Larkland Morley’s Professional Blog

I am fairly sure that a lot of people will feel stuck about where there are in life. This can be especially true around career and economics. Here are some tips I came up with that could help you get unstuck fairly quickly.

1. Target – What are your specific Goals in life – This is a critical piece of moving forward, you need to know where you want to go. This is the most important of all tips as you need to have this clarified before you really achieve something. Ideally, your goals should be multi-dimensional. This means you should cover family, spiritual, career and any other separately. A lot of experts call this exercise your mission statement.

2. Current State – Where are you relative to your goals? Are you where you want to be or far off from there? Make a note of your current state of affair. Everything is important as you will need to tackle the bad ones directly in your plan. a fancy term for this is gap analysis. What are you passionate about career wise? Are you actually doing that now? A lot of times this is one of the biggest issues. You are not following your passion so you get miserable about life. Take responsibility for your current state of affair. Living in a poor country or location is not a good excuse.

3. Plan – Now that you have an idea of where you want to go and where you are. You need to develop a plan to move forward and close the gap. This plan should be around principles to start with. People can cheat or sell drugs to make lots of money but then deep down you are destroying your spiritual side and fighting the forces of the universe. This plan could mean more education, better time management or working harder in whatever way that you can. Bear in mind that plans can change but your focus should be on achieving your goals. A short cut way is to find someone that you could model after. If you could speak to then even better. Lots of successful people write books about their lives, find one that matches your goal area and learn from them.

4. Take Action – When all is said and done, all of the above can be easy to do with a little effort but the next step is to take action. With your plan in place, take the first step for each area. Try as much as you can on your own but don’t be ashamed to ask for help or seek help to move forward. I don’t mean help in terms of begging for money but help in terms of advice and connections to take the right steps.

5.  Time Management – Following up to taking action, you need to have good time management in place. This means you should be spending time on the things you want to do. For example, if you are not qualified for a job, you should be either getting trained, get mentoring or at least reading a book on the topic. The Internet has lots of information on most if not all topics. Use whatever means available to move forward. You can even volunteer to learn a skill (meaning work without pay). Work hard to cut out idle and unproductive time. Time out to relax is good too, so I don’t mean to be tense and always working.

6. Networking – While you should work hard to achieve your goals in life, you will need help or connections. You should always put networking as one of your planned activities in life. It helps you stay positive in your field and it can open doors to move forward. However, don’t see networking as a one way street, help others as well. In fact its in helping others that you stand to succeed long term actually. Its actually recommended to have a primary mentor as well.

7. Assessment/Monitor – We have discussed a lot of things in this post but in the end, to keep on track you need to monitor yourself on the progress against plan. Do this once a week as well as monthly. Where did you go off track? where did you succeed? This approach will help you to make the relevant adjustments as you move along. Don’t be afraid of failure along the way as this is a means to learn and grow. There is a stigma against failure but you will notice that lots of known successful people actually had failure in life along way simply because they take action.

If you follow this structured approach properly, you are guaranteed to succeed in life. One book that impresses me to address most of the above issues, is that one by Steven Covey called – 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Notice, he is using the term effective versus successful as it means you may not seem successful by other persons standard but you are based on your own goals. Check out the book link below on Amazon.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

There are slums in pretty much every country and some countries are mostly slums, so how could we take a step to really solve this problem. I will use countries such as Jamaica and in some cases the US as talking points in my proposals.

The best way to eliminate slums is to pay those in the slums to change behavior. What does this mean really? It means you need to have some kind of welfare program in place. In fact lots of countries have programs around this theme. A good example is Brazil and they have seen lots of progress with that approach.

Here are the key elements to focus on.

1. Make sure that the children get an education, so you break the cycle of poverty in the first place. This means to provide whatever means possible to make sure the kids can attend school at all times.

2. Have a mass education program in these areas. This education would cover personal development issues as well as basic skills. You at least want people to have a good high school education and a useful skill. They can continue to university or more advanced skills once that is done.

3. Renew the housing facilities within the slum. This could come in two parts. One is to train people to have the necessary building skills and the second its the ability to get them to implement in their communities. Basically, Government could provide the design, materials and supervision but the people themselves will build. Government in this case could mean private groups contributing to some central project.

4. Develop alternative technologies to aid slum development. This covers from building techniques to energy generation. This could reduce the cost to build as well as reduce the cost to maintain for example with power generation.

To reduce slums all over, we need to change the mentality of people to think of abundance as oppose to scarcity(Meaning we can all prosper). Here is the principle, a person with a good skill, job or business has more buying power and has less chance of becoming a criminal or dependent on society. In that case if you as a business person or professional contribute to such effort, it will benefit you in the long run significantly.

My view is that a good start is to have research initiatives on how to practically solve slum issues. This would cover from physical development issues to human psychology concerns. It’s also a great opportunity for co-creation as well.

P.S. There is one very brave initiative to solve the problem of housing for the poor called the $300 House Challenge, this is the right way to think for long term solutions.

While I have not read this book fully, the description has some good strategies to investigate.

Approaches to Urban Slums: A Multimedia Sourcebook on Adaptive and Proactive Strategies (Wbi Learning Resources Series)

The MBA has been around for about a hundred years now and does have its value. The issue that many experience persons seem to wrestle with in terms of getting an MBA is the whole issue of what will I really learn and the consequent cost to do so. Make no mistake that if you want to work for some of the most prestigious consulting organizations, you would need not just an MBA but it needs to be from the top schools in the world. Most of these schools cost at least US$50000/year to study. It can pay off if you have the resources to do this as the starting salary in most of these firms are running at $100K/year and up plus generous bonuses.

On the other hand, you can get an Accredited MBA fairly cheap nowadays. There is a school that offers an MBA online for about $4000.00 and they are accredited. In this case it could help you get promoted in most companies to a management position. There are several schools that offer in this price range and the quality is reasonable.

Now, lets assume you really don’t want to take an MBA but either want some comparable certification or you just want the knowledge to help with running a better business. I will outline my opinion on two paths to explore.

Option #1 – Gaining a credential that is comparable to the MBA.

This again could approached from different angles but we will keep it simple at this point.  The first option is to look into the Certified MBA exam, this exam does require you to have an MBA but to solve that problem there is an online school that offers kind of MBA equivalent diploma even cheaper than the $4000 degree I mentioned earlier. The name of the school is AMBAIU. There maybe other ways to sit the exam but that seem to be the easiest way for now.

The other paths along this line is to look at UK professional Qualifications in Management from bodies such as the Institute of Leadership and Management and many others.

Option # 2 – MBA level knowledge to improve business skills

This option is a lot of fun and it comes down to the good practice of reading. There are several books that tries to summarize what is covered in an MBA program, one such book is “The 30 Day MBA“. On top of that, there are several books out in the market place that covers different aspects of the MBA program and in fact by authors who have real world experiences running their own businesses. The other thing you can do is to visit the website of the top MBA schools, look at their course outline and use that as a guide for your self study.

Another approach you can take is to check out short courses and seminars offered by the SBA and other organization that seek to promote business activities.

To test yourself with the self-study route, you could try and write a comprehensive business plan from scratch with all the relevant sections needed to run a viable business.

In summary, we have seen that you can get your own personal alternative MBA by paying attention to what is being offered by the top schools and seek to get that through reading or certification programs. The bottom line in all of this is, get the results as that is what really counts in the end with an MBA.

Useful Resources

1. General Business Education Materials – UK

2. Top US MBA Schools

3. The Personal MBA Reading

4.  The Quick MBA

Added Note: One MBA program I forgot to mention that is fairly flexible and has very good respect in the market place is the EBS distance MBA. Check out EBS MBA here. Its not the cheapest online accredited degree but its very cheap for the respectability that it has.

A lot of people are unfortunately incline to think with scarcity mentality. This means they don’t believe everyone can win but focus on either trying to win everything or feeling helpless that there is nothing out there for them. I really like Stephen Covey’s approach to this topic, so I would share a few videos I found on this topic.

Think about it, God does offer abundance; why do we think that being better than someone is the main aim in life? The key to life is to have good character in that case we are more equal than it may look.

Wow!! 5 years ago this question would seem far fetch and remote.  For about a couple years we had the Celio Redfly which gives you a Netbook type device to control your phone. This only worked with some Microsoft and Blackberry phones but it had potential and use. The limitation with that approach was that the user interface was primarily the Phone screen and seem to be generally slow. Check out the Redfly in this quick video.

Well, lets take a step into 2011 and here we have the Motorola Atrix.  This is basically a phone that was designed with the intention to function as computer since it has 2 GHz processor and lots of memory and storage (min 16 GB). The key with this device is that it can function as Desktop, Entertainment Center as well as a Laptop with full functionality using Firefox web browser with webtops.

Some important highlights of this approach are that you can run Android applications on a larger screen, you can use a full keyboard and mouse with the phone, applications such as Google docs can work really well in the computer mode either laptop or desktop.

This phone will come with 4G LTE wireless up front and should be out by March 2011. Unfortunately , it’s only available on ATT network for now.  You should be able to buy one open but much more expensive going that route. Here are some great demos of how this works.

Second video with another perspective.

I really like it as I always believe in the concept of modular computing especially coupled with the cloud. I am sure you are very excited to check one out.

It just came to me that some times we can misplace self-confidence as in our potential versus confidence in our applied knowledge of a specific field. To give an extreme example, an Engineer can feel very good about him or her being a very good Medical Doctor. That is fine actually as you can do something that you feel motivated about once you get the training. However, for that Engineer to feel confident about actually being a Doctor, they would need the training and experience to get to that point.

What I am trying to say is that career confidence means you have prepared yourself with the competency required of this field that you are into. The first step is to always find out what is required to get that confidence then accomplish through various means such as school, work and whatever ways available. Outside of that people are being arrogant if they don’t take the time to stock up on the latest and most relevant knowledge in the field.

In closing, I think one of the best means to acquire knowledge is through books. Yes, you can read a lot of books and know nothing but if you chart a course to where you want to go and read the relevant books to fill the gap, the experience would be amazing.

Well, work on building your confidence through hard work and smart learning.

This is something I think will exciting for people who are thinking of authoring a book. Amazon.com as literally made the process free. They have a site called Create Space where you can take your content and polish into a real book to print on demand or a kindle download.

Think about the potential of this. You could do this to generate income or just to build your credibility in whatever field you want to pursue. Here are some tips I would share on how you can do this.

1. Blogging – If you don’t have content on hand, then go sites like wordpress.com, blogger.com, weebly.com or pbwiki.com and create a free blog. Then you would blog on different aspects of your topic say once a week or even more frequent. Once you have a decent amount of content, you can dump this into a document and edit to ensure proper flow and you are ready to go.

2. Outsourcing – This can be done in two basic ways. A. you could hire a ghostwriter to generate the entire book at a fixed cost. Of course you would provide some guidance on how to write and all those things. B. You can buy a set of articles from an article writer for about $5 each or less. Lets say you buy about 20 or more articles, you take those and format in a book fashion and again have a nice e-book to sell.

3. Promotion – Generally, the book is on Amazon.com, people will find it by search and if it comes related to other books. You also have the option to take the listing on amazon.com and promote directly on a website or send out on Facebook etc. Lots of possibilities there.

In any case, this is a really good facility to look at if you want to create books and its an innovative approach to empower people.

Wanted to share a little on my experience with a tablet computer. I got my android Ipad lookalike tablet some time in September this year. I want to give some feedback on how I view it and how it could be improved over time.

1. Since this is not from a big name company but some Chinese copycat company, the quality is not that good although it looks good and with extra care you could manage with it.

2. It lacks secondary wireless capability. I am really surprise it does not have bluetooth as a standard feature. In any case, basic 3G built in would be useful. They could at least make the wifi configurable so you could setup an adhoc connection with your phone or computer. Most of the good applications such as email and Internet depends on having a connection.

3. I find it difficult to use for note taking although with practice you could get to be good at it. It could be useful to have a dictation machine built in to tape a session directly.

4. Its very useful for reading but still I have a lot of PDF and even the adobe reader is not that flexible on there. It does not even allow you to jump to the last page read. You can browse the Internet as well but only useful when you are away from your laptop.

5. Video play back is very good, I would see the use of this to watch a movie in bed or at park. This is one good potential for tablets I think with both video conferencing and video playback.

6. Since the version of Android was not officially released for tablets, there is still a lot of bugs to work out especially with calibration but overall its still very good for a first cut.

Overall, the tablet is usable but until we find the right applications to make it stand out, it’s more of a tool for information consumption on the go. I strongly believe in modular computers which means it could be a real system on the desk and you take the screen along for mobility. I think the Ipad has that with its docking option.

In any case, there are some real Android tablets coming out before the end of the year, so watch out for the improvements.

The last post even though I think very good was a little too general from what I had in mind to write, so let me try to be a little more specific in this one.

The general mid-career professional could be in different fields but mostly find themselves in technical areas. This could be accountant, engineer, nurse or whatever similar titles. At this point you are thinking of whether you should move into corporate management or become the main technical guru in the company.

In each company there are limits in terms of either management or very senior technical positions. While you can have tons of top performers they cannot all become VPs or Architects, so you have to bear that in mind. There is always an option to move on to other companies with openings.

Now what if you feel stuck? Before you start focusing on getting your resume out there, go back again to that whole thing about goals. Get that clarified first as you may just end up in a circle between jobs.

What options do you have to move forward? discuss this with your manager in terms of what the company has to offer relative to your goals. Sometimes people get afraid to discuss with their managers as they feel that if the goal is too far off what they have it may back fire on them. Another option is to seek out a mentor and get some ideas from them.

Look into joining professional bodies in your field. This gives you opportunities to network as well as they have information on options in your field. Attend the local meetings and participate in whatever way you can.

Based on the option you selected going forward which could be very technical or management, you should look at some formal training or certification to build your case. For example in Management an MBA would be seen as a serious commitment. If you do not want an MBA then you could look at the Certified Manager or PMP certifications as one means. There are several accredited MBA programs below $10,000.00 with reasonable quality.

In terms of technical growth, it all depends on your current background. If you already have a Masters, you may just need to start looking at ways to get more responsible experience on projects. Create your own project such as writing white papers or try to publish in technical journals. These will give you a better feel and confidence to step up to the challenges out there.

If you don’t have a masters, you could look at taking one locally or by distance learning. As a mid career professional this gives you an advantage as you can pick the courses that will really serve you long term. Again, Certifications are all over the place so pick the most respected one in your field as well.

What I have found is that ability is not the issue in most cases. The biggest issue for people is to have that goal to focus on then to have confidence in achieving it. I really think a good mentor is one take away from this post that will help you get some sanity in your path forward in your career.

Hope you like it. Please share.