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Management Consultant Mike Eldon

I was recently invited by professional advisory firm Ronalds East Africa to be one of the keynote speakers at their training event for Chief Finance Officers (CFOs) and other leaders of the finance function. My session was about advising the participants on how to interact effectively at the board level. There was quite a spectrum […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

Around the world organisations are downsizing, whether because of the generally tough economic times or for other reasons. And as we observe how this is being handled we see a whole spectrum of employer behaviour, from the brutal to the caring. Some have simply sent texts to staff, informing them that they are being laid […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

I am sharing with you a conversation I had with three young women leaders, launched by one of them about a situation in which she found herself. “I am the only woman on this board, and one of the men asked me to get him a cup of tea,” she narrated and asked how I […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

I have recently been exposed to a couple of situations where the manager of a salesperson has been playing an unnecessarily high proportion of the role that could and should have been carried out by the salesperson. In each case, the salesperson was an “account manager”, or “relationship manager”, two terms which I like and […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

Last Friday, immediately before this week’s Africa Climate Summit, KENCTAD (the Kenyan Entrepreneurs’ Conference on Trade & Development) organised a conference on sustainability. It was all to do with how being serious about ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) issues benefits businesses, and I was invited by Ngida Sebastian, KENCTAD’s ESG Lead, to be the keynote […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

I’ve written before about Frank Kretzschmar and my Leaders Circle events, and here’s something about the most recent one we hosted on the story-telling theme “Gaining and losing trust: moments of judgment, and their consequences”. In preparing for the event I dove into the three books on trust by Stephen M.R. Covey (the son of […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

Last December I wrote in this column about the importance of adopting a systems approach to corporate social responsibility, aligning and integrating it not only with the Sustainable Development Goals and ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) issues but also with the overall organisational strategy. (This is despite concerns that neither the SDGs nor ESG incorporate […]

Tomorrow it will be 30 years since my son Dan was killed in Somalia at the age of 22. Dan was a Reuters photojournalist there and he, along with Hos Maina, Anthony Macharia and Hansi Kraus, was attacked with sticks and stones by an angry mob infuriated by the bombing from an American helicopter of […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

On June 15, I attended the Kenya Private Sector Alliance (Kepsa) AGM, where CEO Carole Kariuki and outgoing chair Flora Mutahi reeled off the activities and achievements of the previous 12 months. As at previous AGMs, the sheer volume and variety were staggering to absorb – indeed two years ago I wrote a column about […]

Management Consultant Mike Eldon

In my last article, I wrote about minute-taking, and it led me to think about that other vital skill that is even more significant in making meetings work well or otherwise: how they are chaired. And just like some minute-takers write too much and some write too little, so some who chair meetings talk too […]