Don't Let Lawyers Run (Ruin) Your Carrier (Career) - The Case of Africa

African carriers need to adopt the more pragmatic approach of European, North American, and Asian carriers. Virtually no carriers in these regions require customers to sign NDAs to get a price quote. It accomplishes nothing since buyers share pricing information with impunity. Nor is there need to sign the MSA and then the service order form. Again, American carriers, including competitive carriers like Lumen, skip the NDA unless the client requests it, and even skip the MSA by putting language in the SOF that says signing it implies acceptance of the default MSA.

Clearly this bureaucratic quagmire is the fault of the colonial powers that once governed Africa. They imposed their clumsy 19th century European administrative systems on the continent during the colonial period. When independent African states emerged in the 1960s, they inherited these administrative regimes.

Lawyers don't understand that business is more than risk management. And that risk management is not the same as risk avoidance. Lawyers want to prove their value to the firm so they create one-sided NDAs and MSAs that require the other side to completely rewrite them in order to reestablish some semblance of balance to the agreement. An entrepreneur friend of mine was negotiating a software product sales relationship with Yahoo. The deal was almost wrecked by his own lawyers who kept rewriting the agreement in such way to make it clearly unacceptable to Yahoo. He had to jump in his car and drive to Manhattan to personally scold his legal guns over their stupid antics. The lawyers backed off and he became rich. 😀

At the beginning of a company's life, the vision animating it is one of opportunity: "To Get Rich is Glorious" (Chinese economic reformer, Deng Xiaoping). As the company grows, the entrepreneurial spirit dies and professional managers take over. The professional managers receive high salaries; they face less upside than downside. So avoiding mistakes become the top priority. So the professional managers allow their legal staff to restructure every process to minimize risk regardless of the impact on sales, provisioning or customer satisfaction. Indeed, legal becomes a shield for professional management. If an excuse is needed for inaction, a lawyer can provide it. These companies struggle to grow and their cultures are so inbred that they cannot see the problem, namely that 20% of the work force is doing 80% of the meaningful work. The other 80% is simply corporate fat. Grist for a chainsaw wielding cost cutter.

Carriers need to be lean because wholesale demands it. It is not a gentlemen's club. If you let the lawyers run your firm, you will lose to more nimbler players. Don't hide behind words like 'governance' or 'professionalism'.