Parlaying a Biochemistry degree into Brand Management may seem quasi-impossible, but it is a feat that Communications and Public Affairs Manager for Google West Africa, Taiwo Kola-Ogunlade, has managed to pull off admirably.
Parlaying a Biochemistry degree into Brand Management may seem quasi-impossible, but it is a feat that Communications and Public Affairs Manager for Google West Africa, Taiwo Kola-Ogunlade, has managed to pull off admirably.
“Some of my colleagues come from an arts background and whenever they look confused, I always look really smart,” Kola-gunlade jokingly told Open Source yesterday. He obtained an Honours degree in Biochemistry from Lagos State University in Nigeria, followed by an MBA in 2011.
“When I worked for GlaxoSmithKline, I had to think ‘what does sodium chloride mean to the consumer?’” Kola-Ogunlade said, explaining how he translated his scientific knowledge into consumerfriendly information.
“So for example, sodium chloride to a mother means strong teeth.” Kola-Ogunlade made his way to Google by way of a few traineeships where he found that he had to be prepared to ‘unlearn’ quite a lot from his university ways. One piece of advice he gives to neo-trainees is that they should try to find the humour in workplaces where fetching coffee is a major part of an intern’s duties.
“As a rite of passage, it [fetching coffee]is on its way out, but for those who still have to endure it find the fun in it because you know that someday you’ll play that trick on someone else.”
Nowadays organisational structures are, “flatter; so there’s really no boss. You can be the newest member of a team, lead a project without being subjected to those initiation rites.”
Working at Google has confirmed Kola-Ogunlade’s belief that the future lies in data.
“As humans we constantly generate data, only we don’t learn from it,” he said. Archives are a great source of information and in most African countries they are ignored, to our detriment.
“Data can be used to tell stories and data journalism helps you create a story before it becomes a story,” Kola-Ogunlade said.
Kola-Ogunlade works with brilliant minds at Google, a company that believes, first of all, in knowledge and in the goodness of human beings.
“It’s a fair company in that it thinks first about the user and everything else follows from that,” he explained.
“Where I come from enterprises don’t normally think like that, they think first of profitability.”
At Google, Kola-Ogunlade and his colleagues think about people’s needs and requirements when they search for online tools and products.
“If a product does not suit the user we have in mind, it will not fly at Google.”
