Murder in the Boardroom: A CEO's Quest to Look the Part!

I witnessed murder, or, let me be more accurate, a near murder, in the boardroom. And the victim, or near victim, was me!

The strange drama began when I started a new lifestyle and wellness business and had the creative imagination to call the Company "Six Pack & Slimfit (Lifestyle) Ltd." The brand, as you have already figured out, has a compelling promise for our male clients and a separate guarantee for the women.

The name of our Company started making waves even during the business name registration process at the Corporate Affairs Commission. Everyone who saw it liked it … even with a chuckle. "Six Pack & Slimfit Ltd."

After the euphoria of creating a winning business name and brand promise, the realities began to settle as the morning dew on cocoyam leaves. As the African proverb goes, "The way the bitter kola sounds when you bite it isn't the same way it tastes when you do the chewing." That was exactly where the trouble began, especially for me, the CEO.

You couldn't be the CEO of a "Six Pack" company and still retain the beer belly persona. No, it's not done! As most men have discovered, six packs and beer belly don't share the same bed. One gives. One has to sleep on the floor.

You have to look the part, don't you?

Unfortunately, a beer belly isn't something you could hide any more than you could hide the source of a nasty fart in the airplane cabin. I have told you this for the umpteenth time: Every human being in the airplane has the inbuilt talent to spot the owner of the offending anus! Just as bees mysteriously find their way back to their hive, people are innately able to trace the wind direction and calculate the source and trajectory of an offending fart inside an airplane or any enclosed space. Nobody will tell you but they know you did it!

Again, six packs isn't something you could fake either. Which makes a perfect conundrum. You couldn't hide a beer belly and you can't fake six packs.

Your beer belly, like your personal John the Baptist, goes before you. It gets into the door before the rest of your body. When you want to make it to the top floor, it selfishly shoves itself first into the lift while the elevator door barely misses jamming the rest of your body. And you needn't utter a word to the bewildered but polite passengers in the lift. Your belly already said all that needed to be said in that situation.

You couldn't enter people's offices or homes with your back. You'll appear odd and needing a shrink. So, the belly, as forerunner, goes in first, announcing the late arrival of the rest of your body. And its effect on the people in the room is usually immediate. Human nature is so good at making unspoken conclusions.

Our valued customer, a young twenty-something year old wife and mother of two, after much frustration, flatly told her beer belly husband, "We can't afford to have two pregnant people in this home!" You can imagine her dragging the man to our "solution center" only to confront a beer belly compatriot CEO!

So, I got to work. And that was where the murder nearly happened. I hired a personal trainer. "I want nothing else but six packs!" I charged him.

"Sure," he said. "I'll get you to have those."

Ladies and gentlemen, I cannot begin to narrate what I went through during and after the first session with this muscular trainer. If you came into the gym, you would call the police! He made me do all kinds of weird stomach firming exercises I never knew existed! I screamed. I moaned. My body trembled. And he kept counting, "One ... two ... three ... four ... thirty more to go ...!"

In the middle of the session, I was tempted to think, 'Why am I doing this to myself? Shouldn't I have called this business another name? Something like "Take Life Easy Ltd?"'

After the session, he said, "Now, I am going to give you a stretch." He grabbed my right arm and contorted it in different directions until I groaned, He did the same to my left arm. Then both legs.

I was barely able to get home before the pains began to register! Can you imagine being placed alive in a black body bag and having the top seven WWF fighters punch and jump on you for thirty nonstop minutes? That was how my body felt after that first session.

Days later, it is beginning to feel good. The pains are going. The six pack terraces are forming. And the training continues.

This evolution of our business idea brought home some indelible truth to me and my coworkers: You cannot give what you are not.A business cannot offer what its people are not. We have to first become our business.

Have you wondered why many businesses have a mission statement that is far removed from Realityland? "We make you happy," says a bank. Until you step into their banking hall. Then, you will understand the definition of misery. Or the classical "The Police is Your Friend" touted by the Nigerian Police a few years ago. If you took that literally, you'd think you'd stroll into the nearest Police Station if you needed a friend. Yet, in Nigeria, everyone knows that The Police is anything but "friend!" Everyone avoids the Police the way butter dreads a heated saucepan.

Ultimately, the journey of a business is the journey of the CEO, the managers, employees, the Board, and other stakeholders of the organization. And a business succeeds when it persuades the customers to join the journey because they want to do so. In fact, the business of business is to make the journey of their journey the journey of the customer.

The more we become the business, the more the business fulfills its mission.

I find business intriguing. First you create a vision, a picture in the mind. Electrical impulses in the brain! Next you practice until you translate these electrical impulses into products, services, systems, people, operations, delighted customers, employment benefits for workers and their families and other good things of this world.

The most important activity of business may not be marketing, budgeting, operations planning, or the sort. It turns out that the most important responsibility of an organization is to become the business. Marketing, training, operations and everything else must revolve around becoming the business.

 How to Make Your Business Great