Books are powerful. Reading from great authors has convinced me more to write beyond anything else. I do this thing where I read many books at once. I often stumble upon something phenomenal when they reference each other. One book can explain the other even better.
I am re-reading The Innovator's Dilemma after over a decade and The Medici Effect again at the same time. These are classics to be reread and used as reference material. I was reading them because of something I was writing, and BOOM! One chapter of one book explained the other.
The Medici Effect explains Value Networks which was a concept dealt with in Innovator's Dilemma but was very technical. It simplified it and explained the importance of their overlaps, and how not experiencing other networks blinds us to potential intersections.
I have been researching different diaspora value networks and why some succeed more than others. We must avoid blindly copying others when we should interface and overlap with them. We have our own value networks, and there are good reasons why we remain in them.
We don't have to replicate Silicon Valley, the Israelis, Chinese, or Indians, but learn from them and overlap ours with theirs. The extended family system has worked for us for generations before we decided to take the worst part of Western culture to replace it.
It shocked me when I got married and discovered how tightly knit my wife's "huge" family was. It is something that wasn't so strange to the generation of my parents but is now wholly lost with ours. We focus more on individual achievement. We compete instead of being communal.
Community is still very much part of our African identity. It comes out in unexpected places and primarily powers what are now called "informal business networks." We are working hard to destroy those networks with modernization instead of learning from them.
It is insane and ironic that something like 419 fraud succeeds mainly because of community and sharing and not greed. Criminals know how to share and understand the benefits better than those they steal from.
Criminal value networks are surprisingly global. It helps them evade the law and launder the proceeds of crime. This is why we must be cautious with cryptocurrency. While it is very transparent, it is also. The easiest way for a large-scale criminal enterprise to scale.
Criminals are always ahead of most people in adopting disruptive innovation. They sometimes see the benefits well before others. While we were begging legit businesses to use email and the internet in Africa, criminals switched before them. Same for digital banking.
This is now my biggest worry with AI.
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