St. Lucia Simply Beautiful

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.

Is it not significant that the message of the advent of Christ the Lord was delivered in the context of shepherds keeping watch over their flock by night? We are all shepherds; don’t we all have our respective flocks? Are or flocks not more exposed by “night” rather than by “day”? I can think of no better example of this concept than the pilot project, BIM Ventures, conducted over the last three years to debug the implementation of the CBET Shepherding Modelâ„¢ in the Barbados environment with the assistance of the Barbados Governme

CMEx is focused on the Caribbean journalist with a cross fertilisation of ideas from journalists and tourism officials from the Americas, Canada, the Caribbean, and Europe whereas CPTM has a wider diversity of expertise, experience, interest and support which encompasses Africa, Australia, the Caribbean, Europe, India and the Indian Ocean, Malaysia, the Mediterranean and North America. As an example of such diversity, I was sitting at a table for lunch on the first day of the CPTM at which the randomly selected representation by country of birth was Barbados, Cyprus, Ghana, Malta, Romania, the Seychelles and the UK; and the next day, a smaller group Barbados, Germany and Nigeria.

Here I am again riding my old hobby horse “Barbados as a Donor Country”. Whereas the traditional donor country model may help the recipient country, results show that the donor country is the net beneficiary of such schemes. This is primarily because the aid is usually tied to the purchase of goods and services from the donor country.

The marketing and production functions go hand in hand. If we successfully sell products or services to given target markets we will have a sustainable economy. The productive sectors include tourism, agriculture, financial services, business development services, creative industries (e.g. film, music, fashion, fine arts, culinary arts and graphic arts), education, ICT, renewable energy, health and wellness and construction.

This is one of the busiest periods of my life. There are so many calls on my time, but I enjoy every moment of it – well, most moments – the enjoyment is my reward. This exemplifies the Rotary International Motto “Service above Self”.

We cannot get growth without risk. The visionary and the brave have stuck their necks out in a socio-economic mine field and the challenge of sustainable success is directly proportional to the effort spent in expertly managing the process.