Articles Tagged Sunday Nation

Microblogger @oshinity3 tweeted an arresting thought recently. To paraphrase, she asked people whether they still stated on their curricula vitae the fact that they were skilled in MS Word/Excel/PowerPoint, etc. Most people do. Why, asked @oshinity3, does this still matter? What she’s pointing out is that people have an ingrained tendency to freeze into one […]

I am so very tired of writing about disasters. And I am sure you are so very tired of reading about them. It was a bad week. First a ferry sank off Zanzibar. Several hundred people, including little children, were thrown into the sea. More than two hundred are believed to have died. Next, fuel […]

Regular readers will know this column often likes to identify ordinary individuals who are fighting the good fight when it comes to personal excellence. This week, it has found another one to highlight. The lady in question is called Ioana. She is a flight attendant. I have encountered many flight attendants in my time, mostly […]

I was fortunate enough to sit atop the Singapore Flyer recently – the world’s biggest observation wheel. At its apex, the Flyer is as high as a 42-storey building, and offers unparalleled views of the famous Singapore skyline, its busy port – even of neighbouring Indonesia, across the water. Being a Peculiar Kenyan, however, I […]

Corporate executives must really hate their work. I only say this because they seem to need a different language to describe what they do, liven up their meetings, dress up their mundane lives in metaphor. How else do you explain the modern disease known as corporate jargon? A recent Forbes magazine article defined jargon as […]

Haruki Murakami is widely regarded as one of the world’s most interesting, original writers. His novels frequently combine elements of the bizarre and the mundane, the surreal and the banal in such odd measure that the reader is left baffled, rattled, disturbed – but always interested. Murakami has won numerous awards and accolades, and has […]

I have been trying to avoid mentioning our current famine, as I thought I had written all I could about famines in the past. Clearly not, though, judging by the actions and utterances of those who ought to know better. Seven years ago, I wrote some articles on this page about famines and the right […]

“We are surrounded by Bureaucrats, Note Takers, Literalists, Manual Readers, TGIF Labourers, Map Followers, and Fearful Employees.” That’s Seth Godin describing what most people in the world do. Last week, I asked you all whether you are “Godfreys” – just a random name I chose for all the people described above. So look at the […]

Have you ever read a book where you want to stand up on your bed (that’s where I read) and clap on every other page? Seth Godin’s Linchpin is just that book for me. It is a manifesto, a call to action, a drumroll. So you can imagine how fortunate I felt to meet the […]

Every once in a while, this column looks for ordinary people who exemplify the attitudes that Kenya needs. This week again, it has found one to name. Clement Githinji is a restaurant manager who runs one of Nairobi’s finer eating establishments. My wife and I are often there, and recently had an interesting encounter. After […]

Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, so long a global behemoth, is in serious trouble. Commentators are scrambling to make sense of the events that led to the closure of a 168-year-old newspaper, the News of the World (NOTW) – until last Sunday Britain’s most popular newspaper. It won’t end there. The shenanigans at NOTW threaten to […]

“Bottom of the pyramid” is all the rage these days. To make money in emerging economies, you have to find a mass-market product, says the conventional wisdom. M-Pesa, Equity Bank, Senator beer – these are all great examples of bold innovations that captured the bottom end of the market in unprecedented ways. We take great […]

I have been a customer of a large global bank for a couple of decades. Recently, however, I closed all my accounts in despair. Why? Because after years of halfway decent service, this bank fell victim to the modern business malaise of automating all its customer interfaces. I began fearing the worst some years ago […]

Whatever became of moral outrage in Kenya? “Nothing changes, no lessons are learned. Kenyans move on, and forget about the whole thing. And so buildings will continue to fall, and bombs will keep being planted. Ferries will keep sinking, and trains will be derailed. Buses will continue crashing in exactly the same places for decades. […]

What on earth has happened to India? That country, one of the huge economic success stories of recent times, is resembling a banana republic again. Witness the astonishing spectacle of “saints” and “godmen” holding “hunger fasts,” supposedly to end corruption. At first I wanted to applaud, thinking: now there’s a way to make a stand […]

After years of procrastination, I finally made it to Kigali recently. I had, of course, heard what you have all heard: that it is an African city that is clean and orderly. I was, of course, sceptical. Seeing is believing. Even so, the evidence of my own eyes was hard to believe. The roads and […]

I often speak before the leadership teams of top firms, and one of my favourite subjects is the customer experience these companies offer. An observation: I am nearly always asked the same question during the interactive part of the presentation, no matter where I am and which company I am addressing. Here’s the question: “What […]

As we all know, we live in a peculiar country. A very peculiar country. There are so many confusing questions that bedevil us every day, and precious few answers. So I have decided to occasionally become an “agony uncle” in this column, to tackle some of your more thorny conundrums. Here’s the latest instalment. Q: […]

Last week on this page we shouted: “enough is enough!” No more indignity for Africa. Africa must stand up for itself and stop being everyone else’s benchmark of poverty and dependence. Before we fix Africa, however, we must understand what ails it. The easy answer is always to blame the leadership we’ve had to date. […]

Pride, Africa, pride. Africa lost its dignity somewhere, and all thinking Africans have to help this continent find it again. We do not want to be the world’s problem child, the one with learning difficulties that requires every kind of pseudo-expert from abroad. We don’t want all our knowledge and technology to be imported and […]

A job description, as every human-resource professional will tell you, is a very important thing. It specifies the nature of your role and what particular activities and responsibilities are most important for you to fulfil your remit. In Kenya, however, most of our jobs are not as straightforward as they might be in other parts […]

Thankfully, it’s over. I refer, of course, to the royal wedding held in the United Kingdom on Friday. Since two billion people around the planet were supposed to watch it, the chances are pretty good that many of the readers of this column were also glued to their screens. Could we stop and ask ourselves, […]

Mombasa is very dear to me. Mombasa is childhood memories; wonderful sights and sounds; spicy aromas; and, of course, the peerless Indian Ocean. Mombasa is a cradle of culture; the place where diverse languages and cuisines and songs have interlocked for centuries. Mombasa is the biggest port in the region, the place where most of […]

I wish to announce that I am entering a new line of business. From tomorrow, I will be opening a whole new kind of advisory service. I will be known as Dr Sunny Day, and will be addressing all the common problems of humanity: love affairs gone wrong; business failures; bedroom mishaps; uncertainty about the […]

A few weeks ago India’s foreign minister, S.M. Krishna, stood before the United Nations and read a speech. Nothing peculiar in that – the UN, after all, excels in listening to speeches. But there was a problem: it was the wrong speech. What Mr. Krishna read out was actually the speech of the Portuguese foreign […]

I had the privilege of moderating a panel discussion at Strathmore Business School last week. Kenya was hosting an important visitor: Jose Maria Aznar, prime minister of Spain from 1996 to 2004. Mr Aznar is a highly regarded global leader for a good reason: he is a conviction politician who calls it as he sees […]

The word “stoic” has recently re-entered the world’s consciousness, thanks to the people of a small island nation that has just faced an unimaginable disaster. First a terrible earthquake broke Japan’s spine; then a calamitous tsunami engulfed it. When the first pictures rolled across our TV screens, the events seemed unreal: buildings, cars and ships […]

I wrote here last week that so many of our businesses seem hell-bent on sacrificing long-term strategic gain at the altar of ‘shrewdness’ – the mistaken belief that you must get the best possible deal for yourself in every transaction. That article seemed to touch a nerve: I was deluged with tweets and comments from […]