Manish Sardana is the Founder and CEO of Craydel; a platform that seeks to guide the youth to study what they are passionate about.
If you think about the courses you studied and the school you chose, you will find that the transition from secondary school to university was based on influence from family and friends. In Kenya, students are allocated to programmes based on their high school grades and are led down career paths they never dreamt of. In a lot of cases, there are Kenyans with degrees that they never use and stuck in jobs they hate; that is, until the brave few leave their jobs and pursue their passions.
Sardana has always been passionate about entrepreneurship and businesses and started his first, a library, when he was nine or ten. He was in a very good place in his career and left his Managing Director position at Scangroup to pursue his passion of creating a platform that drives social change.
The themes Sardana and Waithera Kabiru discussed in this episode of the iMarket Podcast were entrepreneurship, leadership and success in a digital world.
Entrepreneurship
Sardana finds Steve Jobs career success something to strive towards. What Steve Job did was become successful, get fired, make a comeback, and passed having changed the world. Jobs left a legacy behind, and Sardana wants to do the same. He may have been Managing Director at a large organization but his mission was to build a platform that people can use generations after he’s gone. While it wasn’t easy leaving a position with a lot of job security, Sardana felt agitated that things weren’t working and wanted to make a change. It takes courage, but you have to begin and not be stopped by fear of failure. Lastly, you have to pursue your passion, that’s what will drive you to focus on growing your business ventures.
Leadership
There’s a genuine lack of courage in the marketing profession. Sitting in rooms discussing great ideas that never leap off the pitch deck because clients assume they’re too bold or risky for the consumers. What they fail to understand is that, as Kabiru said, “ideas come our way that aren’t based on consumer truth or insight”. Good leadership will stem from not shying away from thinking different but are also based on strong value systems. A great leader needs to figure out what their value system is in order to make those tough, risky and bold decisions that will eventually make an impact.
Success in a Digital World
Sardana knew that the future would be shaped by technology, it wasn’t just a passing phase, but now organizations have to adapt in order to survive. When technology came in to disrupt, he saw that there were the disruptors and the disrupted. Sardana wanted to be a disruptor. Craydel, his web-based platform, allows working professionals and students to select courses from a wide range of local and international universities. While still a fairly new company, Sardana is making strides to grow and change within the realm of technology which will enable users to attain information that will potentially change their lives. The success of this platform in a digital world will outlive him and make a global impact because as he said “the only way to immortalise yourself is to build something so meaningful and powerful and used widely across the world”.
