Pocket of Thoughts™ by Saint Akanji

         Prologue Having a vision and a mission statement(s) has become such a cliché. Now, everyone makes it a point of duty to articulate them. Ask any business executive saddled with the responsibility of leading a business or any organisation what the greatest challenge is. The response you'll get depends largely on a number of factors ranging from industry, segment, stage e.t.c. From a general point of view though, businesses and organisations grapple with similar problems. Changing customer behaviour, tougher regulations, commoditization of competitive advantages and general level of uncertainties are some of the broad issues. The response of most businesses is to create 'winning strategies' (cost engineering, revenue enhancement, supply chain optimization e.t.c) and these and other affirmative actions are crucial to enterprise success. However, there is a certain issue that should be closely consi...

Prologue I recently took two weeks’ vacation away from work. This is the first truly leisure vacation since coming to Lagos in February 2008 and as you can imagine, the experience has been surreal to say the least. In the two weeks which ends today, I have had a taste of a different life in Lagos. If there’s anything I can say I have learnt, it would be that the world keeps moving. I set out at the beginning of the leave period to “see” the things I have been seeing. I intended to immerse myself in my environment. I needed a little perspective. I was getting very rusty in my fellowship with God and I sought for renewal. It became necessary to also shed some pounds (I was getting tired of the many well-meaning ‘ Oh you are getting big, you better watch it ’ comments). The last thing I achieved on my last day in the office before setting sail was the completion of an E-learning course by The Economist. It felt really great. Week 1: A time with God If there was a spy on ...

        In search of all-round fulfilment. I could have titled this blog post Don't marry your best friend (Part 3) following the Part 1 and Part 2  but I think I have sufficiently gotten it off my chest now. I am fully aware that talk is cheap and action trumps speech as fortune favors the doers. I pray earnestly for myself and others that God will grant unto us marital success and all round fulfilment in life. This blog post is about all round fulfilment. I have always thought to myself how may I achieve success in every ramification of my life. This desire has led me to ask certain questions. Questions like; If it was possible to narrow down life's struggles and categorise them into departments, what would the departments be? How can one achieve healthy balance in these departments?       God, Family and Work. So far, I believe there are three of such departments. For the purpose of symbolism, let us...

        You can read the first part of this post here .       Marriages are like startups. I am not a relationship expert neither have I married before. Like I said, I am currently on my search journey for a life partner. So, I am a bloody grey horn or not? I'm a regular guy whose love and passion is for businesses especially startups. In my work as a business guy, I have often tried to understand why businesses fail or succeed. I know two  very successful men whose life work is to do this. They are both professors of one of the world's leading universities. The men are Clayton Christensen and Michael Porter of Harvard Business School. Sorry for the slight digression. My obsession with these two extremes (success and failure) have led me to discover a lot. Marriage is a like a startup. So, if there's any justification I have to write about this topic, it would be this.       A...

    Okay. I know I don't have any experience on this subject and I won't pretend I do. At the moment, I am still trying to figure out what exactly I need to do to ... attract the right mate. I am equally trying to be the right mate. I won't lie that I don't like weddings. I totally love them. I'm however weary of the rate of divorce. This may sound cliché since everybody seem to be bothered about this. My own bone of contention however, is not the rate of divorce but I am curious to know why?       Infidelity, incompatibility, selfishness and you hear "irreconcilable differences" ( a broad term for "I no dey do again") are some of the reasons why couples path ways these days. What I cannot stomach though is the ready-made counsel you seem to hear. It goes like this: Marry your best friend!. This must be the most unintelligent counsel ever. So, the people who are divorced were never friends? Com'on! Seriously? Marry your best ...

    To declutter is to simplify or get rid of mess, disorder, complications Clutter is the biggest marketing challenge of the 21st Century. If I were to write a book on marketing, this would be the title. This is because we live in a noisy world. Everyone is trying to be heard. Brands (corporate and individuals) are all trying to make sense and communicate to their audience. Let me quote a section in Marty Neumeier's book titled Meta Skills (a must-read for anyone serious about competing in our robotic future). " The world's ability to store, communicate and compute information has grown at annual rates of at least 23% since 1986. The total amount of digital information is now increasing tenfold every five years. A total of five exabytes of data  existed in 2003. Today, the world is generating the same amount  every two days. If we could put this data on CD-ROMS and pile them up, the stack would extend beyond the moon. The amount of inf...

 A living dog is better than a dead lion. J ust when I thought I had overcome the knotty challenge of being able to title my posts, I realized that I'm not entirely out of the woods. I decided to settle for this title for want of a better one so please bear with me. Nevertheless, I mean every letter of it. It is a great time to be alive. I hope you have noticed my deliberate emphasis here but if you are yet to, now you do. While it is almost difficult to entirely say for sure that this profession is true, I hope that by the end of this piece, you can inspite of whatever you are going through or what is going through you, take a deep breathe and say with zestful hope "What a great time to be alive"!       A roll call of troubles. Some of us cannot relate to it when people recount the many troubles they have gone through or are going through. Even when we hear the news or see gory pictures, we still can't connect to their pains. Thi...