I was recently invited by the accountants’ body, the Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Kenya( ICPAK) to run a session at their 7th Annual Governance and Ethics Conference. The topic they chose for me was “Inside the boardroom: the realities of shareholder engagement”, and this in the context of the overall theme of the […]
In my last article I found myself in the boardroom and today I remain there, following my invitation by Strathmore University Business School to be a panelist on their “Leading the Board” programme. In what follows I will refer to the main issues that emerged, and I’ll start by reporting on our easy consensus over […]
In the latest edition of the London Business School Review I was pleased to see an article by my dear friend Charles Handy on how business schools must adapt for the future. He opens by recollecting that 51 years ago he returned to England from America to join the fledgling London Graduate School of Business […]
We are all so busy these days, and the more senior we are as leaders the busier we are. In among the frantic activity and the e-mails, with our ambitious targets and tight timescales, there’s no time to reflect – never mind to invest time in doing so with others at our level. When I […]
We are at a time when we’re not sure whether to be depressed by all the bad news regarding the debt, corruption, unceasing politics and other ills that continue to drag Kenya down, or to be hopeful that initiatives such as the Handshake, the Big Four and the Multi-Sector Anti-Corruption Programme will lift us to […]
I feel very sorry for those who work in government, and almost as sorry for those who interact frequently with them. For the public servants, it is not aspects like their remuneration or their office environment that I worry about, however inadequate these may be for some of them. No. My sympathy for them – […]
A speech held by Mike Eldon at the Rotary Club of Nairobi on 7th February 2019 In Rotary we are all leaders in our profession, and here today we are all past, present or future leaders in Rotary. Sometimes we lead, and sometimes we are led, and in Rotary we must establish our reputations as […]
A few years ago I moderated a series of workshops for UNHCR to help them and their implementation partners strategise about the future of the Dadaab refugee camp. Their then Deputy Resident Representative Kilian Kleinschmidt (who is now active in Syria) dreamed of seeing the hand-to-mouth refugee camp dependent on mere humanitarian assistance transform into […]
In my last article of 2018 I promised to write more about one of my favourite management gurus, Prof Edgar Schein of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I described this 90-year old as the father of organisational psychology and organisational culture, and praised the way he was so ahead of his time when he published […]
Exactly ten years ago I wrote a column on careers guidance in which I described how when I joined the Rotary Club of Nairobi in 1978 the first job I was given was to take care of the careers guidance portfolio. Like most young people making their way through their school years I had never […]
