photo courtesy www.greenbeltmovement.org

In a space of just 10 days, two icons who left indelible marks both on their fields and on humanity have died: Wangari Maathai on September 26, 2011 and Steve Jobs on October 5, 2011.

Even as we mourn their passing and celebrate their achievements, there are a few lessons SME owners can learn from these iconoclasts. One, doing the unconventional can produce remarkable results. When Wangari successfully protested against KANU’s bizarre idea of constructing a 60-storey building at Uhuru Park in 1989, she by extension marketed the Green Belt Movement that she had founded in 1977 to the rest of the world without spending money on traditional advertising. When Apple opened the Itunes store in 2003 and priced song downloads at US$ 99cents a piece, that action did not only help American music labels slow down music piracy, it also helped accelerate the uptake of Ipods.

Second, despite their celebrity statuses, Wangari and Steve knew they would one day die, so they surrounded and delegated responsibilities to other people so that they could, pardon the cliché, concentrate on the bigger picture. One result of this succession planning is that the Green Belt Movement and Apple will continue functioning without experiencing the power struggles some companies go through after the demise of their owners. Indian billionaire Dhirubhai Ambani died in 2004 without leaving a will, sparking off an unnecessary feud between his sons Mukesh and Anil Ambani.

photo courtesy www.economist.com

Third, they ensured their companies stood for a specific purpose anyone could understand: Green Belt Movement for a green planet through the preservation of forests, Apple for elegantly designed products.

As an SME owner you should not only learn from them, but do one better.