Home is where the Heart B.E.A.T. is!

Ghana is changing, and the executive team at Home Finance Company Bank (HFC Bank) in Accra, Ghana, have been quick to recognise this and are rapidly changing and expanding their business.

HFC Bank and their Human Resources Manager, Mr Emmanuel Adom are not content with, “Doing what they have always done before”. In their business world, where the pace of change is faster than their ability to learn, they are ready to put into practice New World Thinking.

To help the Executive Team to more effectively lead the changes in HFC Bank, Pentacle Tutor Kwame Akuffo went 'back home' to Ghana - where he was born.  He used a series of workshops to help the executives learn that they needed to develop several leadership styles in order to cope with all the multiple challenges of their business environment - and come out on top.

Kwame Akuffo facilitated the creation of personal development plans, devised to equip the managers for the surprises challenges and opportunities times that lie hidden in the future for HFC Bank.

Participants learnt that in order to drive change, leaders must first look closer to 'home', actually to themselves and establish a B.E.A.T. They need to look at their own Behaviours and the paradigms that underpin those behaviours, Emotionally engage the hearts and minds of their teams, take Action with real courage and Think clearly about the challenges that lie ahead. The managers at HFC Bank really committed to adopting this approach and making it central to their leadership approach. So Kwame left them with the BEAT proving that for him, "Home really is where the Heart B.E.A.T. is!

The Precariat? NOT an early orange root vegetable!

Yes, it's a new buzz-word to us as well. It seems to be a concatenation of "precarious" and "proletariat".  French sociologists a couple of decades ago used the word to describe a new class of 'unprotected', temporary or seasonal workers. It has since been adopted by the Japanese to describe workers who choose the flexibility of short-term contracts and temporary work rather than bow to the established job-for-life tradition of the 'salaryman'. Like them, we see these people as a critical part of the "virtual team" within an organisation that allow it to be flexible enough to respond to rapid change.

Toby Scott, Director of Pentacle Ireland, will be provoking the audience, by proposing how the pace of change in the New World means that the Precariat will become the dominant employment group over the next decade or so, at a free symposium in Dublin arranged by GradCam, the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media on Friday 24th September.  Toby plans to then educate the audience on how to respond to the change and benefit from it.

Uproot yourself and join Toby if you can!

Leadership in Crisis or Crisis in Leadership?

For the fifth year Pentacle has continued to support the African Leadership Institute.  It is AfLI’s belief that without good leadership across the various levels and sectors of the continent, all the other excellent initiatives in Africa will be stifled. Investment in good leadership thus has an enormous return in terms of future social, economic, political, technological and environmental benefits.  Eddie Obeng has now worked with over a hundred future leaders on the ALI flagship Programme the Archbishop Tutu Leadership Fellowship Programme.  This year's course was directed by Peter Wilson, Sean Lance and Lord Hacking.  Seeds of New World Leadership thinking have been planted in the fertile soils of Senegal Burundi, Nigeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Tanzania, Mozambique, Kenya, Madagascar, Angola & Liberia  

Let's Talk Again - Welcome to the World After Midnight Version 2.0

Have you ever experienced that moment, when the drawing of the old witch transforms into a young lady? Or stared at a Magic Eye picture of coloured dots to suddenly see a butterfly emerge? Or that moment in the film The Matrix when Neo sees the data that makes the world in zeros and ones?

The next nine minutes will transform how you see the business and economic world around you. Things will never be quite the same again.

Welcome to the New World After Midnight....

NOTE: You can download a version from http://worldaftermidnight.com/