Planning is key to success — Ms Pala Asiedu

The Head of Commercial Legal Affairs of MTN Ghana, Ms Pala Asiedu Ofori, has advised young people to prioritise planning to enable them to succeed.

She gave the advice in Kumasi, when the Springboard Roadshow made a stop in the Ashanti Region.

Speaking on the essence of planning, Ms Asiedu Ofori pointed out that planning was very important if one wanted to succeed in life.

“For every venture that you will undertake, you need planning,” she stated.

Using the Achilles heel story, she urged the participants to pay attention to very small details when drawing up their strategies and plans since those small things could actually cause their failure.

“We put in a lot of time and energy putting plans and strategies in place but sometimes you realise that there may be one little thing in the chain that can lead to a downfall and make the whole strategy a failure,” she noted.

“This is how the Achilles heel story comes in,” she added.

The Achilles heel is a story of ancient Greek where a mother was told that her son will die very young. To protect him, the mother dipped the son into a river that was known to have mystical powers.

But in doing so, she held him by the heel so every aspect of his body was covered by the water except for his heel.

As he grew up, he went into battle, won many and did exceptionally well but because his heel was not protected, eventually the enemy shot a poisoned arrow into that heel and that is what killed him.

Ms Asiedu Ofori said the lesson that could be learnt from the story was that, “You can have all the plans and strategies in place but there can be just one aspect of it that you may not have considered that can make your strategy and the desired outcome fail.”

On the personal level, she also said there could be one bad habit of the individual that when not dealt with, could jeopardise his/her whole strategy.

“Character building is very important as you can have all the technical knowledge but certain aspects of your character can be the weakest link that will cause your downfall,” she stated.

Tour

The annual nationwide tour has been providing personal development, coaching and mentoring to thousands of people across the country and made a stop at the weekend at the Calvary Charismatic Centre in Kumasi, where hundreds of emerging leaders were educated on how they could combine strategy and technology effectively to create wealth.

The event had three thematic speakers who spoke on the three pillars of the theme under which this year’s roadshow was organised.

The roadshow, which also brought together thousands of individuals from across the world who participated digitally, had Ms  Asiedu Ofori give a presentation on strategy, while the Regional Head of Consumer Banking for Ecobank, Mr Tara Squire, also spoke about technology. The Managing Director of FirstBanc Financial Services, Mr Amenyo Setordzie, spoke on wealth creation.

The Executive Director of the Springboard Roadshow Foundation, Rev. Albert Ocran, was the keynote speaker.

Power of technology

Mr Squire urged the youth to make good use of very simple technological tools that had the power to transform and better their lives.

He shared with them simple ways in which technology could empower them and move them to the next level.

“For those of you who are working in the corporate world, running your own business or responsible for certain family projects, you can use Trello, which is a project management tool that is very simple. You can go in there and add all the people who are involved in the project and assign tasks and follow progress and updates,” he pointed out.

“You can sync access to all your mobile devices and can be updating from anywhere,” he added.

He also mentioned IXL, which he said was an application that had learning materials that children could have access to.

“We also have the google sheets, which has real-time collaboration. Different people working on a project can basically update at different times and different portions and it is also synched across all mobile devices,” he said.

“You need to experience them and make good use of them,” he added

Discipline

Mr Amenyo Setordzie, for his part, urged the participants to always put in place an emergency fund which they could fall on in emergency situations.

“Emergency funds mean having savings so that in case of unforeseen occurrences, you will be able to tap into them to solve those problems,” he stated.

He also urged them to be disciplined as he believed it was one of the few ways in which they could create wealth for themselves.

“Discipline is key if you want to create wealth. Discipline is when you feel like buying something almost every hour but you say no to yourself because you have a bigger goal ahead so you save the money,” he explained.

He also urged the participants to adopt budgeting as a lifestyle.

“Let budgeting be your lifestyle. Everything you want to do, prepare a budget and run with it and it will help you stay on course,” he said.