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

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 […]

“Executive coach Elizabeth Kuhnke offers some simple tips that can make the difference between being perceived as powerful or merely part of the pack. 1. Consider your stance. Place your hands facing each other and steeple your fingers. This forces your palms apart and, whether you are sitting or standing, your arms will take up […]

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 […]

“Steve Jobs is famous for having said, “I want to make a ding in the universe.” Walt Disney, for having said of Disneyland, “I just want it to look like nothing else in the world.” Springsteen said, “More than anything else — more than fame or wealth or even happiness — I just wanted to […]

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 […]

“A good consultant wants clients ultimately to be able to make their own good decisions—but the better a client develops the skill for the organization, the less it needs the consultant. So perhaps even well-intentioned consultants unconsciously build, with their clients, their own prisons—a set of invisible bars reinforced by a mindset that leaders always […]

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 single most common competitive mistake investors, CEOs, and entrepreneurs alike make is this: striving to do slightly better what their fiercest rival already does incredibly well. The result is usually a muddled, incoherent mess of a strategy — one that fuels not disruptive, explosive differences between a firm and its rivals, but their very […]

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 […]

“Our high performers create enthusiasm for things… They create energy, and even though this is intangible it generates client sales and follow-on work as it gets other people here engaged in and supportive of what they are doing.” ROBERT I. SUTTON Good Boss, Bad Boss (2010) Bob Sutton is that rarity: a professor who talks […]

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 […]

“Do you have customers who can’t live without you? 
Because if they can, they probably will. The researchers at Gallup have identified a hierarchy of connections between companies and their customers, from confidence to integrity to pride to passion. To test for passion, Gallup asks a simple question of the customers they query on behalf […]

If you spend time with businesspeople, you soon pick up that they value something called “shrewdness” over most other things – if you aren’t sharp and quick-witted, with an instinctively predatory commercial instinct, you shouldn’t really be in business. By this they mean that the ability to sniff out and design a great deal is […]

I’ll be discussing our peculiar businesses with Larry on NTV, at noon tomorrow.

“I’m asking them about their families, and how they grew up, and who’s important in their life and how did they decide to do this and that. I’m looking for fit, personality, values. Is this the kind of person we want around here? Will they work well? And I don’t really care how many places […]

Kenyan leaders, I know you don’t read much. Your time seems to be wholly consumed by midnight meetings, political plots and ugly utterances. So I thought I would offer you an executive summary of the story of a man who has just changed the world. Please read this as your driver overlaps through our 24/7 […]

“What’s the best way to make the competition irrelevant? It’s a question that has obsessed generation after generation of strategists, pundits, and gurus. Is it new business models, new market space, harder hardball, or better knowledge? The answer is: none of the above. It’s Brian Fitzpatrick’s concise summary of Google’s great insight: “Disrupt yourself before […]

“The rules are the rules, and they cannot be broken.” So said the Deputy Speaker of Kenya’s house of parliament last week, and many of us applauded. He was blocking MPs from attempting an infringement of parliament’s rules, and doing so with ironclad certainty that neither he nor the Speaker would permit any laxity. Hear, […]

“Do you find your mind wandering at times when people address you? Do you frequently switch from one activity to another? Do you have difficulty sustaining attention on a task and are you easily distracted by what’s going on around you? Do you struggle to prioritize and organize activities? Do you dislike having to do […]

Last week I suggested that most of you may not be reading your newspaper in its current form for too much longer – simply because technology and social change has whacked the underlying business model. Who else is affected? Pretty much everyone. Consider one of the most wonderful products ever invented by humankind: the book. […]

I’ll be on the Capital Breakfast with Chris and Etta on Monday morning, 7.00 to 8.00 am, discussing matters peculiar and topical. Do tune in.

“…companies with high levels of engagement (65 percent or greater) outperformed the total stock market index and posted shareholder returns 19 percent higher than average in 2009. Still not convinced? Companies with disinterested employees (40 percent or less engagement) had a total shareholder return that was 44 percent lower than average.” COURTNEY RUBIN, www.inc.com (20 […]

Consider this product. The life of the product begins when mammoth trees are grown on a huge scale, then pulled down and turned into pulp with massive machinery. The pulp is taken to giant mills and turned into huge rolls of paper. Those rolls are trucked and shipped around the world. The rolls are then […]

“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 […]

Like a tidal wave the people came, and kept coming. They had had enough, and had nothing to lose. Only a complete removal of those who led them would appease them. Day after day after day they piled into the streets. They made their own country ungovernable and froze its economy. It was only a […]

I will be on KTN Sunrise Live with Edith Kimani to discuss matters ‘peculiar’ on Wednesday 2 February, from 7.00 am. Do tune in!

“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, […]

Dear Kenyan Chief Executives Last week I wrote to you to point out that if your company’s customer service sucks, there’s only one real culprit – the person you greet in the mirror every morning. Some of you may have taken umbrage at that suggestion, so do allow me to elaborate in this second part […]