How Prince Kofi Amoabeng stays on top

In every generation, there seems to be somebody who rises past the echelons set by society, sends a shocking wave of their arrival by the way they think and act. These individuals stand taller than their contemporaries; defy the odds and take the bull by the horns in the most unimaginable way. The story of Prince Kofi Amoabeng of UT is no different. We can comfortably refer to him as the Messi of this generation’s financial space.

I will not attempt in my mind to digress into the technicalities of his work and success, but my focus rather, is to explore those ‘little acts’, which, having observed over some time stands out as reason his organisation remains the name on most lips. The fruits of his labour are there for all to see.

My position is that, these traits, one or many, if adopted can work ‘miracles’ for all leaders and their organization irrespective of industry or location. Let me add rather quickly, that these traits are easy to forget if you do not hold them tightly, they really want to escape already.

I have wondered in my mind how Prince Kofi Amoabeng has led his team consistently, caused them to think like he does, yet leaving them to keep minds of their own. I decided to probe deeper and look more closely. I loved what i found.

My belief is that Prince Kofi Amoabeng ingested without apologies to his personal feelings, the law as set forth by Napoleon’s Hill in his book ‘The law of success’ that ‘Desire is the starting point of all achievement’. My interest here is to place the binoculars on a man who has applied stratagems akin to those employed by Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Aliko Dangote et al.

These are my findings:

Military Background: Prince Kofi Amoabeng possessed a military background thus he understands discipline and strategy. The most notable trait of any soldier is their desire to die for their country even at the peril of their lives. No doubt Prince carried that mentality onto the making of UT.

Personal work ethic: Do you know that Prince Kofi Amoabeng has consistently maintained a rule in his organization that customers must never be kept waiting unduly as they wait to access a service. His understanding is that the single demonstration that you value anybody is to value their time. He would personally ask a customer if he observed that the person had been sitting in wait for some time.

The Goose and the Gander: Are you aware that Prince Kofi Amoabeng enters his name into the Attendance Book just like any other staff. Mind you, when he arrives late to work, he pays the fine just like any other staff. This may seem a trivial matter but it counts greatly in boosting employee morale.

Just call me: It’s amazing to find the telephone number of Prince Kofi Amoabeng hang boldly at the Reception of all Banks’ branches. Not only that, he does the same at all events he attends so that those who intend to speak with him can reach him. Now, you are wondering how he does that successfully right? I have no idea, but obviously, it’s working out just right.

Awards, So?: Prince Kofi Amoabeng has never let the number of awards he's received go into his head. He has stated several times that awards are the least of his thoughts, rather, how to serve customers better and help humanity ranks first on his mind. That is a winner’s mentality.

Position? Funny: He believes that role must supersede position. Prince Kofi Amoabeng as a practice does not allow staff carrying his bag as he enters the office. His response to whoever attempts it is ‘I did not employ you to carry bags but to think for the company’ Funny right? That’s classic and true.

These traits are not taught in the limited walls of classrooms but to be harvested from the unlimited learning of highly successful men and women across history. If you ever discourage yourself from applying these secrets or allow anyone to discourage you, well. I think of Prince Kofi Amoabeng and I see a similitude to Richard Branson of the Virgin Group.

Let me end with a quote by John Quincy Adams ‘if your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader’ . Clearly, Prince Kofi Amoabeng is one.

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The Great Myth of Balance

The decline of the great religions mean that there are fewer and fewer 'universal truths' in our world today, and what few pretenders there are lack the prestige and following of yesteryear's great maxims.

But if there is a maxim today worthy of the 'universal truth' status, it surely must be the widely celebrated notion of 'work-life balance'.

We are supposed to 'do what we love' and to prevent the burdens of the workplace from intruding into our 'personal lives'. To leave work behind and not to carry it 'home'. To nurture relationships that are meaningful and deep, which by definition must be external to our daily labours, and uncontaminated by the economic forces that rule our professional lives.

People complain of being 'burnt out', and workaholics are looked upon with a mixture of disdain and pity, consigned to statistics of psychiatric health and psychological well-being. Is this some form of modern conceit? After all, in those cultures where written records make it easy to trace the origin of names, we find that 'what one did for a living', 'one's place in life' and 'one's purpose for living' were often conflated and deliberately blurred. Hence such names as 'Hunter', 'Baker', 'Falconer', 'Brewer/Brew' etc.

And yet, it is curiously in Marxism, that most post-industrially modern of creeds, that we find the most sustained assault on the notion that 'work' can be separated from 'life'. As Erich Fromm extracts from a summary of Marx's work: "History is....nothing but the self-creation of man through the process of his work and his production."

The ideals expressed in such maxims as: "dignity in labour", and "essence through human production" etc. lies within the very bedrock of all the materialist philosophies that accept human centricity in their conception of the world. Labour maketh the man.

There are of course perversions, such as the Nazi taunt that "work makes free". But the fundamental principle penetrates very deep into any logic that seeks to separate man from the other species.

Which is why even in the supernatural creeds, such as the great Monotheisms, we learn that God worked for six days and on the seventh day, 'rested'. The proportion is very clear: work is pre-eminent. Man, made in the image of deities, must also respect this proportion, and must mark the Sabbath not in the glorification of 'rest', but to give full meaning to WORK. In fact, in the Christian tradition, the Christ appears to condone the extension of labour into the Sabbath itself, strenuously refusing to chastise the Apostles that performed a harvest of grain on the holy day of rest, in defiance of the teachers of the Law.

And when you extend the idea of labour into the broader concepts of 'vocation' and 'duty', one finds in the Christian eschatology that the Angels and other divine essences 'worship forever' before the throne of the Monotheistic Deity. Worship being their vocation, their "life's work", they are called upon to do it without ceasing, to work incessantly.

Perhaps, then, a case can be made for 'fusing work into life', in much the same way that family law in contemporary times appear to have done for 'stay at home moms' and in its reinterpretation of domestic chores. Nowadays, child-rearing, home-tending, and civic duty, have all benefited from such 'reinterpretation', notwithstanding the capitalist surge in the production of so-called 'labour-saving' devices and advanced democracy's apathy-inducing side-effects.

Witness therefore not only the transformation of the home into a theater of labour-negotiation, but also, even more intriguingly, the emergence of full-time politicians and civic activists, some of whom now find sufficient means to live off entirely on what were once considered 'mere passions'.

Which leads to the heart of my concern: the perverse, in my view, morality that the operation of passion works solely in one direction: you must turn into a vocation that which you love already. It seems manifest by the record of contemporary lives that, very often, the key to peace of mind is to COME TO LOVE THAT WHICH YOU MUST DO. That which is your duty and vocation. For your means of livelihood must become your "life's work".

To my mind, by no means the sharpest that has contended with this subject, falling in love with your duty is a performance. It requires skill. Skill that must be acquired, through daily practice and perseverance. But, above all, it requires a mind-shift. And that mindshift is the centralisation of work in one's life. Work must define the being.

The artificial distinctions that have been erected by barefaced gurus have now come to a head in the religious vocations. Some people worry that other people earnestly work themselves into 'religious ministry' without a 'calling', wrongly construing the labour that attends the organisation of a religious mission as non-labour, and thus suffering unnecessary indignation when they discover that such activity is as much labour as any other form of work, to be harnessed by all who will to work.

That there are pastors and Imams, undercover journalists and spies, who hate their jobs as much as the next janitor or white-collar clerk is a notion unthinkable to those burdened with these delusions. To them, work is burdensome and a calling is sweet. I hate to break it to these timorous souls: here is the truth: all work is work, and there is no such thing as a distinction between vocations that are based on a calling and labour predominantly motivated, via cultural referents, by wage and service.

Understanding the preceding should open one's eye to the harsh reality of the human condition: we must PRODUCE OUR ENVIRONMENT, and this production is the day to day NATURE OF OUR VERY BEING. From the time we wake up till we drop, we are engaged in a constant pushback to re-orient our environment. The returns we get are calibrated by the success of this endeavour, and where those returns are 'wages' it simply means that the struggle we are engaged with has been codified enough to be widely performed, and through the various efficiencies of aggregation to generate wealth, and thus transform the environment at a much greater scale.

One may retreat from this types of aggregation. But one cannot escape the incessant throbbing of work in search of some elusive notion of happiness, unbound from the pressure of the environment, which is one's unending duty to produce. This is a grand delusion. Work stares into your soul, revealing your true worth.

The escape which you seek is the escape from the *MYTH of Work-Life Balance* into the universal truth of Work-Life Fusion.

Bright Simons is the Ghanaian social innovator, entrepreneur, writer and researcher affiliated with IMANI Centre for Policy and Education. He is the president of mpedigree network. Author Permission sought to publish this article which was originally posted on his facebook on 27th September, 2015

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A Night changed everything

It all began that night from a simple question a guy asked in a Whatsapp group of which I am a member.  “Supposing your best friend whom you chat with very often, almost every day suddenly stops contacting and chatting with you. You asked him or her and suddenly the response is that big excuse, ‘busy!’ How would you take that?

I read quite a lot of comment that were contributed by other members and finally decided to add mine, something that has sprung out of my own experience.

Sometimes we become sentimental in friendship. We do more and so we expect the other person to do more too. We love more, and so we yell at the other person to do same. None of these cravings are bad in themselves but the truth is, achieving them is close to impossible.  

We can’t force people to reciprocate love to us in the same magnitude we showed to them.  I have come to realize, that, quite often all these begin to happen and if we can be truly honest with ourselves, it all begins when one party cannot seem to draw the line between normal friendship and a state of admiration or let me put it simply “when we begin to fall in love with our friends”

Rule#1.
People need space no matter what and when they ask for it, give it to them. Hand them their space. We must be smart to know when they ask for it indirectly.

Rule#2.
Remember that your friends’ worlds are not revolved around “you” alone. They have a big world of other friends, family, work, happiness, quietness, and so we can’t always have their attention exclusively.

Rule#3.
Feelings are visitors. Let them walk in and walk out. Let them come and go. Quite interestingly, the very start of a friendship is sweet and interesting but when time and space begins to pass through, it becomes rough because, perhaps, we become tired of doing the same things over and over again.

Rather, stop complaining, let the person be, do as much as you are required (welcomed) to and just be you. Honestly, we all can’t be heroes in friendship, thus, we must know and define the limits of every friendship.

Our issue usually is that, sometimes with all our effort we desire to make some people “best friends or close friends” when they were just okay been friends. The fact that you told someone every detail about your life, even your greatest secrets, doesn’t automatically make them your “best friends”.

 I figured out that, sometimes, we are too quick to open up, mind you, not all openness means an outstretched hand of a life time friendship. Some people will like to listen to you but they can’t fix your issues, they can’t protect you and may not be the persons to make you happy, they are not bad people, it only means they cannot walk afar into our hearts.

That’s it, because, as we age, our priorities begin to shift and change and we become just too busy. That saying ‘if people love you they will make time for you’ has proven true over a life time.

Last month I found myself in a disagreement with a friend over the same issue. I sat down to analyze the situation carefully and I realized that i needed to know my limit in people’s life; I needed to understand how much of me they were willing to take and keep.

It was absolutely okay if they didn’t need me too much. It was even okay if they did and yet couldn’t prove it, it never meant there was something wrong with them or me. It is just as it is. As long as I was concerned I needed self-respect too, if they needed rest and space, I should be willing to grant it! If they were okay with us talking every year, so be it! I just had to define the friendship. (I must admit it was a painful process because it changed my perception about others and the fact that we have to be moderate in our expectation of others. And here I was, a sanguine lady, I had began to open up a little, just so little though.

Trust me people come in big surprises. Sometimes, they are quick to welcome you and then you begin to trust them, then, you become vulnerable and that is when they lose sight of your worth and unconsciously, sometimes consciously, they begin to take every bit of it for granted.

Who said change was wrong anyway? Often, we become a lot of different people before we settle into who we finally become. It gets scary to know who we have finally become, so toughened at heart that we can’t feel deeply anymore just because we are scared of being hurt again, that one too was okay.  Gradually, we become tired of being the “sentimental freaks” as we come to accept that, the compass to our emotional landscape does not always have to be directed to some particular persons anymore.

I hated this change but a lot of times I had no option, I wish I knew a better way and I realize I may have to lose a lot more friends because I prefer to enjoy that pure and genuine solace; my own place of quietness away from the world where I can totally transcend to find Love in my own self, where I could only believe my own mantra  ‘I will always love you’

With these experiences translated into words, I can say that mostly, it’s difficult to define the boundaries of friendship between a male and a female at a particular point in time  (not all the time though) and the challenge is when we can’t tell where friendship ended and love began, and as long as we can’t determine where we really want to belong, we will keep searching for love in different places.

The writer, Josephine Amofaah Nketiah lives in Accra, Ghana. She can be reached directly at abenamofaah@yahoo.com. She blogs at josiefin.wordpress.com 

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How to rise after every 'failure'

Thomas Edison's teachers said he was ‘too stupid to learn anything’. He was fired from his first two jobs for being ‘non-productive’. As an inventor, Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, "How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?" Edison replied, "I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps". wow!

The first thing you must understand about failure is that there is no such thing as failure. Surprised? You do not have to be. Yes, I said it! There is no such thing as failure except that which you call failure. ‘Failure’ as we have come to understand it is a term used to refer to a loss or inability to achieve a goal, however, take a break now and let’s think about it this way.

Everything that exists today was given its name and expression by somebody or a group in the past, based on their perception or feeling about that thing. What I am saying is that, ‘failure’ as we have come to accept was somebody’s definition and therefore, you and I are under no obligation to accept their interpretation. We must resist the trap of defining and measuring ourselves by other people’s standards because they chose to see themselves as failures. You were created uniquely. Yes, no two people in this world are the same, not even identical twins. Unconventional? Yes, unconventional!

Coming, many of our forebears decided to see ‘failure’ as negative because they felt like losers when they experienced a ‘predicament’; meanwhile, history has countless records of men and women who rose from supposed defeat to supernormal success.  Let me emphasize here that we are not failures because we face temporary defeat. Rather, we fail when we refuse to leave the mess behind and move forward to achieve the goals we set for ourselves.

It is important that you realize that you are solely responsible for controlling your daily circumstances and not be controlled by them. For instance, failing to pass a job Interview is not enough reason to declare yourself a failure. Your inability to secure the Contract does not mean you are a failure. Get back to the drawing board, believe that you can succeed, do not waiver in your belief, and take action again.

My friend, I want you to say to yourself right now that you are not a failure. Believe what you just said and know in your heart that you will be able to achieve your vision. Never say ‘never’. Accept the challenges that come your way, continue to look out for opportunities, never call yourself a failure, never see other people as failures. We may experience temporary defeats but it does not in any way certify us as failures.

It is interesting to know that many times people ‘fail’ even before they begin. They question their own dreams and ability to execute a task, thus, a negative message is immediately sent to the subconscious part of the brain to ‘go and sleep as no good will come out of their efforts’.  This mindset keeps him at point zero and despite abounding opportunities and the acres of diamond in his backyard; he would not be able to exert himself fully to a cause.

So, the next time someone tells you ‘This is not possible, it cannot be done’ Look at him or her confidently, eyeball to eyeball and tell him/her to ‘fuck off’. The next time you are tempted to tell yourself it’s not possible, tell that voice to shut up and ‘fuck off'. Get on your feet and get to work.

Remember, Victory may be like a hesitant woman but with persistence, you will woo her to your side. Make it happen! Refuse to die!!!

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