Hi Everyone,
I lived in Hong Kong for a semester in college. The thing that struck me most about that experience actually how familiar life was there. Succeeding in life takes the same qualities everywhere: honesty, hard work, relationships, fun. For whatever reason, learning these lessons in really foreign environments lends another layer of meaning. Or maybe just makes them more memorable.
That universality shines through in today’s interview with Barbara Chabbaga (youtube, mp3), who lives and works in the insurance business in Kenya. How about this for a lesson we can use anywhere in the world: Get the @#$@ out of the building:
How we do it now at AB consultants we call it a bottom up approach. We would never sit in a boardroom and say this is a really good idea.. the kind of product we’d design. I look back at my previous life of working in the corporate world is very tempting you know to sit in a marketing meeting or a product design meeting and say I really really think that if we did this kind of products would work.
What we do now.. we’d probably commission a study, so if it’s with farmers not bring them to our office, go to the field, go to the tier states or go to the informal settlements here in Nairobi. And to be very honest, David, I actually did that for the first time after I left CIC.
But of course not is all the same in Kenya:
…it was a shooting attack, right, shooting, grenades and just shooting anybody in their sight it didn’t matter whether you’re a child. They shot a children’s convention, a cooking class for children, and they shot the children it was horrible and so I was stuck in this little filing room and I was very lucky because it was very hidden. And there were about 30 of us and we hid there for about 8 hours.
…It went on and on and on and you hear the grenade. And you hear the grenade is rolling on the floor because when you roll a pen on top of a table it makes a similar sound and I never knew that until after that ordeal. And a pen rolling on a table, it terrifies me. And I sat there in this dark room and I think I’ll probably die today and that we knew that for sure they’re going to find us, that’s what we thought, you know, they’ll find us. and I prayed.. please spare my life and I’ll live my life to its fullest.
After I made a couple decisions and one of them was I was going to leave my job at CIC.
There is so much more to the conversation, including the changes she made to her life after surviving that attack, where the Swahili word for insurance comes from, how many actuaries there are in Kenya (guess!) and how the most successful banker in Kenya made his fortune.
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