i see what you did there Robina.... you have so much loathing for the Pepsi guy, you want to pop him everywhere; that was referring to Jim Manzi not John Sculley. A good read!
Let's be honest the MBA business type guys created value for these companies. John Sculley was brought in to steady Apple which was bankrupt at that point; Steve Jobs at this point was up shit creek, didn't know what to do to rescue the business. The Sculley types simply over stayed their welcome and forgot about innovation once the turn-around had happened. They should have gone back to basics of what the business was about, moved on or listened a little more to the techies. But they grew big egos!
Mind you also that Steve Jobs wasn't really a techie but rather a calligrapher. He turned his passion into billions.
The tragedy is that Safcom will not transform unless it has some real competition at its doorstep and is shaken and woken from its complacency. The various players in the Fintech space need to create a competing app platform/ecosystem that competes with Mpesa for similar services and nibble away at its market dominance. Then they will jolted from their reverie. For now, they will continue on auto-pilot, after all they are minting billions (for now) and in huge margins unheard off in any of the other Vodafone subsidiaries across the world.
Quite frankly, a techie CEO for Safcom would only make sense if you create a holding entity and assign techie managers (domain experts) to the various business units while the holding company looks at the business side of the whole and ensures that the various entities/units are delivering on revenue and bottom line targets. Until such time, you will need a business guy at the helm who ensures that his various unit leaders have competence in the assigned responsibilities. IS the Board/Vodacom/Vodafone interested in making Safcom the predominant technology (yes Pundit, technology, not telecom) behemoth in Africa outside South Africa?? Would they? I doubt they have even imagined this leave alone entertained the thought!
I swear this is not a dig at ours truly 
... i don't even like this gay geek. Bill gates sounds alot like MJ from first-hand accounts I've heard - constantly yelling the f** word n all
My First BillG Review
by JOEL SPOLSKY
...
The next day was the big BillG review.
June 30, 1992.
In those days, Microsoft was a lot less bureaucratic. Instead of the 11 or 12 layers of management they have today, I reported to Mike Conte who reported to Chris Graham who reported to Pete Higgins, who reported to Mike Maples, who reported to Bill. About 6 layers from top to bottom. We made fun of companies like General Motors with their eight layers of management or whatever it was.
In my BillG review meeting, the whole reporting hierarchy was there, along with their cousins, sisters, and aunts, and a person who came along from my team whose whole job during the meeting was to keep an accurate count of how many times Bill said the F word. The lower the f***-count, the better.
Bill came in.
I thought about how strange it was that he had two legs, two arms, one head, etc., almost exactly like a regular human being.
He had my spec in his hand.
He had my spec in his hand!
He sat down and exchanged witty banter with an executive I did not know that made no sense to me. A few people laughed.
Bill turned to me.
I noticed that there were comments in the margins of my spec. He had read the first page!
He had read the first page of my spec and written little notes in the margin!He was flipping through the spec!He Read The Whole Thing!reallyHow did I know that? January and February WHAT?John SculleySculleyJohn Sculley was the MBA-type running Apple into the ground.Is Ballmer going to be another John Sculley, who nearly drove Apple into extinction because the board of directors thought that selling Pepsi
...
Read the whole story for a good tech laugh --
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/
Topic: Peter Ndengwa of Daegeo/EABL to head Safaricom (Read 7483 times)