Zach Selch uses the legend of Prester John and Ethiopia's 1,000-year-old rock churches to argue that companies waste time searching for external saviors instead of taking responsibility for their own growth. Real progress in global sales comes from leveraging the resources you already have.
Chapters
I'm in Laliba, Ethiopia. It's a beautiful city of rock-hewn churches that go back about 1,000 years. Carved out of the out of the living rock. You've probably heard of them. It's a World Heritage Site. Really beautiful place. If you ever get a chance, if you're in Addis for business or if you're in Africa for tourism and you get a chance, you have to come here. It's just gorgeous. Really amazing. I've never seen anything quite like it, and I've seen a lot of cool stuff. You might have heard of the legend of Prester John. The there was an Ethiopian Christian kingdom here. Earliest Christian kingdom actually in the world, and the people here are very devout Christians. They have their own Orthodox Church, and for about 1,800 years there has been an Orthodox Ethiopian Church with their holiest sites right here. Very, very, very interesting. But in the West, there was a legend of an Ethiopian or an Oriental king called Prester John, who was a Christian with fantastic wealth and a fantastic army. And Christians pretty much for about 1,000 years had this idea that if they could find Prester John and ask him for help, Prester John would help them fight the Muslims. And there were all these attempts to reach Prester John. Actually, people tried to— thought that maybe the Mongols Genghis Khan could communicate with Prester John. They sent explorations up the Nile. They sent explorations around Africa. A lot of early explorations had ambassadors to Prester John. And of course, they never found Prester John. And even if they had come to Ethiopia and found the Christian kingdom, they wouldn't have found this gigantic army that could save them. We very often look outside of our control to find somebody who can help us. We look to different departments. We say, well, if just engineering could develop a better product, we'd be in better shape. Or if marketing could come up with better solutions, better marketing material, we'd be in better shape. Or if finance could just give us a little bit better cash flow, we'd be in better shape. And all these things are just excuses. Right. What we have to do is look inside ourselves. And figure out— When you decide it's time to grow your international sales, call us.
