Do what you love. That is the exhortation commonly heard these days. Every motivational speaker urges you to find your passion; every pushy tweet pushes you to discover your true aptitude – that is how you will do your best work. The late Steve Jobs, in his now legendary address at Stanford University, told us: […]
Read More1. The organization behaves like a community, not a hierarchy. 2. Management does not “broadcast” directives but is open and listens to employees. 3. Communications aren’t codified, rigid and ritualistic but flexible and spontaneous. 4. Obedience is not a highly valued quality. Innovation is. 5. Information is open. Management is transparent. 6. The company does […]
Read MoreListen to a truly great singer singing. Note the effect the song is having on you. Now listen to the same song rendered by a more ordinary artiste. Note the difference in what you feel. The first singer probably invoked deep emotions in you, heightened your senses, made you feel better, even euphoric, about the […]
Read More“…the overwhelming majority of my media consumption these days is digital, and magazines in general are beginning to seem a bit slow and uninspired. I go to the airport newsstand because I know I’ll be asked to turn my electronic devices off — and even then, more often than not, I end up buying nothing. […]
Read MoreTrees and development don’t go together? Of course they do. As I discussed here last week, sustained development does not take place at the expense of the environment. Ask Haiti, which in a frenzy of slashing forests for wood fuel, reduced forest cover from more than 60 per cent to under 2 per cent in […]
Read More“Air carriers may be flying through rough weathers, but their top executives have got handsome pay hikes, including the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of crisis-ridden Kingfisher Airlines, who has emerged as the second-highest paid among all his peers at the Vijay Mallya-led UB Group. Among the country’s three listed airlines also, Kingfisher CEO Sanjay Agarwal’s […]
Read MoreThis is the time of year when Nairobi becomes Jacaranda City. Everywhere you look, the famed trees are in blossom, painting the skyscape a vivid lilac, and precipitating our well-known ‘purple rain’ as they shed their flowers and create beautiful natural carpets all over the city. But look around, and you will see that this […]
Read More“Frustrated by the 40 minutes she spent on hold with Citibank customer service, Stacy Small tweeted her displeasure. To her surprise, a Citibank agent tweeted right back. “Send us your phone number and we’ll call you right now,” read the message. Within minutes Ms. Small, who owns a luxury-travel company in Los Angeles, was on […]
Read MoreThis is my 500th column on this page. To commemorate the occasion, let me take you on a little journey. Let us go back to the Kenya of a decade ago, when I first started writing in the Sunday Nation. In 2002, this country was broken. It had been plundered dry. It was in the […]
Read More“Whether it was a looming deadline, an understaffed development team, or missing information, Apple–despite being a company that has historically exceled at delighting its end users–wasn’t able to deliver on its customer requirements with Apple Maps. And this particular case illustrates the outcomes that can result when companies choose to embark on strategies that are […]
Read MoreIt must be easy to starve the education sector of funds, if your own children are not affected by the decision. If your offspring invariably go to private educational institutions, here or abroad, I imagine it is not difficult to wield the axe and say, “We can’t pay, won’t pay.” Your kids will be just […]
Read More“There is no conclusive empirical evidence that outside succession leads to more favorable corporate performance, or even that good performance at one company can accurately predict success at another,” …In short, executive skills cannot pass the most basic test of generality: transferability.” CHARLES M ELSON and CRAIG K. FERRERE, “Executive Superstars, Peer Groups and Over-Compensation […]
Read MoreThere is a simple, widely observable incongruity in the higher planes of business life. Where are all the women? Specifically, where are all the women when it comes to decision-making and direction-setting? Look at the upper echelons of corporate life, and you will see only a few token feminine faces. This situation is found even […]
Read More“While delivering my washing to our local dry cleaner this morning, I realised the reason why I always go back to that specific dry cleaner: it is a result of an intimate relationship that has developed between me and the owners over a period of time. The owners know me by name and the name […]
Read MoreThere is a persistent drone in the air of human endeavour, and it goes something like this. Don’t try too hard; it’s not worth it. Don’t try to achieve too much; you’ll fail and it will hurt. Don’t stand out from the crowd; the crowd will shun you and you will be lonely. Be average. […]
Read More“With total liabilities of more than $2 billion (Rs.11,100 crore), Kingfisher is operating on a skeleton schedule, with its flying fleet cut to one-fourth, half its pilots gone and the lowest market share of any airline in India. Earlier this month, the airline reported its net loss had widened to Rs.650.78 crore for the quarter […]
Read More“Today, the economy is the biggest news in India and politicians are only listened to when they talk about the economy.” I wrote those words on this page in January 2010, to preface the proposition that India was on an irreversible forward economic march. I was horribly wrong, and I apologize. At the time, all […]
Read More“There are three classic models of leadership: the first is “autocratic leadership” where the leader manages to get somewhere but doesn’t take people with them, for example Margaret Thatcher. Then there is “charismatic leadership” where the leader takes everyone with him but doesn’t actually get anywhere, Tony Blair being a good example. Finally there’s the […]
Read MoreTravel is great for a variety of reasons. One of the most important is the possibility of serendipitously coming across something you might not otherwise have seen. This happened to me recently when I opened a magazine on an airplane to find the following: “There was this one instance when a woman in her early […]
Read More“We need to be able to trust pharmaceutical companies. We expect banks to be run and populated by honest people, to keep our money safe, and to give us our money back when we need it. We want oil companies to have a strong culture of engineering professionalism and commitment to health and safety. If […]
Read MoreThe BBC World Service has left Bush House. So what? The British broadcaster announced last month that it was leaving its venerable studios at Bush House, to move to the more modern premises across London that house the rest of its news operations. What could be wrong with that? Nothing. And everything. What is this […]
Read More“Some things in life we know are true. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. A body in motion will remain in motion unless acted on by an outside force. And the best way to motivate salespeople is by offering them commissions. But what if we’re wrong, at least about that […]
Read MoreThere is nothing quite like Kenyans when it comes to our propensity to laugh at ourselves. I discover this every so often on Twitter, when making a few comical observations: often the hashtag created will go viral in a matter of minutes, as Kenyans on Twitter pile in with their own rib-tickling insights. #HowToSpotAKenyan was […]
Read More“The example set by Kenya’s banks when it comes to not only reaching the unbanked, but also making a profit from them, is something that the rest of the world should look to emulate. Banks in large swathes of Africa, Asia and Latin America have undergone huge expansion in the past decade. Many now rank […]
Read MoreKenyan leaders, what are you looking at if not at the carnage on our roads? We have always had a high rate of road accidents, but it has now reached crisis proportions. There seem to be awful crashes occurring across Kenya every single day. These result in deaths and dismemberments, grief and disruption, tragedy and […]
Read More“I wonder what the ROI of bankrupt is? And yet, if you have ever given a speech, a webinar, or a class on social media marketing, I can almost guarantee you have received this question: “But how do we measure the ROI of this stuff?” Look, I’m a true-blue ROI guy. Frankly, money is one […]
Read MoreI don’t get it. I just don’t. It should be blindingly obvious to every owner of every business that it runs primarily on just one thing: the goodwill of its customers. If customers obtain value from you, they keep buying. If they keep buying, you keep making a profit. If you keep making a profit, […]
Read More“Marissa Mayer, the Google (GOOG) executive who today was named Yahoo’s (YHOO) new chief executive, is pregnant. Mayer told Fortune exclusively that her first child is due October 7. It’s a boy! …Mayer first disclosed to the Yahoo board that she is pregnant in late June, in a meeting with Michael Wolf, a member of […]
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