Leadership and Business Wisdom.

Byline: S. Kamal Hayder Kazmi

To succeed in business presently, experts say that you need to be flexible and have good planning and organizational skills, experts say. Starting a business requires analytical thinking, determined organization, and detailed record-keeping. It's significant to be aware of your competition and either appropriate or enhance upon their successful tactics. You'll almost certainly end up working harder for yourself than you would for someone else, so prepare to make sacrifices in your personal life when organizing your business. Providing good service to your customers is crucial to gaining their loyalty and retaining their business.

Feedback: Key to Continuous Learning

Whenever a Jesuit priest or a Calvinist pastor does anything of significance (for instance, making a key decision), he is expected to write down what results he anticipates. Nine months later, he then feeds back from the actual results to these anticipations. This very soon shows him what he did well and what his strengths are. It also shows him what he has to learn and what habits he has to change. Finally it shows him what he is not gifted for and cannot do well. I have followed this method myself, now for fifty years. It brings out what one's strengths are - and this is the most important thing an individual can know about himself or herself. It brings out where improvement is needed and what kind of improvement is needed. Finally, it brings out what an individual cannot do and therefore should not even try to do. To know one's strengths, to know how to improve them, and to know what one cannot do - they are the keys to continuous learning.

Reinvent Yourself

In today's society and organizations, people work increasingly with knowledge, rather than with skill. Knowledge and skill differ in a fundamental characteristic - skills change very, very slowly. Knowledge, however, changes itself. It makes itself obsolete, and very rapidly. A knowledge worker becomes obsolescent if he or she does not go back to school every three or four years.

This not only means that the equipment of learning, of knowledge, of skill, of experience that one acquires early is not sufficient for our present life time and working time. People change over such a long time span. They become different persons with different needs, different abilities, different perspectives, and, therefore, with a need to "revitalize." If you talk of fifty years of working life - and this, I...