St. Lucia Simply Beautiful

At the national level, Britain’s Prince Edward affirmed Barbados as a “model small state” but advised its leaders they would need courage, creativity and common sense to overcome the economic challenges. He was addressing a Joint Sitting of Parliament in the Senate Chamber, held in commemoration of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and further reaffirmed that Barbados had demonstrated its maturity and self-confidence and that it actively seeks to learn from the past.

The Barbados Entrepreneurship Foundation (BEF) has embarked on a goal for Barbados to be the number one entrepreneurial hub in the world by 2020. A manifestation of this is to double, say, the GDP per capita of Barbados in 10 years. This can only be done through the sustainable success of many large, medium or small enterprises.

The major constraint arising from the pilot project is the continuing difficulty to access seed and venture capital funds from the available financial markets. The next phase of the project will, therefore, be focusing on targeting specific institutions to set up individual funds which would be managed by a CBET (Barbados) Fund Management company using the systems established during the pilot project.

I constantly refer, in this column, to the five functions of management: corporate governance; innovative marketing; operations; personnel; and financial investment. If we examine these functions against the sugarcane industry, we can immediately see that there is a gap between the potential for each function and the status quo.

The theory of Management of Business states that business is driven by the five functions: corporate governance, marketing, operations, leading and control; and that the elements of management (planning, organising, staffing, leading and monitoring), if well applied, mitigate the risk of business failure.

When I approached Chief Justice Gibson to greet him on the evening, I was absolutely honoured when he immediately referred to my weekly column and confirmed that he actually reads it. He immediately made reference to his exposure to spirituality and jurisprudence during his days at Oxford University and revealed his comfort that my column attempts to combine spirituality and business.

Good management is highly correlated with the sustained success of the business and includes the elements of planning, organising, staffing, leading and monitoring/controlling. The monitoring/controlling element of management facilitates the exercise of testing the outcome against the objective (forecast) and if the outcome is not consistent with the forecast then corrective action must be taken to bring future outcomes back on track with the forecasts.

“Funny how simple it is for people to trash God and then wonder why the world’s going to hell. Funny how we believe what the newspapers say, but question what the Bible says. Funny how you can send ‘jokes’ through e-mail and they spread like wildfire, but when you start sending messages regarding the Lord, people think twice about sharing. Funny how lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene articles pass freely through cyberspace, but public discussion of God is suppressed in the school and workplace… Funny how we can be more worried about what other people think of us than what God thinks about us”

A new year, a new source of Biblical quotes, this time from my autographed copy of the 2011 daily planner by Pastor A. R. Bernard who is the Founder, Senior Pastor and CEO of Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, New York, United States, delivered by Bevan a year ago. Yes, a year late as a year planner but still relevant as a source of God’s unfailing love and wisdom.

As I reflect over the past year there are many things with which I have been involved either substantially or peripherally. They are BIM Ventures; Commonwealth Partnership for Technology Management; Barbados Entrepreneurship Foundation; Caribbean Media Exchange on Sustainable Tourism; Barbados Society of Technologists in Agriculture; Errol and Nita Barrow Educational Trust; Rotary Club of Barbados South; Annual Conference on Statistics, Science and Public Policy; ANSA Awards; and Caribbean Institute of Certified Management Consultants.

In order to be effective, I have to adhere to a strict regime of good nutrition, exercise and peace of mind backed up by traditional and complementary medicine practitioners. Fortunately, if not mentally stimulated, my default position is to sleep, albeit soundly for relatively short periods at a time (power napping), so there is no sleep deficit syndrome getting in the way.