A picture from the interfaith conference in Sri Lanka a few years ago. The respect for each other and their views points gives hope to make this world a better place. Please reflect on a baby step you can take to create interfaith harmony in your own community, be it the neighbourhood, workplace, school, social organisation or any other organisation you are associated with.
NAFLIA 2019 Presentation (Click here to Download Powerpoint)
NAFLIA 2019 Presentation (Click here to download PDF)
Click on the above link for the presentation related to the keynote speech to be given by me at NAFLIA 2019. Conference participants are invited to download the presentation and use it to follow the keynote speech.
This blog is written in service of life-Insurance Advisors in Sri Lanka, specifically the members attending NAFLIA 2019, the National Forum for Life Insurance Advisors scheduled for the 2ndof September. My attempt is to articulate the key messages of the keynote speech that will be delivered by me.
As I was reflecting on the topic for the annual conference, ‘Assuring Tomorrow Dream Today’. The questions that come up are, what is the action we need to take today to assure our dream of tomorrow? How do we know the action we choose to take today will assure our dream tomorrow? I realised this is a very complex question and that there is no standard answer to this as the action to be taken depends of the world each person lives in. What I mean by the ‘world’ is the immediate world of each person starting with him/herself, family, friends, organisations they belong to, organisations and people they interact with etc. The answer is personal.
Continue reading “Living our Dream Purposefully – Purpose of Living – Part 30”
Organisations consist of people who are varied. People come from varied cultures, mindsets, beliefs, philosophies, and background. This diversity creates varied dynamics of interactions. Therefore it is unlikely that there are two similar organisations on this planet. Therefore there is no standard formula or right answer or wrong answers. Therefore the best I can do is to provide the clay for you to create a pot that can hold the value you can add to organisations that suits your reality and your aspirations using your creativity and your knowledge.
Why do you need to add value to organisations? I had learnt somewhere in my journey of life that the more you give the more you get. This concept became true to me as I tested it. The more I gave to others the more I received. The more time and I focus I gave my studies the better results I received. The more value I gave my existing clients the more new clients I received. The more knowledge I gave , especially free of any fees, the more knowledge I gained.
Continue reading “How Marketers can Add Value to the Organisation”
How many times a week do we look at our smart phone? Do we look at it first thing in the morning? Do we look at it before 7.30 a.m.? Do we look at it during meetings? Do we feel lost without our devices? I am sure the answers to these questions might not only be interesting but it will start us thinking.
Study UK’s Daily mail (www.dailymail.com) surveyed 2,000 smartphone owners about their tech habits. They found the average user now picks up their device 1,500+ times a week, reaches for their phone at 7:31am in the morning, checks personal emails and Facebook before they get out of bed, use their phone for three hours and sixteen minutes a day and almost four in ten users admitted to feeling lost without their device. (see the 4 mts video below about these dangers)
Technology has given us so many options of interest that our mind keeps wondering from one to another at an alarming rate. We may be at a meeting and our smart phone alerts that it’s a friends’ birthday and we pick the phone to wish her. When we open Facebook to do it, we see a friend request from an old friend. As we start accepting it, we see a photo posted by another friend. Then we remember there is a customer meeting and we may be late to get home and we start messaging someone at home to pick up a child from school, and then she tells you to bring some extra cash as the plumber was coming to fix a leak the next day. All this happens in about one and half minutes. Therefore we live in a world where our mind gets more and more fickle.
Some feel this is beneficial as it helps us to do many things rapidly, become knowledgeable in many fields, be able to handle more things than ever before, be able to respond fast, be connected with more friends more often, find new opportunities be more efficient, smarter, successful etc.
Do you generally find that your email inbox clogged with unattended mail?
Do you find that there are many important things to attended to?
Do you find that some important projects don’t get your required attention?
Do you find that some important task are neglected or delayed?
Do you feel that there are some task that you need to attend but you get drained trying to do them?
Do you find you just don’t have enough time to do tasks you enjoy doing that energizes you?
Well, if the answer to one or many of these questions are yes, then many of the answers are with David Allen, the author of many books including, ‘Getting Things Done’ and inspirational speaker.
I was fortunate to be at David’s session today, organized by Right Selection, the company who also represents me in the Middle East. While I generally have an empty email inbox, have things quite well organized with most things done by the end of each week with, and adequate time to do things I am passionate about, I found David helps put things in perspective and provides concepts and a process that helps get things done.
Here is a summary of the learnings for you.
Compare the intent of your communication with the impact of your communication. If there is mismatch then surely there is conflict. Great communicators know how to synchronize the two and this requires us putting our heart and soul into communications. This was a powerful message delivered by at the learning event : ‘Heart & Soul of Real Communications’ on the 21st of January 2014.
So how do we start achieving this magical balance?
This requires us to be a students of impact of our own communication on other people and our intent of that communication. We need to use our ears to listen to the emotional impact created on the other person. We need to be empathetic. We need to see it from our soul, that is to know the positive energy it creates in the other person. Understanding of spiritual intelligence is key here.
Top Performance requires us to ensure that top teams are set up, developed, nurtured and rewarded appropriately. Most companies miss this important point. Here is a summary of the insights from the ‘Top Performance through Top Teams’ session held on the 21st of January 2014.
Inappropriate strategy deployed by the organisations to measure/improve business performance is one of the key reasons that teams remain average teams delivering average performance.
Therefore following are the appropriate strategy for the organisations to measure/improve business performance.
Continue reading “Great Teams Build Great Organisations and Great Organisations Build Great Teams!”
‘Mastery of Self’, first introduced in Sri Lanka in the mid-nineties has inspired thousands of Sri Lankans to make ‘Lemonade’ out of the ‘Lemon’ in them. They are known as NLPers rather than HELPers as they HELP the world with the tools of Neuro Linguistic Programming [NLP] they mastered during this 4-day experience. Continue reading “THE HEART AND SOUL OF REAL COMMUNICATION”
The month of April 2013 epitomized the caption! Yes there were many including myself who were ready for the teacher. It was a great month of personal growth.
The month started with 60 souls from various organizations and walks of life taking part in the Mastery of Self playshop that was conducted in Sri Lanka. This was the first 2 days and all of them left feeling more valuable than ever before, more empowered than ever before and more purposeful than ever before. They come back for the final 2 days on the 6 & 7 of May.
Then I travelled to Vietnam where I conduct the same session for another 60 souls from Fashion Garments a company of the Hirdramani Group in Sri Lanka. The impact created was the same and I go to Vietnam again to do the final 2 days of the training on the 11 & 12 of May 2013.
From Vietnam I travelled to Dubai to conduct a 2 day training on advanced negotiation skills and a 1 day training in work life balance. While the numbers were around 16 participants in each session, the impact created for them was tremendous.
After having helped unlock potential of so many souls in the first half of the month, the second half was about me going back to school. Yes I was a participant with 15 other senior executives from the health care industry who took part in a 2 week long intensive leadership development session for health care CEO’s held by the Samson Global Leadership Academy of the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, USA.
Continue reading “The teacher will arrive when the student is ready”
If I tell you that you can fly, would you agree with me? This is the first question I asked the audience at the Sales Master Class at The Radisson Blu Water Garden In Dhaka Bangladesh on the 20th of October, when I started presenting at the day event, ‘Unlocking Sales Potential’. There were some instant ‘yes’ answers and a few others said ‘no’. The point made by this question was to get the audience thinking about the unlimited potential we are blessed with. With the realization that we can fly in an air craft and aircrafts been made by people using god given brains and resources opened up the minds in the room to the possibilities yet untapped.
Continue reading “Unlocking Sales Potential – Exploring the resources available in inner-space”
When I received an invitation from the Yunus Centre to attend the Social Business Day 2012 at Sarvar Bangladesh, I was excited at the prospect of listening to a man who is one of a kind. I had heard of Prof Muhammad Yunus many years ago and had once met him at the Dhaka Airport Business Class Lounge where we had an interesting conversation about the quality of leadership in Bangladesh. Professor Yunus is a Nobel Lauriat for introducing Micro Credit to the world. After its amazing success in Bangladesh, it has been adopted in many countries around the world including the United States of America.
I was also intrigued to know that NASA astronaut Ron Garan will be the key-note speaker. While getting an opportunity to listen to an astronaut was interesting, I never knew the significance of Ron Garan’s presence, his relationship with Professor Yunus who also invented the concept of Social Business that also spread around the world in the same manner micro credit spread.
It was amazing to discover that Ron Garan took Muhammad Yunus’s book; ‘Creating a World without Poverty’ with him during his 5 1/2 month in space. The book therefore travelled 65,340,224 miles in 2,624 orbits during 164 days in space together with Ron. Ron Also took with him the Bangladesh national flag to honour the motherland of Professor Yunus.
Sri Lanka’s future is in good hands! This is the feeling I had as soon as I walked into the ballroom of Colombo’s Galadari Hotel on the 17th of March 2012. This feeling became stronger as the day went by to see the enthusiasm with which the 270 CIM students participating in the conference absorbed the wisdom dished out by the 4 Chartered Marketers of the Chartered Institute of Marketing [CIM] who had reached the top in organizations and the panel discussion that followed.
Deepal Sooriyaarachchi who spoke first outlined what it takes to be a ‘Future Proof Marketer’. He talked about the importance of knowing your strengths and improvement areas and making sure that marketing is the right profession for you. Then he went on to talk about the importance of knowing your job, profession and the company well so that you can market your products with confidence. Managing your career with the 4 essential steps of learning, mastering, managing and leading was highlighted as one of the essential requirements. Knowing your team was highlighted as essential for success as it is vital to have good team work for success. To top it up it was important to know your market and the world we operate in. While all of these aspects were important, I felt the key message was the need to have a firm set of ‘values’ and live by them remembering that we are human and we need to add value to humanity all the time.
I first attended the Asia Retail Congress in February 2011 where I had the privilege of accompanying the Managing Director of Rahimafrooz Superstores Bangladesh, the operators of the Agora Supermarket Chain to receive the retail excellence award.
I was delighted to be invited to be in the advisory panel of the Asia Retail congress 2012 and to be a speaker as I had lots to share from my experience of making Agora a winning supermarket chain during the last 31 months as the Chief Executive Officer [CEO] of Rahimafrooz Superstores.
