200 years ago, an unknown warrior from possibly the smallest nation in Southern Africa, set out to pursue a BIG Idea – an idea that would change the fortunes of South Africa forever and enable him to grow his business 10,000 times in ten years – And key to this exponential growth was a system that would motivate the best soldiers and generals from the region to join his army voluntarily – and at the same time make his enemies surrender many times before the battle even began. When I first came to the shores of the Zulu Kingdom twenty years ago, I was astounded to discover that the legendary ZULU KING SHAKA had suffered a branding fate similar to the subject of my PhD thesis, the much maligned Roman Emperor Nero For the past twenty years, I have been digging through the archives, visiting the battlefields and sifting through the propaganda of the history books to uncover the true legacy of the great Zulu Emperor – a legacy that far extends beyond military conquests, territorial expansion and countless battlefields, a legacy that is best described by a term that has become the defining feature of the twenty first century – Disruptive Innovation. Not only did the Emperor invent a new weapon by turning the throwing assegai into the stabbing iklwa, but he also reinvented the battle formation … and when his greatest competitor appeared on the scene – the British – he reinvented again and leveraged their superior technology, the horse and the gun, in at least one of his battles. And all along the way, Emperor Shaka leveraged data points to turn his BIG Idea into a product that would revolutionize his industry – and it all started on his first battle as a common soldier against the Dlamini, when he picked up a skill that today has become mission critical for anybody who wants to grow their business discover how to identify your next big idea by leveraging data insights and turn your idea into a profitable product