Before your baby clocks 5

Take a look at your baby; boy or a girl, toddler or preteen. Take a look again, because you are looking at a very unique gift! No other individual is like him or her. No other eyes or nose, no matter how similar, is exactly the same as your baby’s. His laughter and frown; his gait and posture are all so uniquely his that none other can parallel it. But it doesn’t end there; it’s the same with his traits and habits, likes and dislikes.

But have you ever wondered why this is so? Is it just so that we can easily tell him apart from another baby? I think not!

Rather, I favour the answer that it is because his path in life is very unique, very his. He doesn’t need someone else’s eyes because he was not designed to see things the way others do. He has no need for another’s laughter, because he wasn’t meant to use his to bring joy to everyone, but only to his own. But I find something amiss in all this beautiful design, not from nature but from our society. It stems from the fact that even before we begin to appreciate the uniqueness of our babies, we ship them off to the assembly lines called schools. And in the schools, where generic employable graduates are being mass-produced, the uniqueness of our babies is lost somewhere underneath the uniform they wear. Maybe wearing a school uniform, in fact inadvertently symbolizes the way schools replace our baby’s uniqueness for societal uniformity.

1st steps to getting customers for your business

When we were in primary school, there was a method we often used in solving our sums; we called it working-to-the-answer.

Working to the answer

We would flip to the back pages of our arithmetic texts, which contained the solutions, obtain them and use them to work out the sums; it was like working in reverse, from the end to the beginning. We were always discouraged from doing this; but business management is one area of your life where you don’t want to ever stop doing it. Let me explain.

Don't be caught napping

Reliable reports have it that when Western Union (WU) came to Nigeria, they approached one of the most reputable banks in the country and introduced their ‘novel’ method of worldwide money transfer services to them. They had high hopes of appointing the bank as their agents in Nigeria but this was not to be. The reports continued that the management of the bank was disinclined to the idea but favoured the old wire-transfer method, via telegraph, which took several days and often required beneficiaries to open a bank account instead. 

Whatever reasons for not signing up with WU might be, we do not know, but it was said that WU took their business away and went shopping elsewhere for willing banks to engage with. Fate shone on them when they found a forward-looking group of directors on the board of another bank. 

3 personality traits that repel business sponsors

I wish to begin today’s post with a big thank you to all of our readers. Thank you for letting us into your lives every weekend, even though it is the time most people love to relax and spend time with family and friends. Our heartfelt gratitude also goes to readers who leave comments on the blog (I’m particularly feeling the comment from the HR person!) and we just wish to add that you may kindly share the posts on facebook and twitter so that others can benefit from the blog as well. (Find share-icons at the bottom of the page.) Here we go…

Blessed are those who work for no salary….

Happy New June everybody! I beg you to ignore the title for a minute and read on.

The other day, someone was speaking and he compared setting up a business venture to building a house. After the speech, I pleaded with him to elaborate and he drew the parallels which I quickly scribbled on a paper. Here it is: