You can achieve anything. I found this story of Jack Ma of the Alibaba empire and thought you would love it too. Enjoy. As you sow, so shall you reap”. It is a principle relevant to all environments, dynamics and levels of interaction. Corporate culture, employee well being and company performance is one more example of the dynamics and outcomes of this principle in action. In 1999, Jack Ma gathered 17 of his friends and students in his apartment in Hangzhou to share his vision of conquering global markets. They pooled together their resources of $60,000 and founded a B2B…
Perfection kills innovation and success, stop it!
Next time someone says “your diction or written English is bad” remind them that Chinese, Spaniards, etc are succeeding with their “bad” English. Be natural. Learn to express yourself freely. Focus on new ideas NOT the medium! You can cheaply hire a translator or use Google. What matters is an idea. The world is full of many dysfunctions and imperfections. That is why attention to details is an oxymoron. Few people will attend to your details. The secret is to keep improving, NOT to aim at perfection. All great companies I know of have been improving over the years. if…
To be a creative marketer, try to make your ads stand out
To be honest, most ads around Kampala city are just average. It is rare to see a piece of ad work that stands out as in the one shown in this article. As a consultant and mentor, I understand that to get business and sustain your company growth, you must find creative ways to market your business. Failure to market will lead to your eventual exit to the more shrewd and ambitious marketers and business people. There are several tools available at your disposal to market. The common ones are (i) conventional marketing tools and (ii) unconventional marketing tools. Before…
How to set up a risk management department
The difference between good and exceptional business leaders who transform organizations is one: The latter first understand the kind of the industry they are operating in before implementing any new developments. Some organizations are by law and required to have a fully-fledged risk management department. This is because risk is so critical to the business that if some events materialized, the organizations would collapse. These could be legal or technology related events if an entity is fully reliant on IT system, for example. If an IT system of a bank got any problem, of prologed downtime where by customers are…
Understanding cloud computing
Cloud computing is gaining momentum as it enables small and large companies alike to gain unprecedented competitiveness. You don’t need a lot of capital to invest in sophisticated ICT applications, software or infrastructure. As long as you have fast internet connection, and the brains to do it, you identify a credible provider and run all your computing needs on the cloud. A case in point In the past, to acquire a robust enterprise resource planning (ERP) application like SAP; or ACL, you needed to part with over US $100,000+ in one-off capital expenditure to acquire the application. Then invest in training…
Good governance for effective fraud prevention
When I was in prison, visiting, an in mate came right after my presentation and said: “Mustapha I really appreciate your talk on in-mate reformation. But how do you advise a prisoner like me serving a jail term for a crime I never committed?” The person in question was called James — a brilliant young man that had mishandled petty cash at the place of work to pay medical bills for his child. To him, he had not committed any crime. He was justifying his actions. This gives key pointers that in Uganda, majority of the people steal in order…
