Random musings about life, purpose, leadership

Hello Everyone, Barka da Sallah and I hope you are enjoying the extended weekend due to the muslim holidays. I have been asked what skills are critical to growing up the corporate ladder. There are a couple in my view which are critical, leadership communication, thinking and problem solving, wisdom/sense of judgement ability to work effectively with others and agility.  I will over the course of the next few weeks write about each one of them but this week I want to start with communication skills. Communication Skills  is sometimes described as a "soft skill." makes it feel like it's a nice to have. Communication is important because it is at the heart of leadership, critical to problem solving and ability to work with different people.  My analogy is to describe it as the engine oil of business. Try to run your engine without oil and you will appreciate how important the "soft engine oil is. Anyone aspiring to a senior leadership position has to bui

Hello Everyone, Welcome to the Lion's den once again. Hope you all had a great week. Last week I wrote about hanging in there to succeed. A common question that I got was "what do I look for to know I am making progress while hanging on as the results haven't started to show?" There seems to be so much focus on the end results and the frustration felt if they were not coming fast enough. In my reponses, I looked at this from either the expectation or the clarity of the road map to the end goal. There is an old saying that which goes "expectation is the mother of dissapointment". I have found in a lot of cases where the expecations were very unrealist or not grounded on solid clear actions to deliver them. It was as if all you needed was a vision or a big idea and no tangible steps put in place to measure and track progress. Also given our religious disposition, setbacks were not anticipated and seen as strange. I hate to disappoint you but there ar

Hello Everyone, Welcome to yet another week and thank you for visiting the Lion's den. This week I will share a bit about persistence.  In the recent past I have had to give advice  to a couple of people about how to move forward in their careers or with their businesses. This has usually happened because they had hit a road block, run into a boss who is difficult,seeing their career stall, not getting business results despite their efforts. It's made worse by the display of "artificial success" seen on social media and the increasing focus on wealth rather than showing clearly that sustainable success in any endeavor is built over time. There is a lot more focus now on the perks associated with success rather than helping people understand the journey. Life is not a straight line graph and behind every one out there who has achieved results on a sustained basis, there is a period of building and investing in a solid foundation. I have come to reali