On The Path Of Winners By Bayo Ogunmupe How To Secure Your Wealth

On The Path Of Winners

By Bayo Ogunmupe

How To Secure Your Wealth

ONCE you have found your ideal vocation, you must out think your contemporaries in meeting the needs of the people in order to excel. It is in that manner that you can obtain divine favour to gain your heart’s desires. Everything in the world remains to be done better than it has been so far. The best is yet to come! You will only command attention if you make a daring discovery or propose a bold new idea that makes life better. To do this you must be willing to challenge and break the bonds of conventional ways of doing things.

  Just as the computer replaced the typewriter, so no product or service has ever been manufactured and sold as efficiently as it might be. Some day new products will replace present day gadgets. Start using your own creative powers now. Think about things that can be done to improve the quality of life of the people you serve. Doing so translates to more wealth for them and some of that wealth will invariably pass unto you.

  It is significant for you to follow these patterns of thinking in order to improve your ways of thinking. One, think associatively. Associate ideas and concepts continually in search of new relationships between existing objects and ideas. That was how the computer, the ipad and typewriter developed from the printing press. Two, adaptive thinking which involves adapting old products to new uses. This was how the aeroplane seatbelts were adapted for car use and motion pictures were adapted for educational use as teaching aids.

  Three, thinking combination as everything in life is contrived. That was why America could learn from Japan’s supersonic technology and managerial style. Four, thinking rearrangement is a way of turning products or ideas upside down for the production of new items. This thinking berthed running shoes, for there were no shoes for athletes before the 19^th century. The Olympiad was conducted bare footed then. Creative thinking and need produced spike shoes used by sprinters.

  There are local issues peculiar to our character as Nigerians. There is unemployment and corruption. We need home grown remedies to cure them. The world does not know or believe that you can do a think until you have done it. Which is why we are all mediocres. No ethnic group has excelled over the other in Nigeria through creative thinking or governance. That is why regional integration appeals to me. By pooling her resources together a region can show its excellence over others by conquering poverty in her domain. For now there is no proof a Yoruba is better than an Hausa or that a Fulani is superior to an Itshekiri, we are all plodders.

  Five, thinking substitution is the strategy employed to replace old products. Because an item is being used now does not mean it will continue to be the favourite of the future. Nothing is indispensable, see how desktop computers replaced typewriters in the marketplace. Moreover, plastic is now used as substitute for wood. Six, thinking minification produces smaller products. Much of today’s technology market – laptop computers, palm pilots, ipad, cell phones, has to do with making products smaller and more portable. You should think of new devices or tools that would be better or more useful, if they were smaller.

  Seven, thinking time-saving is another device for making products that save time and money. This is more relevant in communications where email and faxes are replacing the snail mail as preferred mode of communication. Eight, thinking cost saving trigger new alternatives for products and services to replace previously expensive and time consuming items. In the USA, consumer goods manufacturers locate their plants in low cost regions such as Korea, Japan and South America to ensure that the cost of products is competitive.

  Finally in thinking safety, new, safer products are manufactured to avoid hazards. Smaller, safer brands of fans, air conditioners and the like are now in vogue. Adopting one of these strategies in your existing business as a basis for new development may lead you to a new discovery, which could draw popular attention to yourself and your business. Ordinarily, our people believe they can get something for nothing. That mindset has kept us a beggar nation. That invariably impels us to buy cheap foreign goods, which have been produced on the service based thinking, which is creativity driven and compels giving to every person more than you take from them. Because of the long-term value we enjoy from their services, our foreign partners enslave us with their goods leading to large scale unemployment here. This has been caused by unseemly reliance on imported goods and services.

  Unless you begin to think in terms of how you can improve people’s lives, as against how much you can make from people, any success you have will be short-lived. Success always follow those who give more than they received. Our champion for today is Cyril Northcote Parkinson, the British historian, author and formulator of “Parkinson’s Law.” This law is the dictum that: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

  A relatively obscure academic prior to his enunciation of that law which first appeared in The Economist of London in 1955. Parkinson later devised a second law” Expenditure rises to meet income. That was detailed in his “The Law and Profits (1960).” Born in July 1909, Parkinson was the youngest son of William Parkinson, Principal of York School of Arts and Crafts and his wife, Rose Mary Curnow. Northcote attended St. Peters School, York where he won a scholarship to study history at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. He received his BA in 1932 and his Ph.D from King’s College, London in 1935.

  Parkinson taught in various schools in England and from 1950 to 1958 in Malaysia. He based his comments on bureaucracy on his experiences as a British army staff officer during World War II. Administrators make work for each other, he said, so that they can multiply the number of their subordinates and enhance their prestige. His second law was intended as jibe at government functionaries, who he thought were inclined to expand their own ranks indefinitely, so long as taxes could be raised.

  Written in a funny style, Parkinson’s Economist essays were issued in book form in Parkinson’s Law or The Pursuit of Progress (1958). Apart from the book that made him famous, Parkinson wrote numerous historical works, including the critically acclaimed The Evolution of Political Thought (1958). He is considered an important scholar within the field of public administration. Parkinson and his wife divorced in 1952 and he married the journalist Ann Fry with whom he had two sons and a daughter. After the death of Ann in 1984, he married a third time to Iris Hilda Waters. Then they moved to Canterbury, Kent where he died and was buried in 1993.