC interviews

Now ghosts on the scene because the business hit a storm.

Senior execs edged out quietly

Because they dared to have a child

Or needed time to heal.

The show? It goes on.

The most dangerous place to live

Is to live for the applause of men

For some leader,

Some crowd.

A few years ago, I was terminally ill.

Everything went quiet.

And I learned - the hard way

That you were created to live for the applause of One.

If you’re lucky or blessed

You’ll find your tribe in that process.

A few souls who love you through the applause

And through the boos.

Selah.

A way to say everything,

By saying just enough.

A few words strung like beads

Can carry a whole world on their thread.

They don’t ramble.

They don’t pretend.

They cut to the core

To what matters,

What lingers,

What lives after silence.

I wish more people spoke in poems

Or songs that rise from the soul.

Not just to impress,

But to impress truth into the bones.

Poetry doesn’t waste breath.

It filters noise.

It holds space for sorrow,

And gives rhythm to joy.

So bring back our rhymes.

Let children learn them,

Let lovers speak them,

Let prophets write them in fire.

Let a generation find its voice again

Not in more words,

But in the right ones.

Books.

Essays.

Podcasts filled with stories of finding purpose, chasing dreams, building brands.

A relentless pursuit of what to be, who to be, how to be.

But who really decides what becoming means?

Is it a career?

A title?

A moment of applause?

A place where everything finally makes sense?

What if the real work is in unbecoming?

Not chasing some grand version of success someone sold you,

But peeling back the layers you’ve worn just to survive.

Unlearning the noise.

Unbinding yourself from the definitions you inherited,

From the stories you outgrew.

It’s not a straight path.

There’s no map.

There’s no “aha” moment where the light stays on forever.

It’s subtle. It’s slow.

It’s a series of quiet revelations—

A soft whisper showing you what truly matters.

Not what makes the most money.

Not what looks good in a bio.

But what ignites you from within.

Unbecoming is the journey.

The freedom to not know.

The grace to change.

The courage to say, this isn’t me anymore.

And to walk away—

Even if it looked perfect on the outside.

Because you could gain it all,

And still feel empty.

Or you could shed it all,

And finally feel whole.

So don’t sweat the destination.

There isn’t one.

Just a life lived deeply,

Peeling back the layers

Until only truth remains.