Help Builders Share their Reflections

Me: I really think you have wisdom to share and you should write more — or podcast, or be on stage — whatever works for you. But you should be doing it more often.

You: Why should I share my reflections?

Me:

• Refine your reflection: The process of having to synthesize your lessons and rationale, often helps deepen your own insight
• Find relevant community who are similarly curious and thoughtful to refine and enrich your insights
• Build your professional brand which opens up spontaneous connections you couldn’t have planned for
• Scale your impact by sharing your hard earned wisdom with the next generation

More of me: Personally, writing has been a way to refine my reflection in conversation with other writers, and scale my impact but I usually only share it with close acquaintances. I am hoping to leverage public publishing to find a broader community. I also prefer writing to speaking because it gives the conversation time to digest, allows readers to revisit, and encourages long form and detailed engagement.

Across my career, I’ve benefited from deep conversations with a diversity of leaders. While I’ve challenged them to share more, I did little else to support them.

So I recently started working with a community of COOs of pre seed to Series B companies, to help them articulate, share and refine their wisdom.

I am extending a similar offer to work with entrepreneurial leaders who have built stuff, led people and organisations in Africa.

If you are a builder, how can I help you share your insights with the world?

Depending on how far you want to take it, I can see us working to create the “First Round Review” equivalent for building organisations in emerging markets — long-form best practice on specific topics written by entrepreneurial leaders for other builders. This I hope will spur and help others to build better, faster and more efficiently.

As a start, here is a working set of guidelines I’ve found helpful for leadership and business related writing to make it practical. The guidelines are a work in progress so feel free to add comments and references to other great guidelines for writers and editors.

I’ve found that GOOD leadership and business writing shares stories that educate, inspire and challenge us.

But beyond having good form, GREAT leadership and business writing also provides clear principles that synthesize wisdom into truths beyond the specific context in which they were learnt; and provide frameworks, templates and tools that others can adapt for their context.

Whoever you are, whatever you have spent time building — I really hope you take up a pen, type pad or mic, and share your story and wisdom with us. Am happy to help.

Know anyone I could support or collaborators I can reach out to?

Reflection Verse: To acquire wisdom is to love yourself; people who cherish understanding will prosper. Proverbs 19:8