This article is part of the series “When Dreams Need Builders” – exploring how visionaries and builders must work together to transform ideas into lasting impact.
It’s 11 PM and the entrepreneur is still at the office, hunched over invoices that should have been processed by someone else three levels down. His phone buzzes with a supplier asking about payment terms—something his operations manager could handle. Earlier today, he spent two hours fixing a printer jam because “the boss knows how to sort these things out.”
His team sees him everywhere: in finance meetings, on the factory floor, troubleshooting IT issues, even restocking the kitchen supplies. They admire his work ethic. “Look how hands-on he is,” they whisper with genuine respect. “This man doesn’t ask us to do anything he wouldn’t do himself.”
What they don’t see is the strategy document that’s been sitting on his desk for six months, untouched. The partnership proposal that could triple their market reach, gathering dust. The long-term vision slowly suffocating under a mountain of daily fires that others should be putting out.
We celebrate these entrepreneurs as heroes of hard work. But here’s what we’re really witnessing: we’re watching visionaries bury their own dreams, one operational task at a time. We’re standing in a graveyard of great ideas, killed not by lack of talent or ambition, but by a fundamental misunderstanding of what leadership actually requires.
The Visionary’s Trap I’ve Lived
This scene plays out everywhere—from Silicon Valley boardrooms to African startups. I’ve lived this pattern repeatedly while building Yati Group. The pattern is always the same: brilliant visionaries drowning in operational quicksand while their dreams suffocate.
In my early years, I was a product visionary with revolutionary ideas for transforming how businesses approach strategy and growth, but Yati Group was struggling to scale because I was still thinking like a consultant who had to handle every client personally. I was burning through my energy on operational details while the bigger strategic opportunities remained unexplored.
Everything began to change when I started learning to step back from the operational maze. Not because I had better ideas, but because I began to understand that my job wasn’t to solve every problem—it was to create the conditions where others could build solutions. This shift didn’t start with a new vision—it started when I realized I needed to be liberated from daily firefighting so I could actually lead.
The same pattern appears everywhere in business history. Mark Zuckerberg was a coding genius with revolutionary social networking ideas, but Facebook was hemorrhaging money and struggling to scale because its CEO was still thinking like a programmer. Everything changed when Sheryl Sandberg arrived and liberated him from operational duties to focus on long-term product vision.
Steve Jobs faced a similar trap. Despite being the ultimate product visionary, Apple nearly collapsed under his operational weight. When Tim Cook joined Apple in 1998 as senior vice president of worldwide operations, he transformed Apple’s supply chain from chaos into precision. Cook “was responsible for making sure those dreams could be made and shipped”, turning Jobs’ brilliant visions into products that could actually reach customers at scale.
At Amazon, Jeff Bezos dreamed of “the everything store,” but it was Jeff Wilke who engineered the warehouses, logistics, and systems that made it real. Bezos called Wilke “an incredible teacher to all of us” and said “When you see us taking care of customers, you can thank Jeff for it”. When Wilke joined Amazon in 1999, the company was doing about $2 billion in revenue annually—now it brings in about $1 billion every day.
Even Elon Musk, perhaps the world’s most celebrated visionary, would be lost without Gwynne Shotwell. While Musk dreams of Mars colonies and tweets about rocket explosions, Shotwell “travels the world to reassure crucial business partners that the launch will proceed as planned”. As SpaceX’s President and COO, she’s “responsible for day-to-day operations and managing all customer and strategic relations to support company growth”. She’s often positioned as “the balancing factor for Musk’s appetite for risk”, but she shares his vision completely—she just builds the systems to make it happen.
I’ve learned this uncomfortable truth through my own experience: most visionaries unknowingly sabotage their own dreams by refusing to let go of operational control. And worse, our teams often encourage this self-sabotage by celebrating our “hands-on leadership” instead of building the systems that would set us free. As Jobs himself said: “I’m a tool builder… I want to build really good tools… Then you just stand back and get out of the way, and these things take on a life of their own”. But standing back requires builders you can trust.
The Builder Shortage I’ve Experienced
Here’s the uncomfortable truth I’ve discovered while building Yati Group: Africa has no shortage of visionaries. Our problem is that I’ve been part of creating a culture where everyone wants to be the big idea person, but few want to do the unglamorous work of building.
I’ve learned that building doesn’t look like standing up at conferences giving inspiring speeches. It looks like staying up at night creating business plans, designing processes when the old ones break, and fighting to maintain trust when mistakes threaten reputation. It’s the general manager who refuses to let a plan die because it’s difficult, the operations head who pushes through resistance when complaining would be easier.
In my experience studying successful companies, the most scalable ones understand this distinction. At MTN or Standard Bank, the Group sets the vision, but when local CEOs speak, you’d swear the idea was born in their office. They don’t compete with the vision—they embody it so completely it feels like their own dream. This is what I’m trying to build at Yati Group—builders who hold the line in their domains without waiting for my constant input.
The Execution Gap I’ve Witnessed
I’ve seen it happen too many times in my own business and in companies across Africa: a brilliant strategy gets announced with fanfare, then dies slowly in committee meetings and feasibility studies. Why? Because too many leaders treat themselves as employees waiting for me to break everything down into bite-sized tasks.
What I need are builders who hear a vision once and say, “This is mine now.” They don’t wait for detailed instructions. They translate the dream into action, repeat it until others believe it, and weave it into the culture until it feels inevitable. Sometimes I realize I need builders who can create breakthroughs that free me from the danger of every innovation depending on my personal involvement.
Consider how every workshop and national meeting in Eswatini begins with reference to His Majesty’s vision—first Vision 2022, now the rallying call Nkwe! That’s how visions become reality: they’re spoken, repeated, and carried by many until they become part of the national rhythm. This is what I’m learning to build at Yati Group.
But I’ve also learned that sometimes my vision feels insensitive to my team’s input, not because I don’t value their ideas, but because I’m trying to protect something fragile from being compromised into mediocrity. The best builders understand this tension and push through the resistance to make the vision stronger.
The Four Builder Questions I Ask My Team
Every leader in my organization—whether in a corporate boardroom or around a family fire—must honestly answer these questions I’ve developed through years of learning:
Am I truly building, or just executing tasks? Builders create systems and solve problems. Task-executors wait for detailed instructions. Sometimes I need my team to step in like the builders who saved Google’s heart when it stopped beating, taking complete ownership of critical failures.
Do I own this vision as if it were mine? When you speak about Yati Group’s direction, does it sound like your personal mission, or someone else’s homework assignment?
Am I multiplying the dream or managing it? Builders find ways to scale vision through other people. Managers just oversee existing processes.
When challenges come, do I protect or abandon? The true test of a builder is what happens when the dream gets difficult. Do you hold your line or immediately escalate to me?
Breaking the Graveyard Cycle
The next time someone in your family stands up talking about building the first car named after your surname, pause before you laugh. I’ve learned to ask myself: what if this dreamer had builders around them? People who could operationalize the vision, create a roadmap, and guide them on where to begin?
The missing ingredient isn’t more dreams—it’s more people willing to get their hands dirty making dreams real. We need fewer mockers and more builders. Fewer people competing for the spotlight and more willing to work in the engine room.
At Yati Group, I’m still learning how to build this culture. Some days my managers step up and govern their domains brilliantly. Other days I find myself back in the operational weeds, fighting fires that should never have reached my desk. But I know this: the companies that will scale in Africa are those where builders understand they’re not just employees—they’re governors of crucial territories in the kingdom of the vision.
Because here’s what I’ve learned through years of building: every movement that changed the world started with one person’s crazy idea and a small group of people who decided to make it real. The early Christians took the gospel from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth not because Jesus gave them a detailed business plan, but because the apostles became builders of something bigger than themselves.
The Choice We Face
Africa’s future hangs on a simple choice: will we remain a continent of brilliant dreamers whose ideas die at family gatherings? Or will we become a place where audacious visions find the builders they need to reshape the world?
The graveyard of great ideas is already overcrowded. It’s time we started building monuments to the dreams that lived instead.
I’m still on this journey myself, learning every day how to build Yati Group into something that can scale beyond my personal involvement. The question isn’t whether you have great ideas. The question is: when someone shares their dream with you, will you be the one who helps bury it—or the one who helps build it?
This article is part of a series exploring the critical relationship between visionaries and builders:
- When Dreams Need Builders – The foundational piece on why every vision needs dedicated builders
- The Startup Builder’s Reality: Why Your Job Isn’t What You Think It Is
- Holding the Line in Business: Guarding Your Space Like It’s the Last Defence – How builders must own their domains completely
- When the Heart Stops Beating: How Two Builders Saved Google – The story of builders who stepped up in crisis
- The Danger of Visionary-Led Breakthroughs: When Success Becomes a Trap – Why builders must create innovations in their own domains
- When Vision Feels Insensitive: Why Builders Must Push Through the Resistance – Understanding the tension between vision protection and team input