The Trinidad and Tobago Chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators will host the breakfast meeting, Taking communications centre stage: Forging new paradigms for the profession on March 29, 2007 from 7.00 a.m. to 9.30 a.m. at the Tourism Development Company, which is located at Maritime Plaza, Barataria, Trinidad.

Taking communications from the periphery to the inner circle of decision-making is a huge achievement. Ask Anna-Maria Garcia-Brooks, General Manager – Group Marketing and Communications at Republic Bank Limited, who has made the envied step from middle management to executive management. As one of the event’s feature speakers, Garcia-Brooks will discuss how communicators can give their function that quantum leap. Joining her for this discussion will be Dr Godfrey Steele, academic pioneer and lecturer at the University of the West Indies (UWI), who successfully established UWI’s bachelor’s in communications programme, and is responsible for training future communicators. (more…)

Everyone wants to be successful. But how would you define success? Judette Coward Puglisi

Bear with me as I recount my week. I have a point or two to make about success. Last Monday, an editor of a global communications magazine went on my blog saw a posting I had written about work life balance and asked me to submit an expanded piece on the same topic to the publication. On Tuesday, I opened my email and shining like a golden egg among 65 banal other emails in my Inbox was a request to speak at a leadership conference in the US. But it was on Wednesday that received a question, the most surprising of them all from a bright, young journalist, whose Facebook chronicles I have been following with some amusement and wonder.

Rhea Simone Auguste posted a question on my wall that had me thinking about the two opportunities that came my way on Monday and Tuesday as much as it had me thinking about success, failure, opportunity and sacrifice.

“What” questioned Rhea, “was the secret to my success?” I confess. Questions seldom stump me trained as I am from my days as a journalism student on the firing line doing mock interviews, but this one did. And to be honest, I never replied to Rhea until four days later, marinating her question in my just so I could deliver a helpful nugget of information for which I felt she was searching. In her post, Rhea told me that she had opened a publishing company but that she never got the results she was expecting. She was also toying with the idea of doing an MBA but wasn’t 100 percent sure of that decision. So I knew my answer couldn’t be coy: “ Rhea I am not so successful, there are ‘soooo’ many people more successful than I am, have you checked them,” or cliched: “ Well Rhea, it’s all about the hard work, you know it’s the point where perspiration meets inspiration.” (more…)