LESSONS AN INDIAN BOY TAUGHT ME

I have read books and practised leadership from my teenage years, but this little boy inspires a different level of leadership in me. His determination to make a difference in a system that cared less and a society that was characterized by selfishness, nonchalance, mediocrity and greed inspires in me the need to take the lead in effecting positive change.

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THERE WAS A PROBLEM;

Things weren’t working as normal and no one seemed to care about it; Do you work in an organization where things aren’t going smoothly as it should, do you come from a family that seem to be careless about certain things they should take rather seriously, or you live in a society that has accepted the life of mediocrity? If you find yourself in such a system as I have, you would notice that people aren’t usually very happy about the situation they have found themselves, but they can’t do anything or so they would think. But this boy is someone you would call a maverick (one who sees things differently from others). What did he do?

• He saw the situation and was exasperated by it
• He analyzed the situation and identified the root cause of the problem 
• He didn’t complain, whine, lament or turn a blind eye (which was the major problem) to the problem like the others in the same area
• He asked himself the most important question under the circumstance, ‘What can I do to solve the problem?

THE SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM;

People respond differently to problems and situations around them; some complain bitterly, others blame the government, the weather, the system, their family background, the economic situation or any other external factor not realizing that the major challenge is not the external forces but the internal weaknesses that we accept as our reality. The bitter truth is that, things are meant to go wrong; people change, government and organizational policies fail, systems that may have lasted for decades fall apart. Rather than sit back and wait and look for whom to blame and criticize, we can be proactive enough to do what this little boy did. He focused his attention on finding a solution to the problem. The only answer that made sense to him was ‘I can move this tree out of the way’. What a stupid thing to do right?

Printivo launches Reseller program to help graphic designers, event planners, photographers and other middle men earn from the platform.

Press Release

Lagos, Thursday, January 07, 2016.

Nigeria’s innovative online printing company Printivo.com today launched Printivo For Resellers, a platform that allows print brokers, designers, photographers, event planners, marketers, freelancers and creative agencies order in bulk and on behalf of the end user. Printivo for Resellers allows individuals or firms to create and order print products on its platform and earn as high as 20% discount all year round subject to terms and condition.

Printivo which announced its six figure series A funding from EchoVC Partners last year after its launch in 2014 is now opening the platform up for creative professionals and anyone who order print products on behalf of their clients with focus on helping small businesses order print faster, cheaper and better via its web2print platform and get amazing discounts.

'We launched Reseller to help graphic designers, freelancers, photographers and other creative professionals order print products for their customers and still make a great margin on each order.With Printivo for resellers, creative professionals can ship printed products directly to their clients, get constant discounts, free sample packs and a dedicated account executive. What this means is that they can focus on the most important part of their business while Printivo takes care of the printing and logistics'. Says Olu’yomi Ojo, CEO of Printivo.

Printivo currently offers free online templates, design support, a custom upload service, nationwide delivery and a fast turnaround with products ranging from business cards, letterheads, flyers, envelopes, and posters to gift products like custom photo mugs, notepads, paper bags and wedding gift items. Customers can order almost any kind of print on the website by selecting from its large database of free editable templates or by uploading their own print ready designs. Printivo then prints and ship the ready-made design to the customer.

'We are expanding our product categories to meet the rapid increase in demand and cover products that our customers would love to order. The idea is to ensure small scale businesses never have to worry about anything print again' Concludes Oluyomi Ojo.

While the reseller programme attracts an annual membership fee of Twenty thousand Naira (N20,000), it is currently free to sign up for the next one year, Printivo believes this will help creative professionals get value from the platform.

To opt in, interested reseller applies on Printivo’s website. Printivo’s reseller team reviews the application and approves the reseller if he meets all criteria. To learn more about Printivo For Resellers visit; www.printivo.com/reseller

12 WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR TEAM AND INCREASE PRODUCTIVITY

The success and failure of your business/organization/team depends on the quality of your Human Resources. All other factors that increase productivity and profit are driven by human resources. Businesses are run and driven by people and not machines. Happy and motivated staff/team attracts happy and loyal customers. Employees are like women, they are soft, tender and fragile; to keep them motivated and productive, you as a team leader/employer have to be creative in keeping them happy. You may be thinking, why should I spend so much resource in keeping them happy? Why not fire them and employ new ones and tell them what happened to the former ones. That will keep them on their feet. Hehehe….. very smart move, but then, you have succeeded in making yourself a tyrant and a mafia boss. What will be the outcome of such action? 

• Your staff will term you a tyrant and will work in constant fear 

• Your corporate image will have been tarnished 

• You will lose your market share to your competitor 

• You will face legal charges and be forced to pay a huge fine 

• You will experience a huge loss on your investment and low productivity 

• Also go through the hassle of recruiting and inducting new staff which will consume time and money. Do you still want to fire them? I guess not.

Your staff are your corporate family, treat them like one. Let’s explore some ways to keep them motivated and inspired to achieve organizational objectives. 

1. Leadership by example; this is still the best form of leadership. Team members want a leader who knows his onus and have the balls to get things done. People follow a general who is always at the forefront and not a rear admiral who fights from the background. 

2. Be transparent and Honest; Give them every necessary information about their jobs and the project. Give them a reason to follow you. It will be a disaster if they find out the hard way that you are hiding something they should know about. You will lose trust and credibility. 

3. Team bonding exercises; All work and no play makes your team ineffective. Introduce some games and exercises that will reduce stress, ease off tension, increase team connection and increase productivity. Create the atmosphere for them to enjoy work. No one wants to work with an acquaintance, so give them a chance to become friends. 

4. Give them a sense of belonging and ownership; listen to their ideas and implement them. Let them be in the implementation team. And if the idea really sucks, be constructive in putting it aside.
5. Reward/little incentive strategy; it may include giving them bragging rights if they perform well in a task, employee of the week/month/year awards, souvenirs, holiday trips etc. these activities will introduce healthy competition in the team 

6. Appreciate them openly and individually; openly let them know how important they are to the team commend their individual strengths and help them walk through their weaknesses. 

7. Support them in achieving tasks. 

8. Be a strategist; Always be steps ahead of your members. Have a plan A, B, C, D etc. and develop an emergency response system for situations that may arise. 

9. Improve budget; This will create a better working atmosphere and increase productivity. 

10. Hangouts and social visits; As often as possible, hangout with your team; watch movies, have game nights, beach hangouts etc. Also make out time to visit them in their homes. You’ll be amazed at the response you will get the following day or week. 

11. Manage change effectively; As often as it occurs, be an effective change manager and inform them when changes occurs. 

12. Be their coach/mentor/best friend; Be someone they can confide in when they get into trouble trying to finish their tasks. Guide them and show them what to do. You are their best trainer. 

 Your staff is the live wire of your organization; their happiness should be your priority if you must get returns on your investments. Use positive reinforcements

3 REASONS WHY YOU ARE NOT EFFECTIVE IN THAT TEAM

Team membership is one of the most effective ways of not just discovering talents, but also maximizing talents and really making impact in an organization or in any system. No man is an island of anything, you're either connected to someone/thing or someone/thing is connected to you. A team is a group of individuals from different cultural, traditional, psychological and socio-political background coming together to accomplish a given task. Research shows that we all learn effectively from each other. Alphabetically, we can describe a team as

T - Together 
E - Everybody 
A - Achieves 
M - More
Teamwork develops your interpersonal skills in coping with conflict, in being a chairperson, in developing your interdependence and accountability and in developing your sense of self-esteem. This aids your personal development and your non-work related relationships. As awesome as teams are, some members of the team are not at their very best in delivering team goals, even as after the team has undergone the various stages of formation. However, it is important to know note that conflict resolution is an ongoing process that continues till the team is dissolved. Some of the reasons for this poor performance by team members are emotional, temperamental. We shall explore some of the reasons you have not been doing so well in that team;

1. Myopic mindset; Just like how being myopic affects our personal success, when you fail to see the big picture of the group we cannot achieve much success when we are given tasks in the group. When you have a shallow understanding of your abilities, it affects your communication with team members and your superiors in your work place. This can be characterized by inferiority complex, low self esteem, inability to comprehend concepts and team values. When you find yourself in this position, you tend to withdraw yourself from others and you’re becoming unnecessarily defensive when you are confronted. 
2. Pride; This attitude is usually exhibited by those with more experience and knowledge than the other members of the team. Sometimes they are more experienced than the group leader. Pride has destroyed so many people’s career and still is. You feel you are more experienced and more qualified for the job than every other person on the team and so you become antagonistic in your approach and tend to question every process and every decision. Sometimes you want the team to revolve around you and you have this 'am the boss' attitude. Team members do not need another 'boss' within the team who is there to fry their asses, they need a team mate and a friend who will guide them and teach them how to get the job done. Remember, the team doesn’t revolve around you, but around principles and values which form team policies and culture. Yes! Every team has a culture... 
3. Fear; This is another very dangerous force that can destroy your thinking faculty and render you completely useless in a team. It makes you pessimistic and you second guess every action that is being taken. Fear is sometimes generated when you think of past failures and the outcome it had on your previous team. So the thought of the same incident repeating itself in your new team affects your effectiveness and productivity and your general output in the team. To overcome these challenges, we must have adaptability, dynamitic personality and an 'i can do it' mentality. The singular reason why a lot of people don't work well in a team is because they don't think they can work well in that team. As a good team manager, make everyone believe and understand that they can carry out what ever task they are given and always help them accomplish such tasks. Step out from the shadows of your nasty past and embrace the future of your organization

SETTING THE STANDARDS

The year is gradually winding up and most of us will blame ourselves for some of the mistakes that we made, some would blame society, some would blame God for not being there. But instead of blaming, hating and cursing yourself or someone else for the mistakes that were made, you can be grateful for the little successes. Yes the little successes you had. Bury the mistakes and move on. The secret to being successful is actually expressing your gratitude for the little things that we sometimes consider irrelevant. We all have reasons to be grateful.

Success has so many sides and several many faces. But failure has just one face; 'quiting'. You must have heard the story of the young man who was just a few kilometers away from the gold he had spent weeks and months trying to dig up when he eventually gave up. Apostle Paul said in Phil.4:13 "Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead",make up your mind to continue pushing in 2014.

Amongst all the resolutions for the next year, the most effective one would be an attitudinal change. Change of moral values, we should look inwards and build on the values that make us more humans and less animals.

Above all, ladies and gentlemen, we cannot erase God is our quest for happiness and a peaceful co-existence. He is the supreme being that oversees the affairs of men. We must honour God above all things and make him the first in our plannings and in the execution of our plans. Prov. 3:5-6 "5 Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; 6 in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight".

Happy new year in advance and God bless us all!

BAD HABIT THAT LEADS TO FAILURE

@pinterest

By Joel

This One Bad Habit Could De-Rail Your Chances Of Success

Becoming successful in life is more about decision making than it is about effort or hard work. We’ve all been there. That moment when we have to decide between one thing and another. It could be anything. Something as small as whether to pay the electricity bill or buy gas with the rent money. Or something as big as whether to change careers in turbulent times or stay the course and face misery on a daily basis. Making a decision can be frustrating and liberating at the same time, because you know it will change your life and alter it forever.

While everyone tells you about hard work and its rewards, rarely do people come up and tell you that they are where they are in life because of a gamble worthy decision or two that they made a while ago. Even rarer are people who tell you about how speedy decision making helped them find firm footing when they were surrounded by chaos and uncertainty. This is because the most closely guarded secret to becoming successful is, you guessed it, QUICK DECISION MAKING.

Unsuccessful people aren’t wrong all the time, but they share one common trait that is obvious to those who look closely. They are very poor decision makers.

Poor decision making skills reflect badly on your life, your work, your business, your personality and multiple other things that are your essentials for growth. Becoming successful is not so much about decisions as the time you take deciding them. One can make a really good decision, like say, a decision to change careers after realizing that the current career is going nowhere. Now this person can wait for really long, grow old and make no difference with the decision. On the other hand, they can make the decision really fast in spite of the risks and turn his or her life around with remarkable results.

Either way, this habit is the No.1 cause of failure. If you hope to even have a long shot at becoming successful, you have to get rid of one thing and one thing only:

INDECISIVENESS!
It affects many more things than you realize. People drag their feet on decisions for too long before they realize that their dreams have grown stale and they are growing older by the day. Too much time has passed by and any success they could have hoped to achieve would be irrelevant anyway.

The worlds leading Peak Performance coach Tony Robbins once said:

“Studies have shown that the most successful people make decisions rapidly because they are clear on their values and what they really want for their lives. The same studies show that they are slow to change their decisions, if at all. People who fail usually make decisions slowly and change their minds quickly, always bouncing back and forth. Just decide!” - Anthony Robbins

There is magic in good decision making. Speed is one thing, and good decision making is entirely another. Becoming successful requires a delicate mix of both these traits. You can make a bad decision fast and drive yourself into the ground or you can make a good decision late and suffer the consequences mentioned above. Sometimes, there is no such thing as a good or a bad decision. There are only decisions and more decisions. Successful people are those who make a large number of good decisions, fast. No one can be perfect and you will be wrong some of the time. But if you make a decision immediately, you will tide over bad results if any, sooner than you think you will.

What prompt decision making gives you a fighting chance at survival in the big bad world of competing ideas and businesses. Anyone will agree that a fighting chance is any day better than assured failure. A decision made fast might go wrong, but a decision that’s never made will definitely go wrong. The accuracy of this logic is evident in the fact that the most successful people on earth attribute their success to fast decision making.

Life is full of decisions. That’s how we all go from one place to another while also growing in the process. If you’re not making any decisions you’re stuck in the same place while the world surges ahead. Wherever you are and whatever you do, making a decision is not only important in becoming successful, but it’s the only way you can ever hope to grow and turn your life around for the better. All that you need is already with you. So free up your mind, take a deep breath and make those decisions fast. Your success almost wholly depends on prompt and good decision making.

"I CAN DO" ISN'T ENOUGH

To succeed in life, one has to develop this kind of mindset and mentality. This is the winner's philosophy and it's relevance cannot be over emphasized in our daily lives. You can never attain the height you have set out for yourself except you have the 'I CAN DO' mentality. Those of you who read the bible, you'll find out that in several verses of the bible, God talks about having faith to be able to receive answers to our prayers and the apostle Paul also said, "I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me".

But the 'I can do' isn't enough to get the work done. It isn't enough to actualize the vision, it isn't enough to keep the team together, it isn't enough to keep our relationships and ultimately achieve happiness. Often times we pray for a miracle not realizing that we are actually the miracle waiting to manifest. The action word for success is 'DO'. Get past the phrase 'I can do' to actually doing what you believe in.

There is no success without the application of certain behaviours and attributes. Having the I can do mentality is one thing, actually doing what it takes to get it done is another.
To achieve success, certain attributes and characteristics must be applied.

1. SET THE ATMOSPHERE; this is the 1st step to achieving success in your life. Some say 'LUCK' means preparation meets opportunity. Well that is true. You can't keep saying 'I CAN DO' this, I can do that and not prepare for it. You've got to set the atmosphere for success around you. It could be redecorating your apartment or changing the way you dress. It could be wearing a smile every once in a while, it could be learning a new skill. But you've got to set an atmosphere for success to come your way. Change the negative atmosphere around you and make it a habitable place for success to dwell in.

2. SUSTAIN THE ATMOSPHERE; "seest thou a man diligent in his work, he will stand before kings, he shall not stand before mean men". Continuity in a particular skill, habit/way of life makes you perfect in it. Consistency makes perfect. At first, its difficult and very hard. You tend to spend more than you profit from it. But if you continue in it, it becomes your reality. Mind you, this is applicable to all areas of life. If you create a negetive atmosphere and sustain it, it becomes your reality too. So we must be careful not to enslave ourselves in some old negetive habit or practice that makes us sad.

3. IMPROVE THE ATMOSPHERE; You can't do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result. Never lose sight of the big picture when setting your atmosphere for success. Having a dream, a vision, a destination causes you to set the atmosphere to succeed. Find out what you are not doing right, make a few changes and add to what you already have in place.

 
Do not dwell on your past, it has a way of limiting you from getting to your destination. The past is merely a reference point that contain elements that would either motivate you to achieve set goals or demotivate you from forging ahead. Make peace with the past, live in the present and work towards your future. Do not let the challenges/circumstances of the present destroy the WILL to pursue the future.