MY UBC CHRONICLES Finding My Mojo in the Chaos! I happen to be a people person and very often than not I tend to hit it on with strangers irrespective of station in life, ethnicity, gender or race be they gardeners, mutiplex parking attendants (mbu Ugandas equivalent of parking meters lol). Its a gift I give thanks to God for blessing me with. I never use GPS, directories and stuff like that to find my way around. I always ask people. This can be very disorganizing for the extrovert that I am, but its gotten me places and earned me immeasurable contacts and flow of incredible amounts of info on intrigue and its auxiliary schemes. Its a gift I deployed at the outset at the UBC! and boy or girl, so helpful was the tool that I invariably had access yiveni (to use Mirundis Ugandlish) to the secret briefs- so called dossiers and the conduits to the highest office (for instance the failure of the live coverage of the Presidents swearing in in 2006 and the Tabaro, Bukenya, Katuramu matrix dossier were delivered by Brig. Proscovia Nalweyiso,!) Its against this background that I set out to interact with staff we were inheriting from radio uganda and UTV and discovered invaluable detail you can never by simply reading manuals, reports etc. Apparently the stafff were highly trained but so demotivated by their take home and lack of growth (vertically and horizontally) . Some staff were taking home as little as 66,000 UGX (yes, emitwalo mukaga mukakaga!). Such persons were entrusted with custodianship of vital installations I cant disclose herein. Many staff had never been motivated through promotions (you know how the civil service frustrates in this regard). Personnel had retained ranks they were inducted at for ages. No appreciation or what have you. Folks, no one, no one I repeat, should ever confuse you to do with management by equating it to rocket science or nanotechnology. Management, simply entails delivering thru-puts and out-puts from other people. If you can select, motivate and retain a winning team then youre a great manager. You dont have to go to Harvard and such like business schools to learn this. (I know super managers with no academic qualifications and mismanagers who are ivy leaguers!) . This too, has nothing to do with age! If it were about age, then Uganda ought to rank so high in performance given the mean age of its senior cabinet. My interactions with staff was both formal and informal. I introduced weekly meetings at departmental level where minutes were generated for top management for discussion and in turn I would prepare board memos for consideration at board level. There being no structures, I set to create them - again here consulting widely. These consultations led me upon the Executives at Stanbic (I was negotiating and eventually got their financing) . Invaluable advice I got from Kitili Mbathi and Anne Aliker (then CEO and ED- respectively to whom I will return later) on change management and the UCB -stanbic transition experience! Human capital can be re-oriented through mindset and frame of mind change and produce incredible results from any circumstances (I believe George Mutabazi, and his ilk, the marauding Lwengo honcho would best benefit from this advice- I so believe). My regret, I did this without engaging / retaining services of a change expert, the money simply wasnt available and my engagement with the British High Commission and the British Council to extend us bilateral assistance from the BBC didnt yield much (I will expound on the partnerships I built, the successes, failings and lessons learned) as at that point in time my efforts were being sapped and drained in fighting off intrigue! I introduced salary structures that permitted vertical as well as horizontal promotions. You could grow in salary without necessarily growing in rank within a salary range/bracket. This greatly motivated the junior staff and never seated well with the senior ones as this was going to take away their inalienable right to pilfer resources! Lest I forget, in my formal and informal interaction with the sales and marketing department I came upon shocking information. They were charging as low as 50 K UGX for a 30 second advert at prime time! On paper. The actual was often many times above that (the rates were adhoc depending on the needs of the salesperson handling the transaction) as well as the running time for the advert- under declaration of revenue. I had to act real quick. My strategy, motivate staff we were going to retain after the evaluation process led by Dennis Kalebbo of UMI and raid other media houses for staff. Raid I did, big-time names, Gawaya Tegulle, Joseph Basoga, William Odoch, Irene Birungi, Ken Love, Jane Kasumba, Adriline Nsubuga, Andrew Mwenda (yes Andrew Mujuni Mwenda was a talk show panelist and he berated the President as he was watching with family - the rest is history lol) etc. However, as I raided other media houses, and negotiated financing with stanbic the question of cash flow remained outstanding and critical. To this end, I ate humble pie and approached Mzee Gordon Wavanunno and my friend and ex boss at the Broadcasting Council (where I was Legal Secretary) Elvis Ssekyanzi to mentor me. In these two, I acquired implicit knowledge and was able to partner with them on numerous UBC tasks that will leave you baffled. I mean on the face of it we were supposedly competitors, right? Quite the contrary! The broadcasting sector is complex as Joel Isabirye will testify! Market segmentation is a critical tool for marketing. The advertising agencies were largely controlled by Kenyans who operated cartels. I and Mzee Wavamunno needed to break that jinx, oh! My! Oh! My! Break it, we did ..... how in next episode! Inshallah!!
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 07:00:56 +0000
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