Six entrepreneur mindsets

I recently logged in to a webinar hosted by the London Business School, where I listened to entrepreneurship professor John Mullins talk about his new book, Break the Rules!: The Six Counter-Conventional Mindsets of Entrepreneurs That Can Help Anyone Change the World. I got to know Prof Mullins many years ago when he was the […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

Tribute: Yusuf, fellow Rotarian who once operated on me

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

Winning with Jack Welch

In my last column, I wrote about the rise and fall of Rudy Giuliani, as a result of reading his 2002 book, Leadership. And today my subject is Jack Welch, having just read his 2001 book, Winning, about which Warren Buffett said at the time of its publication “No other management book will ever be […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

Giuliani and leadership

Over the holidays I read a very impressive book about leadership, whose title is simply Leadership. Published in 2002, its author was a highly successful mayor of New York. In his book, he takes us through how he approached his job, and as I read it I was not at all surprised by how well […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

Write your autobiography

A few months ago I wrote a column about the benefits of writing a journal, including providing raw material for a possible future autobiography. So, today, I want to follow up with an encouragement to you to get going on that autobiography – whether you have been keeping a journal or not. And here I […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

What joining a book club entails

It’s only this year that I enjoyed my first experience with a book club, one that was being launched by my Rotary Club of Nairobi. We have been meeting monthly ever since, and as it has proved to be such an enriching experience I thought it would be good to share something about it in […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

CSR: Do good in a sustainable way

In my last article, I wrote about the evolution of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), promising that in this one I would delve into the latest trends in CSR and how it relates to ESG (the Environmental, Social and Governance dimensions) and the SDGs (the Sustainable Development Goals). For my guidance, I turned again to Michael […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

Evolution of philanthropy and CSR

In today’s world more and more firms from SMEs upward – never mind publicly quoted ones – have taken corporate social responsibility as a natural component in how they operate. For some, it came more naturally than for others. For those where owners’ and directors’ values resonated with being responsible citizens, it was an easy […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

Competent or confident politician?

Some time ago I wrote an article about Trump as a man whose I’m-OK-You’re-not-OK behaviour, one that required consistent win-lose interactions with others, masked a deeply insecure soul. Yet despite these insecurities, despite this lack of self-esteem, he built up extraordinary self-confidence, and through bullying, cheating and lying he achieved all that he did. I […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

Remember our national values

It’s quite some time since I wrote about national issues in this column, allowing the extravagant 24/7 political campaigning and the media’s relentless focus on it to sweep over me. Reflecting on it all, plus on the election itself and the days since, I realised that throughout these months I can’t remember when any of […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

Managing public service delivery

The roles of Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi have been defined as follows: Assist the President and the Deputy President in the coordination and supervision of government ministries and State departments. In liaison with the ministry responsible for Interior and National Administration, oversee the implementation of national government policies, programmes and projects. Chair and coordinate […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

In negotiations, go eye-to-eye

How do you get to win-win? By exchanging offers and requests, and indulging in give and take – maybe upfront simultaneously, or maybe over time – now us, then you. Each side is prepared to be “generous” to the other, to make “sacrifices” for the greater longer-term mutual good. Ethical, responsible vendors look beyond simply […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

How to agree without giving in

A few weeks ago I was invited to run a workshop on negotiating skills for a group of senior engineers who sell capital goods for a well-known European multinational, and it took me back to the last century when I was an account manager offering large IT solutions using mainframe computers. It reminded me of […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

Five reasons teams are dysfunctional

I was recently asked to run a team-building workshop based on the 2002 book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Let me summarise what author Patrick Lencioni laid out in his gripping fable about how Kathryn Petersen, DecisionTech’s newly installed CEO, faced the ultimate leadership crisis: uniting a team in such disarray that it threatened […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

The personal drivers to success

I recently facilitated a very interesting workshop that brought together Africa region’s leaders of a long-established multinational. Thanks to Covid, this was the first time they were meeting physically, and this under their recently installed president. As we were preparing the workshop he told me he wanted to share with his team what he described […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

The softer side of Kaizen

The Kenya Association of Manufacturers and the Kaizen Institute recently held their 17th Annual Congress, and I’m writing about it as I was one of the keynote speakers at the event. I have for long been an admirer of Kaizen, which is all about waste reduction and continuous improvement. It was first largely applied in […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

Taming the abuse of power

Readers of this column will have seen previous articles of mine in which I have written about Leaders Circles I have facilitated with my colleague Frank Kretzschmar. The last one was about sustainability, and the theme of our most recent one was “How we deal with power: from victim to perpetrator to victim”. We’ve all […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

Navigating national cultural differences for best outcomes

In my last article, I promised I would write further about the influence of cultures on how consultants like myself must adapt so as to engage effectively with our clients. I mentioned that beyond national cultures, sub-cultures within countries are equally diverse. Anyone who has visited the United States will quickly see how different people […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

How people adapt to national cultures

In my last article I wrote about the four elements that, according to the Adizes Institute, make a fully functional manager or, more likely, a functional management team: Producer, Administrator, Entrepreneur and Integrator (PAEI). Today I follow up with an article I was sent by Rufat Jahangirov, a senior member of the Adizes Institute team, […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

Management roles that shape top performers

Each of us as a manager enjoys aspects of our roles where we feel more comfortable, with others we’d rather have someone else handle. But the more senior and cross-functional we become the more we need to reach adequacy all round. And yet very few of us ever expand our comfort zones to take us […]