Excerpt 1: The Solo Founder’s Kite: Flying Alone in Business
(From Section 1.1: The Death of Institutional Scale)

“In the deeply evolved landscape of contemporary global macroeconomics, traditional assumptions regarding corporate scale, human capital density, and structural longevity are facing critical systemic failure. For past generations, industrial and commercial dominance was directly measured by organizational volume—the size of a company’s physical real estate footprint, the complexity of its vertical internal hierarchy, and the sheer headcount of its full-time labor force.

However, the emergence of hyper-connected communication networks, decentralized programmatic software, and automated data processing matrices has fundamentally flipped the dynamics of leverage. Today, massive corporate overhead, deep bureaucratic structures, and consensus-driven decision cycles function not as competitive fortresses, but as structural weights that actively compress profit margins and severely slow operational velocity. The modern economic landscape secretly favors a completely different species of corporate architect: the Solo Founder. This architectural evolution represents a permanent paradigm shift in how global enterprise value is created, distributed, and sustained over long-term financial horizons.”

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Excerpt 2: The Maverick Strategy: Strategic Entrepreneurship and Leadership
(From Introduction: The Maverick Mindset)

“The global macroeconomic landscape does not reward standard compliance; it rewards calculated disruption. In the contemporary theater of corporate operations, the historic boundaries separating traditional industries are dissolving at an unprecedented velocity, rendering classic business rulebooks obsolete. The vast majority of economic participants enter markets by mimicking existing commercial archetypes, implement marketing frameworks copied directly from immediate competitors, and quantify success by how seamlessly they blend into the prevailing ecosystem. This standard behavior creates an environment of intense, margin-depleting competition.

However, there exists a distinct, elite cadre of independent strategic thinkers who fundamentally refuse to accept the constraints of traditional commercial design. These individuals are the Mavericks. In the realm of high-impact venture creation, a true Maverick is a deeply disciplined, hyper-analytical systems architect—an individual who possesses the cognitive autonomy to peer through historic industrial illusions and recognize hidden structural inefficiencies that the establishment has failed to address due to long-term bureaucratic inertia.”

***

Author Bio: Safwan Ahmed is an independent entrepreneur, author, and business strategist specializing in business architecture and digital problem-solving. Based in Sylhet, Bangladesh, he successfully manages traditional physical enterprises while providing advanced technical consulting and online troubleshooting to help modern businesses scale. Alongside his business operations, Safwan actively writes to codify his real-world frameworks, offering visionary builders hyper-analytical insights to eliminate structural friction and maximize business velocity.

Book Purchase / Review Links:
• The Solo Founder’s Kite:  https://www.google.com.bd/books/edition/The_Solo_Founder_s_Kite/VbriEQAAQBAJ?hl=en
• The Maverick Strategy:  https://www.google.com.bd/books/edition/The_Maverick_Strategy/OkvsEQAAQBAJ?hl=en

To You 

As the earth thirsts for rain,  

As the sunflower longs for the sun,  

So does my soul yearn for you. 

In every drop, in every ray,  

I see your image, your gentle smile.  

Just as night has its darkness,  

So do I seek the trace of you in my heart. 

As the earth awaits spring,  

As the flower dreams of azure heights,  

My heart, like a swallow, comes to you,  

To love you through the depths of affection. 

In every breeze, I hear your whisper,  

In every leaf, I feel your breath,  

For you are my unrest, from which I suffer,  

My everything, and my eternal fear. 

As the earth thirsts for rain,  

As the sunflower longs for the sun,  

So does my soul yearn for you,  

Dreaming of you, loving you, always listening to you.

Maja Milojković was born in Zaječar, Serbia. She is the deputy editor at “Sfairos” publishing house in Belgrade, Serbia.  She is the vice-president of the association “Rtanj and Mesečev poetski krug”.  She is the author of two books: “The Circle of the Moon” and “Trees of Desire” She is the editor of the International Anthology “Rtanjski stihopevi” One of the founders of the poetry club “Area Felix” from Zaječar, Serbia and the editor of an international e-magazine for creative literature and culture “Area Felix”.

Instructions for Building a Bridge

Begin

not with steel,

but with a question.

Ask the child

what the other side

looks like.

Ask the fisherman

how the current

learns every name.

Ask the woman

who crosses each morning

balancing fruit,

hope,

and tomorrow

on her head.

Measure

not only the river,

but the distance

between strangers.

Leave room

for birds

that refuse

to recognize borders.

Leave room

for silence,

because every honest conversation

must pause

long enough

to hear another heartbeat.

When the bridge is finished,

do not name it

after the richest donor

or the loudest speech.

Name it

after the first person

who crossed

without fear,

and the second

who turned back

to help someone else.

The Library of Borrowed Voices

My grandmother

never called herself a historian.

She simply remembered.

The names of rivers

before they were renamed.

The recipe

that survived three migrations.

The lullaby

that crossed a border

without a passport.

She shelved stories

inside ordinary afternoons,

between washing clothes

and slicing mangoes,

between power cuts

and the first drop of rain.

When she laughed,

entire generations

leaned closer.

When she fell silent,

the room understood

that forgetting

is the first language

of disappearance.

Now I write

because memory

is too heavy

for one heartbeat.

Each poem

is a borrowed shelf,

each line

an invitation

for tomorrow

to recognize

the voices

today refused to lose.

The Cartographer of Smoke

They hired me to map a country

that refused to remain still.

Every border lifted at dawn

like birds startled from a field.

Mountains traded names with rivers.

Cities folded themselves into pockets of fog.

Even the compass developed a conscience,

turning away from every certainty.

So I drew with charcoal.

Not because it lasts,

but because it remembers fire.

Each morning, the wind corrected my work,

crossing out kingdoms

with the patient hand of weather.

Each evening, I began again,

learning that failure is only another alphabet

waiting for a different mouth.

I met an old woman

carrying an empty basket.

She said,

“You cannot measure a place

by the roads that survive.

Measure it by the footsteps

that refuse to disappear.”

Then she walked into the horizon

as if distance were merely

another kind of doorway.

When my employers returned,

they asked for clean lines,

accurate distances,

a legend explaining every symbol.

I handed them a page of ash.

“This,” I said,

“is the only map

that tells the truth.

Everything living

keeps moving.”

Hassan Ismail Adekunle is a Nigerian poet whose work explores memory, family, place, resilience, and the quiet beauty of everyday life. His poems seek to uncover moments of grace and humanity within ordinary experience through clear, evocative language. His work has appeared in The New Verse News and Willy-Wash Webzine, among other literary publications. He continues to write from Nigeria, where he is at work on new poems.

Mom

“Here, beta,” my maasi said as she handed me over a warm glass of water, she was under the wrong impression that I was struggling to deal with the passing away of my mother, just like how she was finding it terrible to not have a sister from now-onwards to daily talk to, after finishing the household work. 

I drank a sip, it soothed my infected throat a bit. I walked over towards the window of  my room, which had been locked since ages. I entered the room and found it sleeping under a blanket of dust. I pulled my old, worn out wooden chair from the study table, and sat at the window. The moment I drank the last gulp, a tear rolled down my right eye. It was as my brain remembered my entire life, and that how I never had a single good memory of my mother. I must forget now how much I hated, since it is immoral to talk bad about the dead. Will this change the fact that she still tortured me, that she never showed me how warm motherhood is? 

I looked all around, the bulb had become dimmer, and the fan had become creakier. 

All the memories started flashing in, every incident of my childhood, or I can say every trauma. Living with her wasn’t easy, it required nodding all the time. 

I was five when she put me in drawing class. Two years passed away, I couldn’t learn anything. That was the first time she had slapped me, I still remember those four fingers on my cheeks. 

By the time I was eight, I was sent off to ballet, although I wanted to be a cricketer. 

“You have to look beautiful, that is what matters for a woman,” she would always say, and there would be silence all over. I would spend hours embodying grace and beauty in myself, and somehow I managed to do it, but it wasn’t of any use. 

My mom would grab my shoulders and cry out loud. “Why are you a slow learner, tell me why?”

“This isn’t what I like,” I would rebel. 

“You are a woman, you must have beauty, beauty and beauty,” she would yell out loud. 

She would every day bring in some or the other pastes which would smell horribly, and she would put them on my face all over.

“It is burning like hell, I am going to wash it,” I would say when she would grab me. 

“No, it will make your dark tone faire. No, I said”.

There would be oil every time in my hair, and she would shampoo them hard, making them soft and straight, and not like a curly nest like her.

It would pain, but I couldn’t do anything. She hated the fact that I was her Xerox copy. 

I couldn’t get any chocolates and cakes, as they would bring acne to my face. I wasn’t allowed to choose what I was going to wear, as she didn’t like my choice. I would always get magazines full of portraits of beautiful models and their tips for looking graceful and radiant when I asked for any comic. I was only allowed to watch cook shows which would teach making modern delicacies, and presenting food in a fancy way. She controlled my life, and all she ever thought was how to make me attractive. She also forced me into being a topper, with me also going to violin and dancing classes every day, not allowed to skip even during my onset of periods.

“I am skipping tomorrow’s exam,” I said one day, too tired from my dance rehearsals. 

“No,” she said. She sat there, making me study half of the whole night. 

I fell asleep on the day of the exam. When she heard it, she slapped me thrice, tightly.

“Why do you cause trouble to your mother? Why aren’t you turning out how I want you to/ You were born to torture me and bring me troubles it seems,” she yelled that day, the whole house in her terror.

“That’s because I resemble you, curse yourself for that,” I said back, too much frustrated, though I accept a daughter can never in her life tell that to her mother, no matter what happens. 

She was hurt, and she cried the whole week. I thought she would stop, but she became even more determined now to make me beautiful. She also did not speak to make, she would enter my room, not speak a word and would sit there, her cold hand pointing me to do whatever she wanted me to do. 

I became a distinguished ballet dancer, and could play the violin really well. Her pulling my long hair twice every week to make them silky and smooth turned out to be of some use, they helped me find my first boyfriend whom I married eventually. 

“No, I will find a guy for you, you can’t marry somebody else,” my mom objected, obviously. 

“Can you please stop interfering in my life,” I burst out wailing that day. “All my life, I lived as you wanted me to live, your will prevailed all the time. Now please, let me take one decision for myself, let me live one day, please,” I begged in front of her. 

As the preparations happened throughout the wedding, she was creating chaos, my mother. In the end, I wore what she wanted, and I looked how she wanted me to. During the last three days, she tried to talk to me, but I was already too mad at her for creating an argument at every function. When I was wedded off, I never called her from my in-law’s place. Also, I had then started working again, and I had no time to talk to her except giving harsh and dry replies if she had accidentally called me once in a blue moon. 

The day I received the phone call reporting her suicide, I had zero reactions, I wasn’t shocked at all. I knew she was mentally sick, and her life’s motto was to take all of us with her to the asylum. 

It wasn’t until I saw her dead corpse that I fell in an abyss, the space of nothingness. I forgot, everything for a second, it felt as if I was the corpse. There she lied hopeless, bald and charcoal on her dark skin, all over her body, after which she hung herself. 

“Where the hell were you lost that she did this to herself,” my expressionless and tear-less self told my father, who stood there as if, as if, what has happened, has happened. 

Suddenly, my flashbacks went away, and right now here I was in this room for what I came here, to read two diaries left for me by my mother, which was her last wish of this life she had written and put in an envelope saying “Only for Riya”, before she departed forever. 

I read through the ten pages she had written, each one slapping my existence to the very core of it. As I completed her diary, I opened the second diary of my father, which my mother had stolen from him and had convinced him by crying for a week that he had forgotten keeping it somewhere. I read all night this long diary of his, full of poems on women, women with silky hair, fair ladies shining bright and ladies smelling of strong perfumes all the time. I saw each mesmerizing beauty’s head-shot he had glued it with love, all the women he lived his life with, except my mother. At first, I thought that this woman’s last wish was also to invade someone’s privacy. Now, it was needed. She was the woman who held her hand out to catch her husband’s love, which was always of some other woman, and it only caught bitterness every time. 

“I tried to make him like me more, as I couldn’t leave him for my kids. Every time I ended to make myself more beautiful, he never saw it, as there was someone much better for him ready at each stage of life. Now, no more”. This was the last thing  she wrote in her diary. 

I sat there trapped in a dark chamber of hatred for her, for my father, and the most for myself. But how could I know this? Every thing made sense now, every dark memory of my childhood lost its hatred. All I could hear was the echoing silence when I never spoke to her for ages, and my dry replies and rough words. 

I took up a pencil, with tears dropping on that page, and wrote after the last sentence of my mother in her diary :

I love you. I wish we deserved you. 

We Need Nature, Not the Other Way Around

​“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.”

— Mahatma Gandhi

​Have you ever thought about how deeply human nature is intertwined with the natural world? Why is it that the sight of clear, flowing water soothes a person’s nerves, while the noise of the city can sometimes feel overwhelming?

​Recently, a post by a blogger caught my attention. The caption read: “North and South Korea were a single nation until 1946. After World War II, the country was divided into two parts. Between these two nations, there lies a piece of land left entirely untouched by both sides. If either side crosses into it, war will break out.”

​When I saw that place, I was truly amazed. Though untouched by human hands, it is astoundingly beautiful. This brings up a question: while we strive to build beautiful and comfortable places, why fail to understand that we are destroying nature’s original beauty and joy? The tranquility and peace of mind we so desperately seek have already been created for us, yet we are ruining them with our own hands.

​As modern society advances day by day, we are destroying nature at the exact same pace. Nature is being ruined simply to feed human desires. For instance, you used to live just fine before the invention of things you now claim you “cannot live without.” Coal-fired power plants produce an average of 7 million tons of harmful gases each year. Consider the immense damage this inflicts on nature—the very air we ourselves breathe. Yet, better, eco-friendly ways to produce energy exist. We simply refuse to stop using coal power plants out of greed, because they yield more energy compared to other sources. In pursuit of our own profit, we are losing both nature and our health. In truth, clean air is the cure for many ailments. Nature gives us its all, and in return, we are destroying its vibrant wildlife and breath-taking charm.

​Looking at it from another perspective, let us assume the average human lifetime is 100 years. What kind of environment are we leaving behind for future generations once we are gone? Will we become the reason our descendants see the animals we once knew only in pictures? You can easily live without items and clothing crafted from the skins, wings, or bones of the animals you admire. I urge you not to sacrifice animals for short-lived trends that barely last five years at most. I would like to direct your attention to a popular proverb: “A good person leaves behind a garden, while a bad person leaves a stain.”

​In conclusion, imagine what nature would be like without humankind. The food chain among animals would simply continue undisturbed. Now, try to imagine ourselves without nature—it is almost beyond imagination, isn’t it? That is because all our needs are enveloped by nature. I believe that when there are boundaries in everything, it becomes all the more beautiful. Let us not allow our greed to flourish under the guise of “need.” Whenever I think about the future, I hope that future generations will not have to wait in line for hours just to see a single animal, or queue up to relax in a lush, tree-covered space. If a single person fights against greed, it may yield no grand result or merely master their own desires. However, if every person in society fights against it together, we can achieve truly great things.

I AM GROWING OLD

I glide my fingertips over the wrinkles on my face, I am growing old…

Each one depicts something

from my life

but I don’t care.

Not a single artist

could arrange them like this,

shallow, deep, smiling

they look at me from my skin.

I frown in vain,

I didn’t do it,

It’s all God’s work…

The one next to the eye that laughs,

and the one next to the lips

that changes the whole face.

I was growing old

and you danced in my chest,

becoming the most beautiful part of me…

I smiled with my soul, eyes, lips

like an actress on stage.

My wrinkles were beautiful too,

there was more and more room for you

because my skin was getting bigger…

I am growing old, I am slowly forgetting,

I know it was happiness.

I am burning

because my heart is tingling and my thoughts are black,

I AM GROWING OLD!

BIOGRAPHY

MILKA J. ŠOLAJA, born in Korenica, Republic of Croatia. Lives and works in Belgrade. She has been writing poetry since her high school days.

So far, she has published 11 independent poetry collections: “If I Were a Bird”, “Dreams in the Mirror”, “Between Reality and Sleep”, “Traces Will Remain”, “Black and White World”, “I Think Your Hands Are Yours”, “A Tear from Stone”, “I Was Born Alone” and two co-authored poetry collections: “I Dream with Verses” and “My Dreams Written in Verses”, published by “Kulture Snova” from Zagreb. 

The eleventh poetry collection “I Am This I Am” is in preparation for publication, as well as the autobiographical novel “Walking on the Edge.” She writes love, homeland, descriptive, reflective, spiritual and poetry for children, translated into English, Hungarian, Bengali, Spanish, Greek, Odia, Arabic…

Award-winning, represented in many anthologies, monographs, collections and magazines, both domestic and international. Some poems are composed. Member of: Serbian Writers’ Association, Literary and Artistic Union “Vlaho Bukovac” from Split, “Culture of Dreams” from Zagreb, Institute for Children’s Literature in Belgrade. She is also a member of several International Groups, Forums and Academies for Poetry and Literature, where she has received a large number of awards.