Archive for the ‘Business’ Category
by Amanda on May 22nd, 2013
Neil Flanagan and Jarvis Finger, authors of Just About Everything a Manager Needs to Know in South Africa have made available a free electronic resource titled “How to prepare yourself for your performance appraisal” on Rubicor. They cover points such as: becoming a participant rather than a target, talking to others about their interviews, being prepared to assert your position and getting your documentation right.
It’s hard to like performance appraisals, whether they’re the traditional type or the 360° version. At one extreme, they’re an annual ritual at which bosses or their nominees list a litany of your flaws and then send you away to reduce or eliminate them. At the other extreme, however, they’re a wonderful opportunity to discuss openly your job performance with your boss. If you show some initiative, you’ll get a great deal from an appraisal interview, as the following points reveal…
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by Amanda on May 21st, 2013
In the following extract from Gert J Scholtz’s The Keys to Persuasion, the author discusses the “cat system”. This persuasion system is based on the author’s house cat, which he calls a “persuasion master”. Scholtz’s The Keys to Persuasion provides you with the tools to also become an expert at persuasion.
Meet a persuasion master: our house cat. Every evening, as I sit down at my computer, he jumps onto the desk and starts nudging me – softly at first, but more insistently after a while. The reason? He wants to lie on my chair. After some more caressing and nudging, he jumps behind my back and wriggles his way between me and the chair. On a cold winter’s evening, the warm cat at my back feels cosy and, after I have adjusted my seating, I let the cat be. He succeeds in claiming his position on the chair every time. How does he do this?
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by Amanda on May 15th, 2013
Neil Flanagan and Jarvis Finger, the authors of Just About Everything a Manager Needs to Know in South Africa, have penned a short guide, How to Deal with Dishonest Staff, for the “e-Books for Managers” series.
Flanagan and Finger explain the legal procedures for dismissing an employee who has been dishonest and offer tips on handling the situation:
Once upon a time, if an employee was caught stealing in the workplace, instant dismissal would follow. Staff members caught red handed were found to have breached their duty of good faith to the employer; termination of service was an expected outcome. But these days, industrial legislation can protect even dishonest employees. Employers must, therefore, tread carefully when dealing with such staff members…
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by Amanda on May 13th, 2013
Andrew Rugasira wrote A Good African Story, “because African businesses are rarely written about…Without the experiences of these businesses being recorded, we lose the intellectual capital that feeds the juices of the next generation of entrepreneurs and spurs them on.”
Reconnect Africa attended the launch of the book at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies earlier this year, where Rugasira explained why he wrote it and said that he is “very optimistic about Africa. We need to challenge the issues of the decision makers head on; equip people with the data to argue and we have just got to keep going.”
The Ugandan founder of Good African Coffee, Andrew Rugasira, has launched a new book that shares his personal experiences as an African entrepreneur
Since its founding in 2003, Good African Coffee has helped thousands of farmers earn a decent living, send their children to school and escape a spiral of debt and dependence.
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by Amanda on May 8th, 2013
Summit Business spoke to Andrew Rugasira, author of A Good African Story, about the business lessons he has learnt along the way.
Rugasira named perserverance and tenacity as the two key qualities that entprereneurs need to have when starting out. He also highlighted the importance of hitting bumps along the way, as he says that “the bumps give you life lessons to be able to sustain your business once it makes it to the top.”
Good African Coffee is the first African company to export and sell coffee in some of the leading supermarkets in South Africa, UK and US. It has been a journey of persistent and hard work. Through disappointment and frustrations from retailers, friends and banks, Rugasira never gave up.
What started as a small company in 2004 has emerged into a global coffee brand sold in leading supermarkets across the globe. And as he says, this is just the beginning. Below is an exclusive interview with Andrew on the lessons of doing good business.
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by Amanda on Apr 10th, 2013
Random House Struik is giving away copies of two business books, The Keys to Persuasion by Gert J Scholtz and Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, to one lucky reader. To stand a chance of winning, answer this simple question on their website:
What position does Sheryl Sandberg hold at Facebook?
A. Chief Financial Officer
B. Chief Operating Officer
C. Head of Marketing
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by Amanda on Apr 5th, 2013
Acquire the power to change someone’s mind…
Why is it so important for us to acquire the skill of persuasion? The answer is simple: every day of our lives, we need to persuade someone of something, whether in the workplace or in our personal lives. Whether you are convincing a colleague to buy into a new initiative, pitching an important deal to a client or trying to convince your five-year-old to go to bed, you are persuading someone of something. And although we all persuade in one way or another, very few of us excel at it.
This book reveals the most effective keys – and the one golden key – that can turn you into a master persuader who can influence and change the minds of others. It explores the psychological bases and reasons why the keys work and contains many fun and effective examples of how to use them.
Based on well-documented research, The Keys to Persuasion is a fascinating and highly practical book that makes a difficult task and a complex subject concrete, accessible, lively and amusing.
About the author
Gert J. Scholtz obtained B.Com, LLB and M.Com degrees and has worked for many years in the financial services industry. He has lived in the USA and has worked in the UK for large parts of his life, and has travelled to many countries in Africa, Latin America, Europe and the East, marketing and selling financial services. He has experienced and observed the universal keys to persuasion all over the world.
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by Amanda on Apr 4th, 2013
Tim Adams from The Guardian has written an article on Andrew Rugasira’s entrepreneurial project in Uganda, as detailed in A Good African Story.
Adams describes first hearing Rugasira talk at the House of Lords in London and then visiting Uganda to talk to the farmers involved in the Good African coffee company. He comments on the ups and downs that Rugasira has experienced over the years and how Rugasira wrote his book “to try to force a conversation. Everyone is suddenly talking about Africa being ‘open for business’. But nobody seems to want to define what that might mean”.
How can you tell when a story has ended? If it is an African story, such as the one Andrew Rugasira has to tell, closure is never likely to be satisfying or clear cut. Beginnings are more straightforward.
Rugasira’s once-upon-a-time moment came nearly a decade ago, when he had a vision to start a coffee company in his native Uganda. He would, he determined, become the first African to collect and roast and market and sell quality coffee direct to British supermarkets. And, by that example, he would demonstrate his certain beliefs: that it was trade, not aid, that transformed communities and that change was never an imposed solution, but a positive choice made by those whose lives would be most affected by it.
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by Amanda on Mar 28th, 2013
Rathbone Greenbank Investments sponsored a talk given by Andrew Rugasira, author of A Good African Story, at the Festival of Ideas held in Bristol, UK. In the talk, Rugasira outlined three main reasons why he wrote the book, one of which is the fact that stories about African enterprise are rarely published.
Rathbone Greenbank Investments was delighted to sponsor a talk by Andrew Rugasira at the Festival of Ideas held at the Watershed in Bristol.
In 2003 Andrew Rugasira founded Good African Coffee in his native Uganda. His vision was to be the first African-owned coffee brand to be stocked in UK supermarkets and by US retailers. He has recently written a book ‘A Good African Story’ about his experiences in delivering an African coffee brand to the global market ,setting out why he believes trade has been successful where aid has failed.
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by Amanda on Mar 18th, 2013
In an excerpt from A Good African Story, Andrew Rugasira describes how his company became the first Ugandan coffee brand to be sold in South Africa in 2004.
Rugasira writes how he had previously done consultancy work for Shopright Checkers and helped to organise a meeting between Shopright’s CEO Whitey Basson and the president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni. After the meeting he pitched his coffee business idea to Basson in the back of the car on the way to the airport. This short conversation eventually led to Shopright stocking his coffee.
On Thursday 9 March 2004, we became the first Ugandan coffee brand to be sold in South Africa when Shoprite Checkers, the leading supermarket chain, agreed to retail our roast and ground coffees. Our three inaugural coffee products – ‘Prestige’, ‘Gold’ and ‘Classic’ – were branded under the ‘Rwenzori Finest Coffee’ label (which was the company’s original name before it became Good African in 2005), and the roasting and packing of the coffee was outsourced to a roaster in Cape Town.
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