Good People, can anyone explain why an “ordinary gas” leak is making European leaders unsettled? I mean in Nigeria, that happens all the time and the press does not even report it. In other words, it is not news!

In Sweden, the Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist was speaking in big grammar as though something big had happened. Indeed, it is a big deal when you understand that civilization is built on energy. If you lose energy security, you lose your future.

The European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was blunt: “Any deliberate disruption of active European energy infrastructure is unacceptable and will lead to the strongest possible response.” That is how critical energy is. And they are mobilizing everything to make sure it does not repeat again.

Fellow Nigerians, everyone will know when Nigeria will move to the next level. And that will happen when we have a secure energy future. The urgency to get there is something we must look at in the current election season. Our office in Owerri uses the national grid as the second backup! In Sweden, the governor of the state would have called press conferences as though the world is failing. Respect good #leadership.

The European Union is “deeply concerned” about damage to the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines that has resulted in leaks in the international waters of the Baltic Sea, calling it a “deliberate act.”

“All available information indicates those leaks are the result of a deliberate act,” the bloc’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said Wednesday, while promising to increase energy security efforts.

The bloc “will support any investigation aimed at getting full clarity on what happened and why and will take further steps to increase our resilience in energy security,” he said.

(This leak is assumed to be a sabotage)

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Comment: This isn’t just a gas leak, it’s a suspected act of sabotage. It’s worth all the big Grammar and calls for investigation and action.

We all know what’s going on in Europe and everyone is wary. If this was indeed a deliberate act from an hostile country, why won’t they panic and work towards ensuring it doesn’t happen again ?

If Russia can silently blow up an undersea pipeline under Sweden’s nose, it can definitely do the same to Norway’s gas pipeline.

My Response: I pity the small Russia for blowing its own pipelines just as it is bombing nuclear power plant it controls. If sabotage is the standard, the whole force of Nigeria military would be in the creeks. More than 90% of leaks are due to “sabotages”. So, why are we not mad as the Europeans?

Companies exist to fix frictions in markets. To do that, they must mobilize factors of production to create products and services. When you examine the whole constellation of that translation of organizing, combining and recombining those factors to make products, you see three things: people, processes and tools. The People are the heart of every firm. They are the central nervous system of any operating entity, making it possible for the neurons and synapses of markets to operate effectively. The wealth of firms is in the People of the firms.

Tomorrow, one of the finest minds in this industry of discovering, nurturing, and uplifting the human capital to execute business missions will be at Tekedia Mini-MBA. Ijeoma Anunibe, PHRi, SHRM-SCP, ACIPM is the Head of People at Shuttlers, an innovative transportation startup.

IJ will teach on  “Building Agile Workforce in Companies”. It would be an academic excursion from an industry leader with certifications in the critical domains of human resources management and administration.

Tekedia Institute >> the best teaches here.

It is just about time: “Calendly, a scheduling automation platform that eliminates the hassle of back-and-forth emails for finding the perfect time, has recently acquired Prelude, a technology company that offers a better hiring process.” There is a reason for that: Calendly is on the path to IPO and needs to ramp up revenue from other verticals besides scheduling. Founded by Nigeria-born Tope Awotona, Calendly is the world’s largest scheduling ecosystem with a market cap of at least $3 billion. 

Speaking on the company’s latest acquisition which happens to be the first acquisition ever, CEO of calendly Tope Awotona said “As the market leader in scheduling automation, Calendly already sees millions of interviews and recruiting-related meetings scheduled via Calendly every month. Together, Calendly and Prelude will enable organizations of all sizes to streamline the coordination of every interview scenario.

“More comprehensive recruiting scheduling is just one piece of the puzzle that Calendly solves. We’ll commonly see a few individuals in an organization begin to use Calendly for specific and sometimes more complex use cases (such as shortening time to hire), then much more usage of the product begins to spread throughout the organization as various teams recognize the value of automated scheduling.

“Organizations that implement Calendly throughout multiple departments within the organization — e.g., sales, customer success, marketing, and recruiting — realize the greatest value, since they can scale quicker by benefitting from a single scheduling platform with the ability to standardize it across teams,”

Watch out – there is a major disintermediation here: why use Calendly to schedule a meeting for Indeed, Zoom, etc when those things can happen in Calendly? By next year, I expect Calendly to add a fintech solution. Why? “Fintechnolization”  which I posited that “every digital platform must have a maturity state of offering a fintech solution”. Yes, it is a prediction and it will happen. Congrats to Tope.

Looking at Chinese digital platforms (Tencent, Alibaba) and US counterparts (Google, Facebook), my conclusion is this: every platform will become a fintech company at the end. So, I do want to see how Tekedia would become an investment club, a lending ecosystem, etc, at the lowest marginal cost, to members and readers in the ecosystem.  This construct tracks the recent trajectories of Facebook and Google. Alibaba and Tencent have validated my thesis as I have studied their evolutions and revolutions in the markets.