How to build your own global organization

On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dormitory room. On July 21, 2010, Zuckerberg reported that the company reached the 500 million-user mark. Facebook has more than 2 billion monthly active users as of June 2017. That’s a spectacular growth. This Facebook takes off in the dormitory room of Harvard University and within 13 years becomes a global organization. How was that possible? As at 2016, Facebook had a net income of US$10.217 billion, surpassing the vastly successful 131 year old Coca Cola company with US$6.527 billion net income. What understanding enabled Mr Zuckerberg to accomplish that in only 13 years?

How far one can go in business, what one accomplishes and the speed at which that happens begins with one simple understanding. Every successful organisation in the world shares in that understanding and the degree to which one relates with that understanding is the degree to which one can succeed.

What is the understanding? Simply this: have respect for every man. You wonder how that relates to business but that’s really the idea behind business. It is being concerned about the needs of people, caring enough about the need to help people freely express their potentials that you play an active role. In a 2014 Entrepreneur Magazine article Zuckerberg was quoted as saying, “I remember really vividly, you know, having pizza with my friends a day or two after—I opened up the first version of Facebook at the time I thought, “You know, someone needs to build a service like this for the world.” But I just never thought that we’d be the ones to help.”

That powerful statement reveals what he thought about the world and what he thinks his role is. His vision statement about says it all, “ People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.” He thought of a connected world, where people can express themselves freely! That is what the whole world craves for, Zuckerberg simply made it possible and the world crowned him a hero!

Is that exclusive to Zuckerberg? No. I got into a Nigerian city which was not very familiar to me lately. I’ve been to the city a number of times, but can’t really find my way freely so I settled for Google map. All I did was program my destination on the google map and drive off. The map talks to me, tells me the route to take and at a time it said, ‘you have arrived!’ Geese! I cleared by the side and walk right into the building. Thanks Google map! What possibilities! Google is a global company which took off in 1998 from the garage of Susan Diane Wojcicki, a friend to the founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.Google was worth US$133 billion with 57,100 persons in its employ as at 2015! That’s phenomenal for a company with a very humble beginning just 18 years ago. Again Google’s mission statement shows us exactly how this was possible. In the beginning, Brin and Page set out “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Again, that sounds like taking the responsibility for something.

The story is the same from Amazon to Toyota, from Coca Cola to Nestlé. It has always been about giving attention to the challenges of humanity and taking the responsibility for change. None of these organisations began by some people sitting around and thinking how do we get people to start giving us money? What can we tell them to convince them to get their dollar bills to us? No, its always being, ‘what can we do to help move the world forward?’

But it does not stop there. Beyond wanting to help is something even more powerful. It is having respect for human beings so much you are only willing to give them first class services or products. You don’t want to compromise what you offer them to make more profit. The first time I watch a documentary of the Toyota Production System, I was to say the least blown away! Watching what commitments they demonstrated in delivering the Toyota Promise and their unwillingness to compromise on quality was simply astonishing! Toyota summarizes its values and conduct guidelines under two headings: ‘Respect for people and Continuous improvement.’

Building a global organization begins with this simple understanding that human beings deserve to be served right everywhere. As the world faces several different threats today from lack of education to poverty, cyber insecurity and diseases everyone can leverage on that to build a global solution. It begins with a change of mindset from seeking for who to help you to making up your mind to become the help the world seeks. Shutting complains and blames out of your life, seeking relevance rather than survival. We must understand that the problems in the world must be solved by people in the world. Solutions to the problems in the world will not come from Jupiter or Mars, it will come from people living in the world. The state of the world has only improved as people gave attention to it and took action to help.

Make it possible for the right ideas to flow through you by choosing hold human beings everywhere to the highest esteem and been unwilling to compromise on your services to them whether you are a janitor or a CEO. That way you position yourself to building an idea that will benefit the whole world.

 

Brian Reuben