Does Your CV Answer These 8 Critical Questions? (Part 2)
In the first part of this article, I stated four questions a good CV must answer. Your CV is the first thing a prospective employer sees before seeing you. Oftentimes, many employers have formed their impression about the candidate based on their CV even before the in-person interview. Let’s look...
Does Your CV Answer These 8 Critical Questions? (Part 1)
I review CVs almost on a daily basis. Hardly will a week go by without having a chat or interviewing candidates. Truth is one cannot see all the candidates but your CV gives you a leg in the door. The word ‘Curriculum Vitae’ has its root meaning from a Latin word which means ‘course of life’. Your...
Hard Skills Alone Won’t Advance Your Career. Soft Skills Matter Even More
The higher you progress in your career, the more you understand that your career is not all about your hard or technical skills. I usually tell people that any company or organisation can buy hard skills; that’s not difficult to get as long as they can afford them. This is why I believe no staff...
Travelogue: The Day I Climbed Olumo Rock and Met Ibikunle Amosun
This piece was originally written on August 23, 2017 as my team and I took a break from our half-year retreat to climb Olumo Rock My heart was in my mouth when I climbed some portion and looked down. I saw houses looking like tiny images. I felt dizzy and said a prayer by heart. I rebuked the...
If You Only Live For Yourself, You Have Not Truly Lived
I had observed him for some time. Each day the routine was the same. Eba with very dry egusi mixed with just palm oil early in the morning and the leftovers late at night. No meat. No fish. He kept largely to himself. He had some bushy beards that made him look like a Marxist of sorts. He always...
Travelogue: Calabar, Columbus, Casino and Conversations With Mary Slessor
This article was originally written on May 18, 2015. I summoned courage as I approached the man who wore a hood. He had just poured himself a generous tot of local liquor, and the look on his face as he downed it showed he was in a world of his own. What manner of man will engage in such binge...
Travelogue: The Man from Zimbabwe, Tourism And Ethiopian Coffee
Note: I wrote this travelogue on November 24, 2015 when I had a layover in Addis Ababa during a trip. He wanted to jump the queue at Murtala Muhammed International Airport, but I told him outright to stay in the queue. He turned to me and laughed, adding that “it doesn’t mean anything.” I was a...
Want to Grow as a Leader? Start by Truly Listening to Feedback
Sometime in September 2020, I received feedback from two of my former colleagues which were quite encouraging. One was from a former colleague that we worked together around 2009. Her call was totally unexpected. She asked if I could recall asking her to watch the movie, Akeelah and the Bee,...
You Grow When You Allow Others To Grow
We were having our monthly review session one morning around 2010/2011 when something suddenly dawned on me. I looked around the small meeting room on Ahmadu Bello Way, Victoria Island, Lagos, and realised that about five people seated around that table had once been my Relationship Managers. Now,...
Leadership and Legacy: How to Live Forever
One of the greatest abilities of exceptional leaders is their capacity to build for the future. A true leader always thinks in terms of tomorrow even though he lives today. The present is too little to contain exceptional leaders. Their realities may be in the present but their sight is set...