By Austine Abolusoro
A man’s life is made up of successes and failures; how we handle these takes us to the next stages of our lives. Mine has not been different. As I look back I see the failures that have helped me succeed in other areas of my life.
So, I will be sharing some of my successes in this edition.
I graduated in 1997 and I was never out of a job following my service in 1998. I started working at Standard Trust Bank (STB)in 2001 as a System Engineer and I became the head of the unit just a year after that. My office was in Big Leaf house just beside the STB Head Office in Oyin Jolayemi. We were responsible for maintenance and support of all printers and servers for about 80 branches across the country apart from providing local support for the head office network and systems. I had a team of about 10 engineers who were constantly engaged in taking delivery of faulty equipment, fixing them and shipping out repaired equipment.
It was a very busy routine and there are times I slept over in the office because of urgency of an equipment required by a branch since they won’t be able to function well without those equipment.
On a certain occasion, I stayed 3 days in the office without going home because we had a system that was to be fixed. From this point in my life, I have not been able to recover from working hard.
In 2003 I had a fatal accident from which God saved my life. I was Zonal Head IT at Abuja and I was travelling to Jos in a an official car for an assignment. Just after Keffi, it was raining and all I noticed was the car summersaulted like 3 times and we were inside the bush. I was able to come out and help the driver out but the car was totally damaged. Because I needed to be in Jos for the branch to work, I continued the journey same day while I got people to tow the accidented car back to Abuja. I latter had some internal injuries that had to be treated but I was able to solve the branch’s problem first. It was a point in my life that I can’t forget.
Later that year, there was a vacancy in the Finacle Team at the head office and I applied. It was a tough one relocating twice within a year and also because it’s a role totally different from what I’ve been doing over the years. I took the challenge and it became another disruption that I engineered for my career which latter paid off.
I took the challenge and it became another disruption
In 2004 I was selected as a member of the startup team for STB Ghana. After UBA/STB merger in 2005, my boss was moved back to Nigeria to head the migration team and I became the head IT for UBA Ghana. I successfully managed a team of 14 young staff. We dealt with cultural issues, skill issues and we had a team that was rated as best team in Bank. We created the first transaction alert system in the Group, managed a completely autonomous system while merger was ongoing in Nigeria, etc.
Coming back to Nigeria in 2009, I requested to move to IT Risk management because I had interest in IT Security and that was a different ball game. This was another disruption in my career which I also engineered and it paid off. If you are good at building systems and you have no idea of information risks, then you may just be heading for catastrophe.
Coming to HH in 2014 was exciting for me. Within the last two years we have been able to make some impacts across the Group. Now things are converging 🙂.
What Drives Me?
The desire to succeed and continue to succeed is what drives me. I get influenced a lot from the things I read in various literature and much of my spare time is spent on reading.
I’ve come to believe that reading is actually an exercise for the mind and if you can continue to read, your mind will not age quickly or get short of ideas. So I set a reading target for myself: One book per month. Last year I was able to do 11 books, thanks to TEF automation projects in December, I couldn’t meet up with my target. This year I’m already ahead of target, I’ve done fives books below:
Success is difficult to sustain.
How can we predict what will happen next in our lives and careers? What should we do to succeed in the next phase? Will the skills and ideas that helped us to succeed today be relevant tomorrow. Disruption is all about getting ahead of the game, getting out of your comfort zone, pushing yourself beyond the limits.
You either disrupt yourself or you get disrupted.
A picture for the ages. Who knows where the rest of the staff in the pictures would be now? Interesting read although I felt the need for brevity took off some interesting aspects of the story. May I plead with Austine to serialize this story so we can read more. His Ghana days, for instance, can make a full series. The IT Risk Management days! Heading the Abuja team, etc. I love the book side of Austine. It is clear that he loves non-fictional prose. Perhaps, having Austine as my Chairman will resurrect my fading love for the later versions of Gothenburg’s work.
Thank you for the comment. We will consider this and we are sure Austine will be happy to share more.
Your are right John. Each of the phase is a story of it’s own but didn’t want to bore the readers. We’ll talk more.