There is a new buzzword in town. Everywhere you go, businesswomen and top exe-cutives are complaining about their inability to maintain a quality work-life balance.
With the world economy still struggling, many executives, and indeed employees at all rungs, have felt the need to demonstrate their commitment to the company. They often do so at the expense of other priorities in their lives, such as family time and the things they do for fun.
Reports show that women, especially mothers and wives, feel part-icularly hard done by. They feel that their office hours demand a lot from them, and because of this, they are unable to meet the demands of their husbands and children.
It does not help that men – so goes the narrative – are reluctant to do their bit at home. They just sit on the couch and watch sport on television, forgetting that their partners have had a hectic day of their own running businesses.
While I have some sympathy for women who have to navigate this struggle, it really feels to me like the novelty of this problem is a tad exaggerated.
Everyone who works or runs a business necessarily needs to sacrifice something if they are to be successful. If it is a career or a business, then hobbies or time with family might have to suffer.
That is life. It is has been like that for a long time.
If in doubt, maybe these women should ask their domestic workers how they do it. In fact, they could ask their grandmothers, or even their own mothers. They could ask rural women or others on the factory floor how they get it right.
Just because business schools have not dedicated time and scholarships to how the night shift office cleaners, the domestic workers and the farmhands are able to manage working long hours and raising children – often for less money than their bosses spend on a pair of Jimmy Choos – does not mean they do not struggle with balancing work and life.
What some of these women forget while they are networking at business conferences is that there is another woman in their homes. And that this other woman is ensuring that the house is clean and that the children are bathed and fed.
If they were really serious about this work-life balance, they would be paying their domestic worker more because she obviously cannot be helping her own children with their homework when she is busy with the boss’s brats.
If someone is walking your dog, running your household and supervising your children’s feeding habits, chances are that their own children and household are being neglected.
Like the CEO, the poor domestic worker must also go home and be a mother to her children and a partner to her significant other. They too struggle, because invariably they have less of a support system than their bosses.
To use the catchphrase: their work-life balance is out of balance. Yet they carry on instead of making a big song and dance about it. They do not throw tantrums, because despite their low station in life, they understand implicitly that a working life requires certain sacrifices.
It is not because their own husbands and children deserve less love than those of their bosses.
I am sure that the idea of carrying a child on one’s back while getting on with the business of living did not come from a seminar on how to handle the work-life balance. Someone just threw a baby on her back, found something to keep the child from falling off, picked up a hoe and went to work tilling the fields. The trend caught on and has shown itself to be highly effective, even though it has yet to feature in business schools’ research.
Corporate and businesswomen who complain about a poor work-life balance must just snap out of it. Life is tough and it does not get any better as you climb the ladder.
It has nothing to do with being a woman. Instead of looking for symp-athy, they should try to be creative about using their time effectively.
We all have 24 hours in a day and unless you plan better, it does not matter whether you are a man or a woman, the CEO or the tea lady, you will keep ending up at the wrong end of the work-life balance.
So here is a tip for all those women stressing about how to find the right work-life balance. Pretend that you are an avant-garde employer. Take the employee you have forgotten is just as much a woman as you are out for a drink and ask her how she manages.
Who knows, the outing may just make you avant-garde instead of you faking it.

Balancing business and pleasure

Lord Malloch-Brown has been described as a rare statesman and a public intellectual. He is a man with a passion for Africa and is the former United Nations Deputy Secretary General and World Bank vice chairman, who has also held the office of Minister of State for Africa, Asia and was the British Prime Minister in Gordon Brown’s cabinet.
A former journalist for The Economist, Lord Malloch-Brown’s astute observations concerning international relations, macro-economics and the role of emerging markets were the platform for his keynote address at the Hasso Plattner Ventures Capital Africa Conference 2012, in Stellenbosch, near Cape Town, a conference aimed at matching investment opportunities in Africa with venture capital.
When asked whether the global economy is heading south, Lord Malloch-Brown’s answer painted a realistic picture, with hope for emerging economies.
“Its going to be a year of troubled growth, emerging markets will continue to grow but less than they did last year, with advanced economies growing at 1.5%. The other understanding of the word ‘south’ is that the engine of the global economy is moving inextricably southwards. You see it in the growing share of GDP that emerging economies represent.”
Chinese growth figures in 1990 comprised 2% of global GDP; now it comprises 8% of global GDP, making it the largest economy in the world. In many ways the Chinese economy is the standard bearer for emerging economies.
For emerging economies, according to Lord Malloch-Brown, the future looks bright, especially in the medium to long-term, with a strong trend towards high rates of urbanization, growth in middle-class consumer spending and increased mechanization of agriculture.
But against this buoyant backdrop lies the reality that internally, social instability will remain a problem, with increased inequality and political unrest.
“You will see potential corruption around the controlling of resources, commercial land and also mineral and energy resources. Scarcity of resources will also play a big role, especially around water. These are some of the real challenges that emerging economies will need to face and address head on.”
With investors looking for increased opportunity in emerging markets, the question is, where is the smart money heading?
“Smart money is all over the place at the moment; assets in Asia are overpriced, in Europe prices are overvalued, coupled with economic instability in the Eurozone. Latin America is a strangely overlooked market, and then you have Africa which is a hugely attractive market. But the difficulty in Africa lies in acquisitions. You really need to buy or build a business that is Pan African. With the exception of South Africa and Nigeria, most African markets are not big enough to sustain a major foreign investment.”
Investing in Africa according to Lord Malloch-Brown is all about finding a sound business model that can work across the continent.
So far, investor interest in African assets has leant towards the financial services sector, telecoms and more recently, retail.  When it comes to investing in Africa, the devil is in the detail says Lord Malloch-Brown.
“When investing in Africa you need to ask yourself whether the asset is a well-valued, well-run business in its own market, and whether you can see the business rolling out into the continent more widely. These are the critical points to investing in emerging economies, especially in Africa.”
According to Lord Malloch-Brown, it’s all about operating and opening up capital to bigger African markets.
Lord Malloch-Brown’s career at the helm of some of the world’s leading international organizations, has given him a birds-eye view of development, matched with an  understanding of the challenges of grass roots implementation. He also believes fostering entrepreneurship in Africa is the only way to build the continent.
“I’m a big enthusiast of the continent; I chair a rice-growing and producing business in Ghana called GADCO which has very quickly positioned itself as the major rice producer in Ghana. The business follows a very clear triple bottom line. We make money, we create jobs and aim to be sustainable.”
Africa, according to Malloch-Brown, is an extraordinary growth story. In his current role as chairman of FTI Consulting, an international investment consultancy, Malloch-Brown aims to help channel private equity funds into the continent’s growth industries.
“Fostering entrepreneurship in Africa is not just about inculcating a culture of ‘win’,” states Lord Malloch-Brown. “It’s also important to note cultural differences that play a role in people’s ability and agility to pick up the skill of enterprise and risk taking.”
The prominence of the public sector as a major employer on the continent has had a dampening effect on the spark of entrepreneurship, but what has been an outstanding source of hope for the future of African entrepreneurs, is the quality and level of business school education found on the continent.
“What South Africa has in way of nurturing entrepreneurship are business schools and tertiary institutions that teach students to become enterprising—part entrepreneur, part social activists. That’s the beauty of entrepreneurs in Africa, you can’t be one without having a social conscience, and that’s where the real change for the continent lies.”
On whether one should be investing in Africa, Lord Malloch-Brown’s answer was a resounding yes.
“The short-term choice is financial services and communications, with the massive opportunity of the unbanked. In the medium-term there are going to be two revolutions across the continent, one in agricultural productivity and the other in increased urbanization. These two, will create astonishing medium-term opportunities.”
With strong investment returns, Africa continues to be a continent with immense potential and the smart money in the world appears to be heading south.

Tag: World Economy

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Balancing business and pleasure

Is The World Economy Heading South?