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Dear Small Business Owner... A Memo

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Why did you start your business? Desire, need, or something else? Whatever it may be, be proud of yourself. Congratulations – you used your talents, and you did it.  Maybe you own and run a small bakery, which you founded because of your character, passion, and skill. You love to make people happy, and you know that treats and sweets make people happy. Baking is your hobby, and you can do it effortlessly.  Often, your small business resembles who you are. The challenges it will face will often resemble the challenges you face at a personal level, and likewise, the successes it attains will be akin to your successes. In knowing this, remember that each morning, you rise to face another day and strive to be a better person than you were the day before, and your business can do the same. You are your business; your business is you.  Just like you, your business has needs and wants. Some of these are an abundance of questions, for which you can never seem to find the perfect answer. How lo
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Bounded Rationality and Our Failure to Recognize Our Own Incompetence

Who makes the best decisions for you? You? Are you sure? When you were young, you most probably had dreams of growing up and becoming successful in your chosen field, but did you always make the decisions that best maximized your chances of achieving that? Let’s say you wanted to grow up to be a doctor, did you always do your biology homework and study hard for all your exams or did you have to rely on threats of being handed detention by your teacher or grounding by your parents? Now going back to the opening sentence, who makes the best decisions for you? Still you? Some of you might argue that with the previous example; you were too young and immature to make optimal decisions for yourself. If you believe this, then may I propose the following question: Do you wish to have a financially secure retirement? If yes, how likely are you to adequately save enough during your working life for your pension if government-enforced social security schemes didn’t exist? The empirical studies o
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Kiya-Kiya Economics

  Who would’ve thought that a nation that is said to be the most literate on the African continent would surprisingly become the opposite when it was time to read an economics textbook? As far as the people of Zimbabwe are concerned, economics is about 'kukiya-kiya'. 'Kukiya-kiya'  is a Shona slang term that can be simply translated as 'to improvise'. After all, Aristotle did state that “No great mind ever existed without a touch of madness”. In this post, we shall probe some of the economic miracles, acts of financial McGyvery and monetary gymnastics that have been performed in Zimbabwe over the past 2 decades. 1. Black Friday. Black Friday (a.k.a. the first time the Zimbabwean Dollar crashed) took place on 14 November 1997 when the government of the day paid out ZW$50 000 each to over 60 thousand war veterans. This was completely unbudgeted, and hyperinflation ensued. It was the beginning of the end and the Zimbabwean Dollar never recovered. 2. Standar
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