In the context of cricket, the politicians need to become involved, at the legislation level, to redress the situation of “cricketing public suffrage” where only a small minority of the cricket public currently have the right to vote in the WICB governance system.
The Springer legacy in scouting all began in March 1912 when Charles Wilkinson Springer, my grandfather, was the first Scoutmaster of the first Scout Troup in Barbados at the Combermere School. All this was refreshingly renewed last week when I was part of the celebrations of the 100th Anniversary of Scouting in Barbados.
This trading system is designed to effect efficient planning, organizing, staffing, leadership and monitoring, in other words, the efficient management of the agricultural sector by managing the growth of one commodity after another.
Returning to Barbados for the moment and, indeed, this is true for many states around the world, the system of governance that is practised does not permit the best brains in the country to exercise their full potential in contributing to the development of the country. This is because many of the best brains may not want to participate in the political system and there is no provision for them to make a sustained input in the future fortunes of the country.
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.