"CEOs can't wait to read Sunny Bindra's articles every week."

“At $5.2-billion Iridium was one of the largest, boldest and audacious startup bets ever made. Conceived in 1987 by Motorola and spun out in 1990 as a separate company, Iridium planned to build a mobile telephone system that would work anywhere on earth. It would cover every city, town and square inch of the earth from […]

“Today, a new generation of renegades – companies as seemingly different as Walmart, Nike, Google, and Unilever, for example – are thriving not in spite of but by rebelling against the tired, toxic orthodoxies of industrial age capitalism. Their secret? Haltingly, imperfectly, often messily, never easily, they’re learning to become twenty-first-century capitalists. Maybe, just maybe, […]

“If you pull out your smartphone and click the button that says “locate me” on your mapping application, you will see a small dot appear in the middle of your screen. That’s you. If you start walking down the street in any direction, the whole screen will move right along with you, no matter where […]

Suppose you go into a shop to buy a drink. You notice that instead of saying “1 litre” on the carton, it says “up to 1 litre” instead. You buy the drink, go home and empty out the contents and measure them. You find there was only half a litre in the box. How do […]

The 2009 Fortune Global 500: 1. Wal-Mart Stores (US) 2. Royal Dutch Shell (Netherlands/UK) 3. Exxon Mobil (US) 4. BP (UK) 5. Toyota Motor (Japan) 6. Japan Post Holdings 7. Sinopec (China) 8. State Grid (China) 9. Axa (France) 10. China National Petroleum Fortune (August 2010) Fortune’s Global 500 List is usually worth a look […]

When I was a boy, the world seemed a simple place. According to pretty much all the books and comics I read, and the TV shows and movies I watched, there were some self-evident truths about the world. These were some of them. All the action was in the world was in the rich countries […]

“We will encounter multiple forms of hubris in our journey through the stages of decline. We will see hubris in undisciplined leaps into areas where a company cannot become the best. We will see hubris in a company’s pursuit of growth beyond what it can deliver with excellence. We will see hubris in bold, risky […]

“I was reflecting the other day on the near infinite number of ways in which companies annoy their customers. A few that make me go “grrrrrr:” – Being forced to rifle through a two-foot pile of garments in order to find my size – Having to search through lines of nano-sized text at the bottom […]

Whether or not Goldman Sachs is found guilty of the various charges laid against it, its reputation has suffered huge damage. It is being fried at the court of public opinion, and faces an uneasy path back to its previously dominant investment banking position. Many other companies face these ordeals, and they are usually of […]

“Contrary to the widespread cliché of American dynamism versus European economic stagnation, over the past decade Europe’s top companies have beaten America’s (not to mention Japan’s) by an often substantial margin. Despite the rise of China and the rest, Europe has held roughly steady, at about 17 percent, its share of world exports since 2000, […]

The problem with being a business commentator is that your subject-matter regularly lets you down. Last year I was interviewed by NTV about the importance of ethics and integrity in business (a clip can be seen on www.sunwords.com). Great firms, I asserted confidently, do not become great by cutting corners or greasing palms. They thrive […]

1. No more 9 to 5 2. Productivity will be closely measured 3. Cogs will become redundant 4. The winners will be the linchpins 5. Work will become art SETH GODIN, Regus Business Sense (April 2010) Business guru and author Seth Godin spelled out some of the ideas in his new book, Linchpin, in Regus […]

I walked into an Italian restaurant in Mombasa recently, and first impressions were favourable. The ambience was pleasantly rustic, and we were greeted with smiles by a waiter, which makes a change. The Italian proprietor was hovering around benignly. But there was an immediate warning sign. During the middle of lunch hour, a worker was […]

One of the key practices of successful businesses is the ability to follow trends and anticipate market movements. This is extremely difficult: if any of us really knew what next year’s markets would look like, we would be billionaires. Some trends, however, are so predictable that the foolishness lies in ignoring them. And that is […]

The recent spate of competition in Kenya’s telecom sector has been characterised by something ugly: vandalism. Now that fibre-optic connectivity is commonplace, what easier way to disable your competitor than to hire a few goons to cut their cables? That leaves them in disarray for days, while we gain ground. Or do we? Telecommunications is […]

The other day I reached for a box of tissues. As I pulled a tissue out, another five came out of the box. I had not encountered this recently, and wondered what the problem was. It turned out my household has been using imported tissues for a while, which are soft and detach easily. Those […]

“Companies have always cut back on workers during economic downturns, but over the last two decades layoffs have become an increasingly common part of corporate life – in good times as well as bad. Companies now routinely cut workers even when profits are rising. Some troubled industries seem to be in perpetual downsizing mode… …But […]

“Because starting a business is a huge amount of hard work, requiring a great deal of time, you had better enjoy it. When I started Virgin from a basement flat in west London, I did not set out to build a business empire. I set out to create something I enjoyed that would pay the […]

“When Toyota told the world of the recall of its cars in January, one of its first public statements was made by a Japanese executive who faced television cameras wearing a surgical mask. Masks are common during Japan’s cold season. However, crisis management experts are seizing on the image as a metaphor for a company […]

“This Wednesday, Steven P. Jobs will step to the stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and unveil a shiny new machine that may or may not change the world. In the magician’s world, that’s called “the reveal.” And the most magical part? Even as the media and technology worlds […]

“The number of female directors on FTSE 100 boards has stalled at 131 over the past year, a report has said. Furthermore, the number of firms with female executive directors fell from 16 to 15, the Cranfield School of Management report found. There was also a “disappointing” drop in the number of boards with multiple […]

A board member with whom I was discussing his company made me laugh out loud recently. When I asked him how effective his board’s policy formulations were, he told me, with refreshing honesty: “You know, sometimes I wonder whether the steering wheel is really connected to the tyres…” Hilarious imagery: a bunch of important personages […]

“Howard Schultz (returned) in January 2008 to run the firm he had made great but which had by then entered a seemingly inescapable spiral of decline. Investors approve: having fallen below $8 last November, down from an all-time high of nearly $40 in 2006, shares in Starbucks have risen above $20, a bit higher than […]

This week I want to stick a steak knife into the restaurant industry. Running a good eatery should be simplicity itself. Entry barriers are low, if you’re willing to start small; many a world-beating restaurant chain started life as a single food stall somewhere. Yet in Kenya we are running this most important industry very […]

My recent interview on NTV (August 29, 2009, with Misiko Andere) is now up on the NTV website, courtesy of YouTube. Watch it here

“For a while, they were just right there, in the middle of American culture,” says Richard Polk, the owner of Pedestrian Shops and ComfortableShoes.com, based in Boulder, Colo. Polk’s store was the first real shoe store to stock the crazy-looking plastic shoes, a few years back, when they first roared out of nearby Aurora to […]

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 […]