Articles Tagged Leadership

My young son arrived on the planet last year and brought with him a message of profound importance. As I have spent the past few months playing with him and observing him, I have become aware of an unnerving fact: he watches me very, very carefully; and then behaves as I do. He sees what […]

Chief Executive Officers of Kenya should read John Donne: “No business is an island entire of itself; every organisation is a piece of the economy, a part of the main; if a consumer be washed away by the sea of poverty, Kenya is the less, as well as if a company were, as well as […]

Chief Executive Officers of Kenya: please pay attention. Your country needs your services. We are going to hell in a mkokoteni cart, and all men and women of vision, authority and management expertise need to step in to avert disaster. Assume, for a moment, that Kenya Ltd is your company, and you have just taken […]

Once upon a time, we looked at the people around us and respected many things in them. We saw certain virtues and placed a high value on them. We had quite simple people as our role models, and we tried hard to emulate them and live up to the ideals we saw embodied in them. […]

Conflict. Of. Interest. Three simple words in the English language which, when put together in Kenya, create a concept that appears to be a mystery to most. Judging by recent pronouncements by high-ranking people who really ought to know better, there is a need to go back to first principles where conflict of interest is […]

Kenya appears to be in the throes of “Obama Fever”. One of “our sons” has just become a senator for the state of Illinois in the USA, and the news seems to have triggered the onset of a strange affliction. The malady first cropped up in a small group of family members, but has rapidly […]

When the news broke last week, Kenya experienced a collective swelling of the chest. The Nobel Peace Prize, no less! What an accolade, what recognition, what a tribute! What an honour for Kenya and Kenyans. It was almost as though the country had won the prize, not a woman called Professor Wangari Maathai. As my […]

The government had been in power for exactly two years. The President had convened a special cabinet meeting to commemorate the event and to reflect on the highs and lows of the tumultuous past 24 months. He looked around at the men and women sitting around him, and leaned forward to speak. “Ladies and gentlemen”, […]

So it’s official: we are facing famine in Kenya. The first acknowledgement of this was made when, during a state luncheon for ministers and assistant ministers, the President asked other countries to send us “maize and beans”. I was not, of course, present at the luncheon, but I am willing to bet those present ate […]

It is easy to be cynical about our leaders. Watching them is like watching some theatrical farce, one that begins as a comedy but will, we fear, end as a tragedy. The average Kenyan, who sits among the wretched of the earth, watches these leaders as they try to convince us why they need to […]

The new management series by Sunny Bindra continues. This week: Part 2 of an article on corporate governance arguing that in redesigning the board of directors, we need to throw tradition out of the window. The traditional board of directors has had its day. The original concept was elegantly simple and eminently successful. It belonged […]

The EastAfrican announces a new management series by Sunny Bindra focusing on the key strategic issues facing senior executives in the region today. We start with the first part of a challenging look at a hallowed institution: the board of directors. The corporate board is on fire. Across the world, boards are under unprecedented pressure. […]

For years, Kenya’s corporate sector was in denial. Everything was the government’s fault: rotting infrastructure; imprudent monetary policies; corruption and malfeasance in public institutions. And, of course, that old favourite: the lack of a ‘level playing-field’. Meaning that while ‘we’ did things by the book, our competitors dodged taxes, maintained illicit relationships with power brokers, […]

A new song is on every politician’s lips these days: good governance. Every minister, every permanent secretary, every technocrat, in the new government can be heard singing it for the cameras. The president even made it the cornerstone of his address at the state opening of parliament, and announced the creation of a special department […]