Put all of those characteristics together, translate them into corporate idiom and this translates into increased productivity. Employees are searching for work that is more satisfying internally.

Anything that may increase corporate productivity-and employees’ happiness-is worth pursuing. Meaningful work involves developing and supporting other people.

Managers can play a valuable role in helping employees find meaning in their work by helping them identify their talents and skills, uncover their work and life values, and assess the environments and activities in which their values are met while their talents are utilized. Workers, all together, are re-evaluating their lives, their jobs and their employers. They are asking whether it is worth it to spend time at organisations where they feel no passion or commitment.

Typically, when employees devote their talents to projects and companies that support their values, the work is meaningful. Some employers are helping employees uncover their talents and values that usually happen during out placement when an employee is already halfway out the door.

Imagine the kind of commitment companies could generate by helping employees find and apply their passions while they are still in their employ. They become more energetic, open – minded, and creative.

On the other hand if managers help employees uncover what is meaningful for them, they run the risk of their leaving–unless they structure the discovery process in such a way that people stay focused on finding meaning in the current work environment.

When managers help employees find meaning in their work, they are helping to light fires that have a better chance of staying lit. Even if managers affect only 5 percent of the population, imagine the productivity gains if more employees felt more passionate about their roles.

It is important to note that work is not everything and therefore people should search for fulfilment outside the jobs. This is the problem. Few people in many populations around the world have been conditioned to think of work as something that should be meaningful.

People go to college, learn job skills, and then find organisations that use those skills in exchange for a pay cheque. Few courses and classes emphasise the importance of doing work that is satisfying. Consequently, generations of the worlds populace view work as a place to make a living.

According to HR Consultant and Blogger, Mike Haberman, employees will commit to their work, if and only if that work is meaningful. When the organisation has a committed employee, the organisation has one that is performing at a higher level. This usually can result in better customer interactions. Organisations want the employees to be committed and engaged so that enthusiasm is reflected in the customer experience.

Employees need to understand how they are doing. To keep the work meaningful to the employee they need to understand how they are performing, what they can do to improve, and receive the appropriate reward and recognition for performing in a way that leads to increased results for the organisation.

Workers are not likely to find meaning in what they do unless they see themselves as a contributing part of something that is bigger than they are. In most work situations, this is a function of the relationship between the workers and the immediate boss. The leader at any level has two primary jobs. They need to accomplish the business mission and care for the people in the leader’s charge.

Accomplishing the mission includes communicating, repeatedly, what is required and why it is important. It also includes communicating what part of the work an individual has and why that is important. Caring for the people means, first of all that the manager works to keep them safe. Keep them safe from forces outside the organization that might harm them and from the organizational authorities.

It also means helping them grow and develop. The manager can help them develop skills to keep them out of trouble in the future. The manager can help them learn things and achieve their personal objectives. Finally, it also means creating a great working environment. Fortunately, managers know what that looks like.

We all know that cash is critical to running a business, no matter the size. But as small businesses, we generally have less cash than the big guys, so we need to know how best to manage it. The first step is to better understand how much cash you have and how you are using it.

First, I want you to know that just because you have profit at the end of the day/month/year, that doesn’t mean you have more cash. The Income Statement (or Profit & Loss) is a tricky thing. It shows you how much revenue you have for the period and the costs related to just those revenues. It might not include cash spent on a large investment, money you received from an investor, or even disbursements you’ve made to yourself as the owner.

The best way to understand how much cash you have and how you are using it is to look at your Cash Flow Statement. It is a simple report giving a ton of information in these four parts:

* Operating Activities: How much cash you have at the end of the period from your daily operations
* Investing Activities: Cash outflows from purchasing a new asset or making loans to vendors or customers
* Financing Activities: Includes cash you have received from banks or owners or cash you’ve taken out of the business
* Cash at End of Period: How much money you have at the end of the day, net of the above

The Cash Flow Statement is fairly easy to get your hands on. Even businesses running on QuickBooks can run a quick Cash Flow Statement from their Reports menu. You can also ask your accountant to supply you with one when they review your books.

Now that you know how much cash you have and where it is going, spend some time thinking about the best uses for your cash. If you are eating up all of your cash from daily operations, then you aren’t able to invest in assets that could potentially help grow your business, like an additional server to give you added capacity so you can have more customers. Here are some ways to manage your cash:

* Budgets: Budgets can save you money and time! In a few hours, you can create a simple budget. Just look at what you spent last year and adjust any items that you don’t expect in the future. Enter your budget in your accounting system. Then run a report to see if you are on track. Easy as pie!

* Dashboards: These are just graphs, charts, or some other visual representation of your financial data. We all know it is far easier to “see” your company when you are looking at a picture. You can visually compare your data: you can see how you are doing versus last month, see what you are spending the most on, or even see which customer is giving you the most money.

All in all, it is important for you to manage your cash. This means understanding how much you have, where you are using it, and how to track it. I challenge you to move past going from hand to mouth and start managing your cash so you can grow your business!

If you have any questions or want to learn more about how you can better manage your cash, visit my website, www.CathyIconis.com.

No matter the yard stick for success, there are some key elements to academic success. The attitude of an individual is critical. Negative thinking can be the ultimate success inhibitor. A complaint free diet can do miracles and it will wake the individual up to how much energy is spent on negative thinking. Rene Descartes – “I think therefore, I am” mentions that a thinking thing is a thing that doubts, understands, conceives, affirms, denies, wills, refuses; that imagines also, and perceives.”

There is a lot to learn. In my first job I worked as both an accountant and sold myself as a salesman, but in truth I had no idea how to sell. I learned by watching, by listening to the sales pitches that worked and the ones that didn’t, by modeling my demeanor on some of the more successful salesmen we had in the field.

The good ones displayed a quiet confidence. They were never desperate to make a sale, which I eventually learned was because desperation never closed the deal. Their confidence came from knowing they had a good product at a good price. And because the deals they were offering were profitable all round. It is a lot easier to sell when you can stand behind your product or service and know you’ve got the goods.

It is also important not to be rigid in individual goals. Fixating on one thing and allowing nothing to dissuade the individual may be a negative indicator of worse things to come. Many employers seek flexibility and adaptability among their prospects. With the ever changing global economy and increase in worldwide competition via the web, companies and organizations’ must respond to change quickly and easily.

It is good to be focused but realize that being so focused that you lose sight of the ultimate goal – to be successful – can prevent success. Academic just like career success may require going sideways, in a diagonal or changing path completely instead of forging straight ahead with blinders on.

There is this young man I trained on job to support clients; when approached to provide reference to someone to be in his permanent employ the young man turned down the offer on grounds that the remuneration was low by his standards and academic level of achievement. There is need to identify the goals individuals have for their life’s if they are to succeed and also know how to get there.

Most often than not we get frustrated easily and give up. Everyone has academic and/or career setbacks but it is how the individual responds to those setbacks that determines their ultimate academic and/or career success. If the individual wallows in self pity for weeks or months it is time to seek professional help to get them out of their academic huff. They should learn to accept setbacks as par for the course as they experiment with what works and what doesn’t. Small wins as they say lead to big wins.

Successful people understand that it is their power of choice that determines their success. They are not victims. They don’t blame others or other things for their success or failure. They seek out every opportunity to use their power of choice and never say I don’t have a choice.

They understand that whatever they choose to do, there are inherent risks but they feel the fear and do it anyway. They also prepare themselves for possible failure with plan B in mind and always look at failure as a learning experience. Marriage however is not one of those unions for plan B. Life is all about choices and when you cut away all the junk every situation is a choice.

Arthur

“Indeed, you are a great leader that is why they called you to attend the leader’s meeting. It is really a blessing to be among the leaders.” - Francisco Mendes

Can rubbing shoulders with the greatest teach to be a good leader? Is a great leader born or made? Alternatively, is there a deliberate effort to find and learn new skills to become a good leader?

A good leader is able to delegate his roles and mentor subordinates to manage tasks allocated to them efficiently and effectively. Many leaders of small and mid –size enterprises are hesitant to relinquish their roles to maintain ultimate control.

Start-ups and growing enterprises require a lot of direct involvement from the owners to provide the leadership and motivation during the inception stages. This period is also a good time to try out delegation skills since the owners are closely involved.

The subordinates get to learn new traits directly from the owners, which makes them appreciate the roles and evolvement within and outside the enterprise. As they manoeuvre around from one challenge to another involving cash and other immeasurable constants.

Keen leaders normally use this period to weigh the abilities and weaknesses of their subordinates to facilitate designing programs to strengthen the areas of weakness. This period is vital in designing operating procedures when both the manager and the subordinate are involved in working through core work processes.

A good leader should allow for some mistakes during the learning period. It is of paramount importance that the leader possesses some qualities of a teacher which include a willingness to listen and observe the within and outside the environment in this case the business.

Finally, good leaders should be willing and able to delegate the roles no matter the level the size of the entity. The leadership cycle is not complete until delegation is evident in the operations of the organisation.

Some lessons learnt through experiences and the best experiences involve failures. All managers should strive to teach their subordinates to be better at dealing with failure during periods of uncertainty.

Those small and mid-size enterprises that have mastered the art have survived beyond the condemned 3 years in Uganda because they have been successful at building and preparing their staff for the tasks ahead. Most importantly, they have spent vast amounts of resources - finances and time- preparing their employees to deal with failure.

Arthur Kaliisa

Password protection for sensitive personal and other data is only as good as the password itself. Easily accessed “cracker,” “breaker,” or “recovery” software runs millions of passwords per second through a log-on box. A password of even 6 characters combining numbers, symbols and upper- and lower-case letters can be broken in 5 hours; only numbers, symbols or letters, in minutes.

Your password should: · contain a minimum of 8 characters; · not use any word found in a dictionary (dictionaries in any language can be downloaded to be used in cracking software); · combine numbers, symbols and upper- and lower-case letters; · not include personal information—it’s too easy to obtain a user’s name, address, birthday, and names of relatives. · lock users out of the system after a few tries at the correct password fail (prevents hacking software from trying 1,000s of passwords per second). Lastly, compartmentalize electronic files and allow access only to those authorized to use each file.

Cutting back is the theme of the hour. We save water, heating costs and power. It’s no longer so easy to indulge yourself. Or is it?

I still believe that this is the best time to do some good savings! When costs are high for most products and services and disposable incomes are at their lowest. An interesting trend has occurred over the past few weeks with banks reducing their rates from between 21% and 19% to between 19% and 18%.

However, the lending rates are still at their highest with some banks maintaining between

28% - 25% therefore confirmation my previous pronouncement that Ugandan lending rates are still the highest considering the regions averages.

It is not all gloomy, even with this gloomy picture painted by economists, scholars and the press we can still make the best out of it. The reality is that this situation will get worse before it gets better but it will get better. Authorities in personal finance have proposed that “it’s more fun spending savings than saving spending”.

The real question is which side you would rather be caught at considering that every crisis is eventually overcome. For the speculators this might not be the best time to consider foreign exchange products as they at their highest. And for those worried prospects there is a lesson to learn some where.

For most of the second half of 2008 and some part of the first quarter of 2009 we experienced foreign rates at their lowest coming close to 1600UGX for 1USD but over the past few weeks we have witnessed a more than 45% increase to about UGX2, 165 per 1USD. These means for those who speculated this trend and actually invested in foreign exchange products about the period mentioned, the gains were tremendous and they laughed all the way to the bank!

It is upon this background that we need to consider putting aside some funds in form of savings. There are many products in the market that can give you a favourable return on your investment. Most banks have introduced bonus savings accounts which give between 8% - 12% interest on savings and the interesting thing is that the costs on managing these funds are minimal.

One bank for example has an investment account which offers 12% return on investment. Other products include the super savings account which gives a monthly return on investment of 3% with charges only when you withdraw. A financially prudent person is informed about the existing products and all it takes is a little bit more research by contacting your bankers and reading various literatures available at most bank outlets.

The best way to increase your savings is automatic transfers which can be done by instructing the bankers to create standing orders to the investment accounts. There is never a small amount to start with when it comes to savings. I remember one individual telling me that he started with UGX50, 000 the equivalent of USD40.00 for twelve months; his bank balance was bigger at the end of the period by UGX600, 000! Indeed small wins and discipline lead to big wins!

When you start out like this there are a lot of lessons to be learnt. First you are developing a culture that never existed at all “the culture of savings!” and two you are growing your wealth!

And finally, I can still indulge myself irrespective of the economic crisis. All I have to do is look for ways to cut down on major spending whereas maintaining a favourable and sustainable lifestyle.

Good morning daddy,

Good morning Bella,

How was your sleep?

My sleep was fine!

What did you dream about?

Mummy and Daddy

Did you talk to Jesus?

Yes, and he said he would buy you a good house and a good car!

We have been having this interaction since she started talking. And at 31/2 years now she knows dads dreams. Although she can’t quite comprehend them she “understands” his frustration sometimes.

Isn’t this what most of us undergo most of the time? Thinking when will I complete the unfinished structure or when will I start at all? The pressure that comes with the growing children and the peers! There is no time like now to start on the road to financial freedom through improved savings and reduced domestic spending.

Every crisis is a blessing in disguise as spending reduces a new discipline is learned with continuous spells of low incomes. Alternatives need to be sought to finance those unfinished projects without necessary increasing debt. The corporate world pronounces that better policies and lower costs can almost guarantee you a healthy and successful entity.

But isn’t also true to our personal finances? Small wins and discipline equals to big wins which is the theme of this blog! Effective management of personal finances begins with understanding debt. 

Anything that provides long-term value or the repayment matches the useful life of the asset.  It is likely that we have debt in the form of salary loans, auto loans or a mortgage. Effective management of finances requires that we know where our money is going and making deliberate decisions about how it should be spent.

When you keep track of your money you minimize the risks associated with the debt problem.  This requires that you use a budget. However, the question that occasionally pops up in peoples minds especially here in
Uganda is whether really to take up a loan. And for what purpose the loan should be for?

With the increased cost of money and the supposedly stringent application procedures many potential applicants have been discouraged away from financial products. The fact is we can’t do without these products especially for the financially literate persons.

Completing a home requires large sums of money which are not readily available considering that our incomes are lower compared to the region averages. So the catch here is really what is the purpose of applying for a particular financial product as opposed to other products?

Knowing that in most cases assets are financed by liabilities is the beginning for those starting out for their search. An additional consideration should be the long term value provided as a result. So what loan product is the best? That depends on the individual and in which bracket of the “food chain” they belong!

My daughter prays for a car and a good house every day and has been doing so for the last 2 years! What is my priority here? You guess is as good as mine!

Adapted from the secret scrolls message from Rhonda Byrne Creator of “The Secret”

In the moment that I discovered The Secret I realized that I had been living my entire life backwards. If things were good in my life, I was happy. If things were difficult in my life and everything was going wrong, I was stressed and miserable. In my ignorance, I had been misusing the law of attraction all of my life. But all of that changed when I had the knowledge of The Secret.

To live in accordance with The Secret and the most powerful law in the Universe, we must be in Joy first - and then everything will change. To live our lives by emotionally reacting to what is happening outside of us is misusing the law! As we react with negative emotion to any difficulties, we attract more negativity into our lives. We cannot defy the law of attraction, which operates on the most microscopic levels of vibration, and with absolute exactitude.

You must be in Joy first. And then your life will change into Joy.

Difficult times are the greatest opportunities in disguise. When we face difficult times we have to put in determined work to get ourselves into Joy. But let me tell you, when you can get yourself into Joy despite what is happening around you, your life must change - it’s the law!

In addition, as you become Joy in difficult times you are becoming the master of your emotions, the master of your life, and the master of the law of attraction. Difficult times are your greatest opportunity to practice yourself into Joy.

Of course if your life is going along swimmingly then it is very easy to be in Joy. During those times your Joy is most likely a reaction to the good times. But the magnificence and the power that you really have within you will be seen when you can be in Joy during difficult times. It is then that you will see the true power that you have within you, because as you hold to Joy, you will shift all the energies of the Universe, and your life and your world will change.

The cause of everything is within you, and the effect is what you experience in your life. You have the power within you to change everything by putting yourself in Joy. You can change everything so easily by becoming Joy first! And nothing can change until you get yourself in Joy, because that is the law of attraction. Like attracts like! The energy of Joy attracts energy of Joy!

Do whatever it takes to find your Joy, and then keep yourself in it no matter what. Keep ramping up your level of Joy every day. There is no limit to the levels of Joy you can reach. You will see change to the degree of Joy that you can attain and maintain. The higher the Joy you can create within you, the more spectacular the change, and the higher the Joy, the faster the change. Once you get yourself in Joy it is easy to maintain it, because your emanation of Joy attracts more Joy. The law of attraction will continually send you more feelings of Joy.

You cannot criticize or blame or complain when you are in Joy. You cannot be afraid when you are in Joy. You cannot speak negatively when you are in Joy. You cannot harm another when you are in Joy. Negativity cannot reach you when you are in Joy.

When you are in Joy you are compassionate. When you are in Joy you are considerate and caring. When you are in Joy you love others. When you are in Joy you appreciate everything. When you are in Joy you are in love with the world, and the Universe is in love with you.

Be in Joy. Seek it with all of your heart, and you will find it.

May the Joy be with you,

Rhonda Byrne
The Secret… bringing Joy to billions

ADAPTED FROM SUZE ORMAN’S 2009 ACTION PLAN

Suze Orman began this book with the recognition that it is absolutely understandable for you to feel fear, anger, and confusion as you struggle with the repercussions of the global financial crisis. However, she believes that the very severity of the crisis means that we will choose to make lasting changes that will put us on a path to a healthier and more vibrant future. Crises force us to take a clear-eyed view of what went wrong and compel us to make necessary adjustments to avoid the same pain and suffering again.

The period of reflection we are in right now has forced us to focus on a difficult reworking of our relationship with money. The era of living beyond our means is giving way to an age of living a more meaningful life based on financial honesty. As painful as this transition period is, please know that what awaits us is a very bright future.

Our economy is suffering from a credit crisis, not a crisis of talent or drive. From the innovation that will continue to spill out of Silicon Valley to the reinvention now being discussed to transform our energy sources, I remain convinced that this is still a nation of unwavering discovery and achievement.

Short term we have to survive the credit crisis and recession; long term we will prevail and we will thrive again. Your job right now is to do the right thing when it comes to your money—to make a plan, to stick to it, to become a saver not a spender, to set a goal to live a debt-free life. I ask that you never forget the painful lessons that 2008 taught us.

I ask you to remember these three things:

When it comes to money, if it sounds too good to be true, it is .

If you cannot afford it, do not buy it.

Always choose to do what’s right, not what’s easy.

My hope is that reading this book has given you an understanding that you are a huge part of the solution to your current problems. Despite the turmoil, despite the adversity, you have to recognize just how much is within your control. A secure financial future is in large part going to be a function of how willing you are to take action today. It won’t appear out of thin air, it won’t be legislated for you by
Washington. It will grow out of the actions you take each and every day for the rest of your life.

Are you ready to make change happen in your own life? If you are, I hope this book becomes your guide. Here’s to making your life, this precious time, the best it can be.

Suze Orman

November 19, 2008