Category: People

Over the past year, I’ve been writing a book about the future of sales and marketing with Howard Stevens, chairman of the leadership assessment firm Chally.

As part of a decades-long research project, Chally has gathered extensive personality data about 150,000 salespeople, including 9,000 sales managers.

Last week, I had a conversation with Howard where he described the results of a statistical analysis on the cumulative data on sales managers. While the data set is specific to sales, I believe that personality traits that emerged apply to any management position.

According to the success vs. failure statistics that Howard shared with me, successful bosses tend to be:

Humble Rather Than Arrogant

Failed bosses defined their role as some form of telling people what to do. Employees perceived them as obnoxious know-it-alls who wouldn’t let them do their job.

Successful bosses put themselves and their own egos into the background. They focused on coaching employees to perform to their highest potential.

Flexible Rather Than Rigid

Failed bosses couldn’t tolerate change themselves and so found it nearly impossible to get their employees to embrace necessary change.

Successful bosses knew that adapting to new conditions requires personal flexibility in order to inspire similar flexibility throughout the rest of the team.

Straightforward Rather Than Evasive

Failed bosses tried to manipulate employees using half-truths that left false impressions. When employees realized they’ve been fooled, they felt resentful and disloyal.

Successful bosses gave employees the information they need to know to make the best decisions, even if that information is difficult or sensitive.

Forward Thinking Rather Than Improvisational

Failed bosses often attempted to run their organizations ad-hoc, constantly shifting gears and directions, creating a more-or-less constant state of confusion.

Successful bosses had a plan and made sure that everyone understood it. They adapted that plan to changing conditions but did so carefully and intentionally.

Precise Rather Than Vague

Failed bosses created mushy goals that employees found difficult to map into actual activity. As a result, the wrong things got done and the right things didn’t.

Successful bosses let employees know exactly what was expected of them, in sufficient detail so that there was no ambiguity about goals.

Patient Rather Than Ill-Tempered

Failed bosses blew up and threw fits when problems cropped up. Their employees became more afraid of doing things wrong than eager to do things right.

Successful bosses confronted problems by listening, considering options, deciding on the best approach, and then communicating what needed to be done.

Uzanyinzoga Suzan was born in 1959, she had a minor defect on her upper lip of her mouth. As she grew, the Lip also gradually increased in size.

Today Uzanyinzoga says her lip has grown so big such that it covers her lower lip and part of her face is swollen.

She is a mother of four children resident at Musongati village , Nyarusange sector in Muhanga district.

For the past years she checked in at Nyarusange health center in her district but she was not given any attention.

Uzanyinzoga says that some good samaritans once brought her to Kigali to seek treatment at the central Hospital CHK.

However, she was advised to return home promising her that CHK would send her medicine to Nyarusange hospital but she has never recieved any such medicine.

She says that these days whenever she tries doing work she gets headache and sometimes gets dizzy.

Uzanyinzoga is seeking help to find a house to stay in with her children.

Rwanda Partners organization has employed an elderly man Karongozi Stephan 84, to prevent him from begging on the streets.

He has been known to go begging at the Rwanda Partners office in Ruhango District.

Karongozi has been a popular beggar at Byimana Sector where he usually asks passengers for money.

The coordinator of Rwanda Partners Sylvie Iraguha said they have employed him to stopping his begging activities adding that it is to enable him raise his social economic livelihood.

Karongozi has promised never to beg anymore since he has a job which generates income.

Zimbabwe Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai Friday lost a bid to have the US$15 000 maintenance claim lodged against him by his wife Ms Locardia Karimat­senga struck off the roll.

Harare Civil Court magistrate Mr Reuben Mukavhi ruled that the appli­cation was properly before the courts and that the hearing should be held.

PM Tsvangirai had argued that the application did not comply with the provisions of the Maintenance Act.

The premier’s lawyer Advocate Tha­bani Mpofu said the claim could have been brought up through summons and not a court application.

He also argued that service of the court papers was not done properly.
Adv Mpofu raised the objection just before the maintenance inquiry, but Mr Mukavhi ruled against him.

Mr Mukavhi held that the applica­tion was properly before him and that the hearing should start.

“The proceedings before me have been properly instituted.
“The points in limine (preliminary points) are without merit and are hereby dismissed.”

Adv Mpofu notified the court of his intention to appeal to the High Court challenging the lower court’s failure or omission to consider some of his sub­missions in dismissing the prelimi­nary points.

“We intend to approach the High Court so that it deals with the issues we raised concerning the attachment of an affidavit to the summons,” he said.

“The point has not been determined by this court.”

Mr Mukavhi ruled that the hearing should take off on October 15.
In the failed preliminary arguments, Adv Mpofu submitted that the maintenance claim was void and that it was an unnecessary burden on the court roll.

Adv Mpofu said a maintenance complaint should be made on oath and the fact that Ms Karimatsenga’s lawyers filed a court application rendered the process defective.

He said the law did not allow the court to condone any departure from the statutes.

Adv Mpofu described the application as “dog’s breakfast”.
He said proper service of summons should be effected by the police and not by any other person.

Responding to the objection, Ms Karimatsenga’s lawyer Mr Everson Samukange described the preliminary challenge as mischievous and a deliberate attempt to delay court proceedings.

Mr Samukange said the complaint had properly been made on oath as required by the law and that service could be done by other persons other than the police.

He said the application, although it was not brought on summons, had an affidavit which constitutes the maintenance complaint on oath.

Ms Karimatsenga is claiming US$15 000 monthly maintenance to match the high standards of life she is now accustomed to as a result of her relationship with PM Tsvangirai.

She wants the PM to contribute towards her upkeep and accessories, as she has been accustomed to.

In her claim, Ms Karimatsenga said she was customarily married to PM Tsvangirai after he paid lobola to her parents in November last year.

Rwandan artist Bruce Melody has said his mother, Zenena Muteteri, 46, died “with her family at her bedside” on September 14 following a short illness.

“Mom told us that she felt like her head was heavy and hurting so much, so we took her to (Rwanda) Military Hospital in Kanombe where she passed on in the hands of the doctors,” said Bruce Melody, the deceased’s second-born.

Muteteri born December 1, 1966 was a single mother after her husband passed away in 1996. She was laid to rest on Sunday at her home in Kanombe. She is survived by four children.

“She was a loving and caring mother, with a never-say-never spirit and she raised us well. We shall always look up to her,” Melody said.

NewTimes

Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe, often called the father of modern African literature, released his first major work in years Thursday with a long-awaited memoir centred on the war that nearly destroyed his nation.

“There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra” chronicles Achebe’s experiences during Nigeria’s 1967-1970 civil war, which saw his native eastern region, dominated by the Igbo ethnic group, secede as the Republic of Biafra.

The split came largely in response to massacres of Igbos in Nigeria’s north and saw Achebe, author of the revered novel “Things Fall Apart,” speak out forcefully in support of the move.

His memoir was released in Britain on Thursday and will be available in Nigeria shortly after, said publishers Allen Lane, a division of Penguin. Its release in the United States is set for October 11.

The tensions that ignited the Biafran conflict, which left around one million people dead, including many from starvation, are largely settled. Today, sporadic calls for greater Igbo autonomy have limited impact in Nigerian politics.

Experts, however, say a Biafra memoir from the 81-year-old Achebe is urgently needed in a country that remains deeply fractured on other levels, despite the book’s focus on events that happened more than four decades ago.

“Achebe is sustaining the debate on integration, on unity and on oneness,” said Dapo Thomas, a history professor at Lagos State University.

“Until there is a sovereign agreement from the peasants to the elite that we want to remain as one, we must continue that debate. A nation cannot remain comatose while these issues are unresolved.”

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country with 160 million people, groups around 250 ethnic groups and is roughly divided between a mainly Muslim north and predominately Christian south.

Achebe strongly backed his native Biafra in the civil war and even toured to speak on its behalf. Echoes of the conflict emerge in his writing, including his collection “Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems.”

The octogenarian remains a towering figure in Nigerian and African literature, though he has been based in the United States in recent years where he has been a professor at Brown University in Rhode Island. He travels infrequently due to a 1990 car accident that left him in a wheelchair.

Achebe’s novel “Things Fall Apart”, about the collision between British colonial rule and Igbo society, remains a landmark work 54 years after its release.

“Just as we read Shakespeare, it’s not possible for any student in this department to graduate without reading the works of Chinua Achebe,” said the head of the English department at the University of Lagos, Adeyemi Daramola.

Zimbabwe Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s former lover has said she is bitter over being dumped through a text message.

Nosipho Shilubane launched an unsuccessful court application to stop Mr Tsvangirai’s wedding on September 15 to Elizabeth Macheka claiming he had also promised to marry her.

Although her appeal was dismissed for lack of merit, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader’s marriage license was cancelled after another woman Locardia Karimatsenga Tembo convinced the court that he was customarily married to her.

Mr Tsvangirai, aged 60, opted for a customary union with Ms Macheka (35) amid calls for him to be arrested for allegedly lying under oath.

Ms Shulubane (35) told a South African television station eNews Chanel Africa (NCA) the Zimbabwean politician should have had the decency to inform her of the reasons he wanted to end the relationship.

“I deserved for him to sit down with me and say Nosi this is what is happening,” she said.

“That decency I think he owed it to me. He is supposed to be an example to other people, young kids.

“At an age of 60, you dump women through SMS then what do the young ones do?”

Ms Shulubane said she felt used and abused by Mr Tsvangirai whom she met in 2009.

The two enjoyed whirlwind romantic trips to Seychelles, Singapore and Botswana before the relationship ended.

“I received a message from an unknown number that said the relationship was terminated because of distance,” she said.

The woman said the politician ignored her calls and this forced her to resort to the court action to stop the wedding.

Ms Shilubane claims she met the Zimbabwean premier in September 2009, six months after the death of his wife Susan and he told her that he was a widower looking to settle.

She said Mr Tsvangirai was due to pay her bride price in January, but the Prime Minister claimed he was held up by government business and would only do so in December.

The magistrate ruled that her claims had no merit after the premier admitted that she was once his girlfriend but had never promised to marry her.

An American Chef on trial for the murder of his wife told investigators that he disposed of her body by boiling it for four days then trashed the remains with other waste in a grease pit in his restaurant.

David Viens, 49 in Los Angeles, was a chef at the Thyme Contemporary Café in Lomita, Calif., when on Oct. 18, 2009 he came home and argued with his 39-year-old wife, Dawn Viens.

At one point he duct-taped her mouth and bound her hands and feet before falling asleep and finding her corpse the next morning, he told investigators.

“I woke up. I panicked,” Viens said. “She was hard.”

On Tuesday a jury in L.A. heard that Viens told investigators that in a panic he stuffed his wife’s body face-down into a 55-gallon drum of boiling water and proceeded to cook it for four days.

He said that he used weights to submerge Dawn’s 105-pound body in the boiling water.

“I just slowly cooked it and I ended up cooking her for four days,” he told investigators.

Viens then took some of his wife’s body’s remains, mixed it with other waste from the restaurant and poured it into the grease pit at the Thyme Contemporary Café. Other remains were placed in the dumpster in garbage bags.

He said that afterwards all he saved was his wife’s skull, though a search of the house turned up nothing, nor did an excavation of the restaurant.

“That’s the only thing I didn’t want to get rid of in case I wanted to leave it somewhere,” he told police of the skull, saying that he left in “my mother’s attic.”

It wasn’t until 2011 that Viens learned that police investigating Dawn’s disappearance began to suspect him. At that point he leapt feet-first from an 80-foot cliff in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. He survived the fall and is now in a wheelchair.

Viens sat in the courtroom staring ahead and scribbling notes as a stunned-looking jury listened to the 2011 taped hospital bed confession to police.

What Viens says in the taped interviews closely matches what he told his daughter and a former girlfriend, both of whom have testified for the prosecution.

Details of exactly what occurred between David and Dawn Viens that night in October 2009 remain unclear.

Viens told police that he and his wife had eaten at a California Pizza Kitchen before he did some work at the restaurant and then went out with friends. When he arrived back home, he said, the couple began to fight.

In one interview Viens said that he and his wife had argued after he accused her of stealing money from their restaurant.

In a later interview, he said that the couple had taken cocaine, and in yet another interview he said she was bothering him while he was trying to sleep.

Viens told police that he had previously taped her up to prevent her from “driving around wasted, whacked out on coke and drinking.”

“For some reason I just got violent,” Veins said.

ABCnews

A Tanzania Court of Appeal September 17, said the High Court had the jurisdiction to determine the murder case facing an actress, LULU (Elizabeth Michael), charged with killing a film star, Steven Kanumba, regardless of her age.

A panel of three Court of Appeal judges who were handling the appeal that had sought to bar the High Court from determining the age of Ms Michael, also known as Lulu, wondered why the two parties in the case engaged in a legal battle over the age of the respondent, who would be charged by the High Court, anyway.

Judges January Msofe, Benard Luanda and Edward Rutakangwa said the age of the accused whether 18 years old or below did not prevent her from being charged with murder.

Lulu is charged at the Kisutu Resident Magistrate’s Court with killing a local movie star on April 7 this year in Sinza, Dar es Salaam.

In June this year, the prosecution filed an application to the Court of Appeal seeking the court to review proceedings and the ruling by High Court judge Fauz Twaibu who had decided to continue determine Lulu’s age.

He ordered the two parties to present evidence that would enable him to rule whether Lulu was underage or not.

Judge Twaib had made a ruling after an application by Lulu’s counsel Peter Kibatara, who wanted the court to determine the accused’s age.

According to Mr Kibatara, his client has not attained 18 years and so she is too young to be charged with murder in ordinary courts.

He, therefore, wants the case to be transferred to the Juvenile Court, which has the jurisdiction to deal with cases like hers and in consideration of section 4(2) of the Child Act, 2009.

However, the Court of Appeal judges yesterday, wondered why the two parties battled over the age of the accused because finally she would be charged at the High Court, which had the jurisdiction to hear her murder case.

“Whether a child commits murder or not, the case will be heard by the High Court and not the Juvenile Court because the latter has no jurisdiction to hear murder cases,” the panel of judges said.

In his ruling judge Twaibu said that, considering the seriousness of the charge facing the applicant and the urgency of determining whether or not the applicant was entitled to the benefits of the law of the Child Act, 2009 and in the interest of justice, the court invoking its supervisory powers under section 44 of the Magistrate’s Court Act shall proceed to determine the correct age of the applicant in terms of section 113 of the Law of the Child Act, 2009. Section 113(1).

says: “Where a person, whether charged with an offence or not, is brought before any court otherwise than for the purpose of giving evidence, and it appears to the court that he is a child, the court shall make due inquiry as to the age of that person.”

Submitting, senior state attorney Faraja Nchimbi said the High Court erred in law for deciding to determine Lulu’s age while knowing that the application by the defence counsel was wrongly filed.

According to Ms Nchimbi, the High Court was supposed to strike out the application, instead, it ordered the parties to produce evidence concerning Lulu’s age.

After passing through submissions from both parties, the Court of Appeal said that, it would give the ruling on notes.

Kanumba died after he fell down in his bedroom on April 7, 2012. He was taken unconscious to Muhimbili National Referral Hospital where it was confirmed he was dead.

His funeral at the Kinondoni cemetery was attended by about 30,000 people including the First Lady, Ms Salma Kikwete, the Vice President, Dr Mohamed Gharib Bilal, and the then minister for Information, Youth, Culture and Sports, Dr Emmanuel Nchimbi.

Citizen

Former heavyweight world champion Mike Tyson says he wants to “dance and sing” in musicals as his next challenge, after leaving the ring and cleaning up his troubled life.

“I want to dance and sing. I want to do some dancing and singing musicals,” Tyson told reporters during a visit to Hong Kong when asked what he wanted to do with his life next.

The 48-year-old Hall of Fame boxer who served time in jail for rape and infamously bit off part of Evander Holyfield’s ear during a fight in 1997, said he now just wanted to “hang out and entertain”.

“I don’t have the desire to be that guy any more,” he said of his previous life as the self-styled “baddest man on the planet” who won 44 of his 58 fights by knockout.

“I was always the bad guy that wanted to be a good guy, but I didn’t know how to be a good guy. I was always so concentrating on being bad.”

Tyson is in Hong Kong to address the CLSA Investors’ Forum about how he overcame his troubled upbringing, the end of his brilliant but turbulent sporting career and his addiction to drugs and alcohol, to become a better man.

He admitted he didn’t have much to offer the high-powered international business audience on the European debt crisis or the direction of Asian markets.

The Brooklyn native, who squandered millions of dollars on drink and drugs, said the business of boxing was, for him, not about the money.

“I didn’t care about my business. I only cared about my glory,” he said.

“You can’t buy that … (I was) the best fighter in the world. Nobody could beat me with money in my prime, you had to be a better fighter and there wasn’t any.”

But he said he had learned a thing or two about business over the years.

“You learn to always trust your decision-making skills, you learn to always have your own fiduciary lawyers with you, and you also learn to always trust your partners, which is my wife,” he said.

Tyson, who has a tattoo of Chairman Mao on his right arm, said he was thrilled to visit Bruce Lee’s home town and paid tribute to the late legend of kung fu cinema.

“Bruce Lee’s concepts and philosophy is totally off the hook. Bruce Lee’s amazing,” he said.

“Bruce Lee was a street fighter, he’s got to fight to the death… I’m not going to fight Bruce Lee.”

Tyson is no stranger to the stage, having appeared in films and television shows. Last year he performed with his wife, Lakiha Spicer, in Argentinian dance show Bailando.

Earlier this year he made his Broadway debut with his one-man show “Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth”, directed by Spike Lee.

“I’m just so happy to become this guy, to be a responsible adult. For a guy like me this is very courageous,” he said.

AFP