Bad grades got me paralysed for many months - Prof. Goski Alabi

Dean of the Centre for International Education and Collaboration at the University of Professional Studies, Accra, Professor Goski Alabi has disclosed some of the mountainous challenges that she had to surmount in order to recourse her life path.

Speaking at the launch of her book, ‘Managing for Excellence in the Twenty-First Century – The Total Quality Approach’, the professor in Total Quality Management (TQM) noted how results of examination she wrote at the A level gave her the shock of her life rendering her paralysed for months as she got ‘unbalanced’.

“Before I got to the university, my A-level result as a science student were not what was expected. It was a blow to me and I fell very sick. I was in the hospital for many months, I lost my balance; I was paralysed, I could not walk, I could not sit…” Prof. Goski Alabi recalled.

She noted that the fear of God, hard work and discipline were paramount in her transformation and therefore urged all, especially the youth, to be relentless in the pursuit of their dreams.

Her situation caused her entry into the university to be delayed by a year but Prof. Alabi did not let that hinder her in her pursuits.

In her book, she highlights the broad analysis of the discipline and cleverly links it to management science in the field of leadership and managing for excellence in the 21st century.

In a balanced opinion and with concrete examples, the author in the opening chapters (i.e. Chapters 1 – 4) makes a critical assessment based on an explicitly stated rationale, that TQM is a management model. TQM emphasises a universal message in leadership, strategy, teamwork, rigorous analysis and self-assessment.

Prof. Goski Alabi further illustrates the TQM movement which started in the United States of America (USA) more as a Quality Control (in the 1950s) and went back to Japan and came back to the USA strengthened as a management philosophy.

The book was launched at the Association of African Universities at East Legon in Accra.