African Arguments

Top Menu

  • About Us
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

Main Menu

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
    • Climate crisis
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • #EndSARS
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Podcast
    • Into Africa Podcast
    • Africa Science Focus Podcast
    • Think African Podcast
  • Debating Ideas
  • About Us
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

logo

Header Banner

African Arguments

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
    • Climate crisis
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • #EndSARS
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Podcast
    • Into Africa Podcast
    • Africa Science Focus Podcast
    • Think African Podcast
  • Debating Ideas
Politics

African Business Culture Tips: Part 1 – The Cult of Precision

By Uncategorised
September 28, 2012
2006
0
Share:

A common complaint I have heard business partners and employees of global (“˜westernised’) companies in Africa often make is that the latter are too obsessed with exactitude. The more “formalisation” has pervaded corporate planning, and gone the way of the Daniel Prajogos and the TQM cult, the more frontline managers have retreated from the “cultural whirl” of the emerging marketplace, to borrow a phrase from the Anthropologist Ulf Hannerz, in order to focus on serving simplifications of the market to headquarters.

MNCs issue a constant stream of demand for forecasts and blueprints and other such formal and quantitative perspectives from their Global South underlings. No one doubts that the cult of precision has made western-style management science a formidable tool for wealth creation. But in cultures that emerged not too long ago from traditional society, certainty and logical precision are not the absolute virtues they are in the west, simply because in traditional economies flux was a constant feature of economic decision-making: the rains sometimes came late, the snake serum that had been potent for so long suddenly failed, or some smart trader from the Coast stopped taking cowries without warning and started insisting on gold.

The best performers in traditional societies were rarely those most skilled in making rigorous-looking forecasts, but those best in taking advantage of the flux. In some ways, “smart fudging” and “flux adaptation” may not be as risky as sometimes supposed, and more valuable than often realised. The past decade saw many of the smartass-models glorifying certainty in the West fail miserably in serial financial crises and other mishaps.

No one is saying a business shouldn’t plan and aim for rigour, but there is some wisdom in not seeing a reticence about over-relying on firm forecasting as laziness and sloppiness hiding behind cheap philosophy.

Even if you are the super-analytical type who can’t sing a song except when the lyrics are laid out in a spreadsheet you still have to acknowledge that the studies do not vindicate an over-reliance on formal forecasting, even in the quantity-obsessed West. As Wharton’s Scott Armstrong pithily observed in 2001 after his extensive review of the principles underlying corporate forecasting in the West: “forecasters often ignore common sense”, a clear end-result of the emphasis on formal tools, necessarily internal to the business’ groupthink, and the marginalisation of the external cultural swirl.

The challenge this poses to Western thinkers is summed up in various chains of paradoxes in the thought of gurus like the MIT’s John Sterman who after gamely acknowledging that: “all models are wrong and humility about the limitations of our knowledge. Such humility is essential in creating an environment in which we can learn about the complex systems in which we are embedded…”, moves straight on to propose “formal models” and “scientific inquiry” tools as the surest paths to addressing the fundamental uncertainties confronting future planning, gleefully glossing over the tension

It does not surprise me that the work of Wharton’s Katherine Milkman and others continue to expose the psychological underbelly of the frequent inaccuracies we see in market forecasting today. Or that the Journal of Business Forecasting routinely reports over 55 percent dissatisfaction with forecasting accuracy in respondent companies.

Read Part 2 – CSR is Dead

Previous Article

Five Business Culture Tips from An African ...

Next Article

African Business Culture Tips: Part 2 – ...

Uncategorised

Leave a reply Cancel reply

  • Politics

    Al-Shabaab steps up attacks in run up to the Somalia elections

  • UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, US President Joe Biden and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres at the COP26 World Leaders Summit. Credit: Karwai Tang/ UK Government.
    Climate crisisTop story

    Please don’t fall for COP26’s empty rhetoric

  • BurundiPolitics

    The AU tried and failed on Burundi. Now it’s time to try again.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Click here to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter and never miss a thing!

  • 81664
    Followers

Find us on Facebook

Interactive Elections Map

Keep up to date with all the African elections.

Popular articles

  • Evangelista Kanohili sits outside her home in Sheema, Uganda, March 15, 2022. Kanohili has been experiencing on-and-off infestations of jiggers, a small parasitic flea that burrows into the skin and can make it too painful to take care of daily tasks. Credit: Apophia Agiresaasi/Global Press Journal.

    Uganda: The tiny flea making it painful for people to walk and work

  • “Too much propaganda”: Zimbabwe’s pirates of the airwaves look to SA

  • Tunisia's President Kais Saied meeting with then US Defense Secretary Mark Esper at Carthage Palace, Tunisia, in September 2020. Credit: DoD/Lisa Ferdinando.

    Is Tunisia’s democracy slipping away?

  • Typical coping strategies such as a nomadic lifestyle are inadequate to handle what is potentially the worst food crisis in Somalia's recent past. Credit: UNDP Somalia.

    Somalia faces worst humanitarian crisis in recent history

  • Students graduating from Babcock University, Ilishan-Remo, Nigeria. Credit: Rajmund Dabrowski/ANN.

    “We copy it from them”: How campus politics sets scene for big man politics

Brought to you by


Creative Commons

Creative Commons Licence
Articles on African Arguments are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
  • Cookies
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
  • en English
    am Amharicar Arabicny Chichewazh-CN Chinese (Simplified)en Englishfr Frenchde Germanha Hausait Italianpt Portuguesest Sesothosn Shonaes Spanishsw Swahilixh Xhosayo Yorubazu Zulu
© Copyright African Arguments 2020
Cleantalk Pixel
By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies.
en English
am Amharicar Arabicny Chichewazh-CN Chinese (Simplified)en Englishfr Frenchde Germanha Hausait Italianpt Portuguesest Sesothosn Shonaes Spanishsw Swahilixh Xhosayo Yorubazu Zulu
African Arguments wants to hear from you!

Take 5 minutes to fill in this short reader survey and you could win three African Arguments books of your choice…as well as our eternal gratitude.