Every month I am going to highlight a specific leader in the technology industry that best exemplifies the skills and qualities of a Disruptive Leader. Each will be a leader who:

  • Embraces challenge and adversity as a way to strengthen organizations and business fundamentals.
  • Uses game-changing strategies and tactics to overturn the status quo both within their company and in their market.
  • Demonstrates significant business impact (profits and revenue growth) that also creates additional value to individuals and organizations.
  • Is a catalyst for change within the leader’s company and industry/market.
  • Has a clear vision of success for both the company and the impact his/her company can have on people’s lives.
  • Demonstrates humility by recognizing others that contributed to his/her success.

I will be looking only at leaders within technology companies that are targeting customers in emerging markets and/or under-served people at the bottom of the pyramid.

This month’s Disruptive Leader Award goes to Michael Joseph, CEO of Safaricom in Kenya, Africa. Safaricom is the mobile phone service market leader (85% market share) in Kenya.

I was first introduced to Safaricom when I visited Kenya on business in 2006, but recently I read an Economist article that briefly described Safaricom’s and Joseph’s success and growth that Joseph caught my eye. I blogged about that article last month because it is one of the few examples of a very succesful tech business in emerging markets.

Then yesterday, I read an interview with Mr. Joseph on the website AllAfrica.com. There he describes his challenges and the approach he took to become one of the most talked about success stories in Africa, it was clear to me that Michael Joseph is one of those unique individuals that exhibited the qualities of a disruptive leader. Here are a few highlights from the interview:

Overcoming significant challenges and adversity:

People always ask the same question – How come you were so successful against all these odds, and how is Safaricom so successful against its competitor, which is languishing somewhere at around 15 percent of the market share, while we have 85 percent? … It’s really a combination of things. We did have an experienced team. … And we made some very good decisions which, in hindsight, were the best decisions that we could have made. At the time we were making them, we had no idea whether or not they would be successful, whether they would be the right decisions or not.

The main decision we made was to have a pre-paid model right from the start, rather than a contract or post-paid model, which is what our competitor did. So an average person on the street could go and get a line straightaway – no questions, no forms to fill in. We made a decision that we would bill on a per-second basis. That means you would only pay for the seconds you use, unlike on most other continents with most other companies, where people are billed per minute. So if you speak for 61 seconds, you’ll pay for two minutes. But on our network if you speak for 61 seconds, you only pay for 61 seconds. Our competitor billed per minute. It was a very good decision for us because the people that we were targeting didn’t have a lot of money.

Creating a profitable business while improving lives:

We started with nothing eight years ago. We now have over 1,600 people working for this company. But we also have close to 400 dealers who sell our airtime, and another 4,000 M-Pesa dealers who deal just with M-Pesa, and each one of them has sub-dealers and sub-sub-dealers. So we’ve probably created 100 jobs for every employee in this company – about 150,000 jobs.

If you look at Kenya … we have between 40 and 50 percent unemployment. We have 300,000 university graduates every year, and we probably only hire 20,000. The rest don’t have jobs. But Kenyans are hardworking people who don’t want to sit back and do nothing and cry. They want to work. But if you have your own phone, you can go and create your own duka (Kiswahili for shop), you can buy and sell stuff in the markets, or go and grow it and sell it on the side of the road, or you can be an artisan, paint people’s houses, plumbing – whatever it is. And the tool that has enabled you to do this is the mobile phone.

Demonstrating a deeper vision to world progress:

My dream is for every school to have a computer so that kids can freely access the outside world. If you go to schools throughout the country, you can find plenty of computers, but they have no access to the outside world. In this global world, we have to have access to the outside world. That’s where I think ICT could be very important; where the cable would be important, the government initiatives putting fibre-optic across the country. Get it into the schools so the next generation will be completely computer literate. You can’t wait for handouts. We need to create all that work, and businesses and industries in Kenya. And we can do it.

There you have it. My hero for the month.