Now that the world cup has come and gone with the fun, passion, excitement, laughs, tears, noise, and fights. Life as in a way returned to normal and several people all over the world have now realized how idle they are (thanks to the world cup for keeping most of us busy for those periods).

Although i am not really a ‘die hard’ football fan, and to be honest i don’t know much about the game. However, i am a kind of person that tries to learn from things around me. The following are life lessons that i think can be learnt for the world cup. I believe these lessons can be applied in other aspects of life.

The lessons are:

1. Because you failed doesn’t make you a failure

Spain won the cup, but they lost their first match to Switzerland. It is important to see failure as an event and learn to move on with life more positive, confident and passionate about future successes. You can fail; every great person in life has failed at one point or the other. The difference is that some people fail and see themselves as failure, while others fail, see it as an event and get back to the lane of success.

2. Success does not happen by chance

Spain won the cup because they deserved to win. Teams like Germany, Netherland, and Uruguay all went far in the tournament becomes they did everything needed to get them the success they wanted. They had a plan, the stuck to it and executed their strategies properly. Nigeria did woefully because the team lacked talent, discipline and focus. They did not prepare well and even though over 100 million Nigerians prayed for them, prayer wasn’t just what they needed.

3.  Humility is a great virtue

I love Messi, not only because he is a fantastic player but because in my opinion he is HUMBLE. Although the current best player in the world did not have a great time as expected by most fans all over world, his ever calm and humble attitude is still worthy of note. Life often take us up and down, but what determines how we cope in such situations is our attitude, humility is such a great attitude to have.

4. The rich also cry (Don’t rest on your laurels)

World cup 2010 was really a surprise for several people, me included. The big teams with high FIFA ratings didn’t do anything magical. Teams like Brazil, Italy (former champions), France, and England did not win the cup; none of them even played the semi-final or final. A good point by Tim Wade is that “You can be the world champion at something 4 years ago, but if you play with fear and trepidation, and rely on deception to get ahead …, you will come undone. It is the power of congruence”.

5. There is power in Visualization

It has been said that if you can go there in your mind, you will get there with your body. Visualization is so powerful that it draws your (desired) reality closer and it eventually manifests. Spain visualized winning the cup; they had won in their mind and really did lift the cup with their hands. I was surprised when i saw the special star on their jersey (indicating their first world cup triumph), i said to myself they really did see it coming.

6. Teamwork

All of us is better than each of us. The fact that a team has individual talents does not guarantee a win, talent is never enough. England despite individual talents couldn’t just deliver, the team cohesion was lacking. In life, it is important to understand that efforts of others are usually required to help us achieve a collective goal. Ability to work in a team will guarantee success more than anything else.

7. Pay attention to critical moments

Certain moments in life are just more important than others. The ability to recognize such moments will go a long way to helping you take best decision. Ghana had a golden chance to win the match that threw them out the tournament, but only if the player realized how critical it was. Playing the ball high was indirectly increasing the risk of losing such a crucial penalty.  Perhaps if they digested the reality that scoring that goal meant winning the game, a different approach would have been taken. The same applies to Kaita of Nigeria who exhibited an unnecessary act of indiscipline in a match that meant a lot the team.

Taking a moment to identify critical moments will help us decide the best way to act in our own interest and that of others.

8. Make sacrifices

Sacrifices are inevitable, and one way or another we make them. However, certain sacrifices are worth the pain and cost when considering the long term goal.  According to Julain Richardson:

Uruguayan Luis Suarez’s goal-saving hand ball was arguably a selfless act and the ultimate of sacrifices in the World Cup. The player knew what was at stake (pay attention to critical moments), assessed the situation and made a decision to commit a violation that would give up a penalty shot, get him kicked out of the game and get him suspended for the semi-finals. But it paid off after Gyan missed the ensuing penalty — a worthy sacrifice, in Uruguay’s book, for a cardless Suarez and a possible 0-1 defeat.

9. Take the shot

In life, there is usually never a perfect time. The ideal world does not exist, so waiting for the right/perfect time might be dangerous. Act when you can, take the shot whenever you can!

African teams especially Nigeria, are so poor at scoring goals. They never shoot at goal until it’s almost an empty net, and even when faced with an empty net, what happens? Forlan scored one of the best goals in the tournament; a typical striker wouldn’t have taken that shot. Learning to act proactively can be hard, but with little discipline it can be life changing.

I once heard someone say life is ball and rolls around, and you better be ready to kick when it stops before you. Eradicate your fears and doubts; take a step today…tomorrow might just be late.

10. Be consistent

Consistency is everything. The ability to be consistent at whatever you do is a guarantee for continuous success. Teams like Germany, Spain and Netherlands remained consistent in their game play and technique throughout the tournament. Germany for example leveraged their speed and counter attack tactic to win most games. Consistency would give you an identity, the same way some teams are known for a particular game pattern, you would be known for the good attributes you possess. Attributes like hard-work, integrity, diligence, leadership, problem-solving etc

Similar articles you would want to read are:

Julian Richardson – 8 Lessons the World Cup offers to the business

Tim Wade – 5 Life Lessons from the 2010 Fifa World Cup Group Round

Mogama – Life Lessons From World Cup Soccer Even For People Who Hate Soccer

I am currently working with a mentor BA who works as a consultant and has several years of experience. Today, while we went to the field talking and working with some clients. Some issues came up (something related to what i recently read in a post by Laura Brandenburg – How do you capture stakeholder concerns)

The challenge

Most of the companies we work with have a reasonable amount of IT investments, usually in off-the-shelf applications which in most cases do not directly meet their requirements.  We discovered that most times, the customer might only be using less than 20% of the features in the purchased software. And since these applications take a one-size-fit-all approach, they usually require additional customizations which are mostly at an additional cost to the company. Further increasing the total cost of purchase while they still have to do away with huge yearly maintenance fees, all to the benefit of the vendors.

However, since most the these companies do not have BAs, or have BAs who are in a way handicapped(am coming to that), they are forced to work with the vendors to gather their requirements, which is expected to drive the change/modification. From our experience, the vendors always protect their interest like they did at the initial point of sale, when they fool customers to purchase their software with the promise of it doing and meeting all needs.

Additional challenge

Also, because of the peculiarity of the country(Nigeria), we realized that issues such as industry sentiments (every other company buys from that vendor),  and personal sentiments (IT manager/CTO/MD knows someone from the vendor company and expects some sort of compensation or tip or ‘thank you’ package) these companies often purchase software without a proper justification as to whether the software meets all their ‘unique’ requirements and also whether it fits well with their existing systems.

Another challenge i discovered is that even when the software’s are developed in-house usually by senior officers who probably joined the company at an early stage and developed the software without proper requirement gathering, analysis and documentation. As the company grows and processes are changed or new ones introduced, the former great software quickly becomes inefficient. But because the developer of the software is probably now the CTO, or IT Manager, even when a new BA identifies the concern and the associated risks and raises the issue, such are quickly swept under the carpet (see Laura’s post). Other times the BA is even forced to shut up in order to retain his pay check (the sad case of internal BAs).

My concern

As i said, i am new to this profession. But in my humble opinion, i think BA isn’t much just about gathering requirements, and generating use cases and all. But really about helping organizations know what their REAL business requirements are, and then communicating these requirements to the right people who might be using some technology to provide solution to this business issues. I think BA is more about helping a company increase value by improving their processes with efficient solutions that meet their unique needs.

However, in a situation like this where things are pretty complex. How does one present any value proposition, or what is the best approach to liberate these organizations from this problem of greedy vendors, selfish IT Managers, CTO etc which ends up to huge IT investments that do not parallel results but only reduce profit significantly. And lastly, how much freedom does a BA working as a staff in an organization require to play his/her role effectively.

Please kindly share your comments and experiences, whether this is solely a Nigerian problem or it happens in much more developed economies too. I appreciate your comments.

For those who engage in academic research like myself, they will understand the importance of proper citation and referencing. And now that plagiarism has become a serious issue (a crime if you wish) in the the academic community, one can not overemphasize the need to acknowledge other people’s work (intellectual property) by providing accurate reference.

However, while gathering references can be problematic in itself as you have to spend time at the library or spend more time ‘jumping’ from one site to another. The bigger problem you can create for yourself is not managing (actually documenting) the references as you cite them in your work. The agony of searching for the references you used for your work after completion can really be a nightmare.

There are actually smarter ways to manage references, you can use a special software designed to manage references or use the Reference feature built into Microsoft Word (I hope to write another post that explains how that works).

Save yourself a lot of stress by updating your reference list as you use them in the work.

If you have had a bad experience with references, kindly share with others and also provide tips on how you now manage sources for your research work.