Articles Tagged Strategy

Sunny Bindra, Executive Fellow at Strathmore Business School, concludes his special three-part series on the ideas of Michael Porter. This final article looks at the professor’s prescription: a new collaborative approach for Kenya. Michael Porter came, spoke and left. So what did he leave behind? I believe he left us with the intellectual framework that […]

Sunny Bindra, strategy consultant and business writer, continues his three-part series on the ideas of Michael Porter. Harvard’s Professor Porter was in Nairobi on Monday and delivered a memorable address on “Global Competitiveness” at the Strathmore Business School. This second article examines the question: What are the sources of national competitiveness? “You can become very […]

Professor Michael Porter, world-renowned authority on competitiveness, was in Nairobi this week. He met government leaders and delivered a keynote address to executives and students at the Strathmore Business School. Business Daily asked Sunny Bindra, the Sunday Nation’s business columnist and a member of Strathmore’s Advisory Board, to convey the legendary don’s ideas and recommendations […]

Sir Richard Branson was in town recently, and everywhere he went he was received like royalty. How come? Not too long ago, we would have viewed him as a neo-colonialist come to exploit us, to take our business away, to expropriate profits, to hurt our national carrier, to prevent us from developing our own skills […]

Why would anyone open a restaurant when: the renovations are not complete; the staff are not adequately trained; and the chef hasn’t quite got his act together? Happens all the time in Kenya. How often do you go to new establishments to encounter exposed wiring, waiters who have no clue what the dishes are, and […]

There are very few good books about business written in the world. Most seem to be exercises in futility: lots of seemingly well-educated people telling you the blindingly obvious and making it sound like a dramatic breakthrough in management thinking. The style of writing covers the full spectrum: from painfully dull to messianic. But most […]

This column often tries to glean management wisdom from the world of sport. The cricket world has been shouting something in recent weeks, and the message is coming from the ‘Ashes’ series held between England and Australia. Cricket aficionados will know that in the just-concluded series, Australia thrashed England 5-0. That’s five test matches – […]

One of the more depressing news items to appear at the close of 2006 concerned the problems that have emerged in the consortium (headed by VTEL of Dubai) that won the Second National Operator (SNO) telecommunications licence earlier in the year. This was the operator we all hoped would go head-to-head with Telkom Kenya. It […]

Address given at Ufadhili Trust CSR East Africa Conference, Safari Park Hotel, 29 November 2006 Ladies and Gentlemen Thank you very much indeed for inviting me here. It is a privilege to address this very important gathering – the more so because you are drawn from all over East Africa. CSR – three letters that […]

Peter Drucker, widely acknowledged as the greatest management thinker of the past century, died 3 months ago. His death went largely unremarked here in Kenya; not surprisingly, as we tend to pay little attention to management – either as a concept, or as a way of doing things. Drucker was just a few days short […]

There is a certain buzz in the air about economic growth in Kenya. After the government announced that the economy was growing at 4.3 per cent per annum recently, a new excitement began to swell. Yes, we all know that the 4.3 per cent has only been achieved after fiddling with the calculation formula and […]

If you are a Kenyan consumer, you have almost certainly gone through some (or all) of the following: Your telephone landline periodically goes dead, and stays dead for weeks (even months) even though you call the service operator every day to complain. When the line comes back, it has a nasty crackle in it. You […]

Many of us are busy picking through the litter of the recent G8 conference held in Scotland. What did the rich countries offer Africa? What does it mean? How much do we get? Can we “make poverty history” now? I’d prefer to put some distance between us and Scotland and take you to the other […]

Oh, colonisation! We’re still paying a heavy price, after all these years. We seem unable to move on, leave our history behind us and just get on with things. New books like ‘Britain’s Gulag’ and ‘Histories of the Hanged’ have disturbed our old wounds, have rekindled the demands for reparations for ancient atrocities. But that […]

We are a strange species, we human beings. We alone have been granted higher consciousness; yet we use this to treat the planet as our exclusive domain. All other creatures and life forms must be regarded as ‘resources’: to be exploited and controlled for our economic gain and personal comforts. Or, to put it politely, […]

You lead a large, long-established, obviously successful East African company. It is a veritable behemoth, looming large over the corporate landscape. Its products are household names, loved by consumers. It is a profit machine, churning out handsome dividends to smiling shareholders. There is every reason to feel confident about the future. Allow me to send […]

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 […]

100 days is a ridiculously short period in which to start evaluating the performance of a new government. I guess it’s a nice round number, and gets public attention. But it is absurd to expect any real outcomes in just three months. Have new jobs been created, is inflation coming down, has forest cover increased? […]