If you only read one book about leadership in the coming months, let it be The Humanized Leader by Dr Martin Oduor-Otieno. For Martin – please allow me to call him that as he and I have worked together in many ways over many years – writes so well about this leadership subject. The book’s […]
From time to time I’ve written here about the relationship between the public and private sectors, going back to when I first started being deeply engaged in this interface in the 1990s. My last article on this was a year ago, when we celebrated the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Kenya Private Sector […]
A few years ago I was walking by the poolside at the Muthaiga Country Club to my table when I spotted my dear friend Bob Munro, now sadly passed away. He was there with his family and with his friend Michael Hopkins, to whom he introduced me. Since then Michael and I became close friends […]
The National Cohesion and Integration Commission, NCIC, was established following the post-election violence of 2008 as one of the commissions that would help re-establish sobriety in Kenyan society. It has been going about its work ever since, with the media mainly expecting it to go after those spouting hate speech. However NCIC was not given […]
I recently participated in a company’s annual management conference in which each departmental manager reported on what they would continue doing because it was working well, and what they would do differently in future. They showed us the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) faced by their departments, and shared the results from the surveys […]
I’ve been reading The Power of a Positive No: Save the Deal Save the Relationship – and Still Say No by William Ury, the author of the earlier bestseller, Getting to Yes. Ury is an experienced mediator, at levels from the corporate to the national, and he is a co-founder of the Harvard Law School […]
Francis Okello has just launched his autobiography, titled CONCERT OF LIFE – From the Lakeshore to the Boardroom, and what a story it is. Like so many of our most prominent Kenyans, his life began in a village. But his ancestors were anything but simple. On the contrary, Okello traces his Luo lineage back several […]
I’ve been reading an interesting 2004 book, From Me to We, by Craig and Marc Kielburger, two brothers who were brought up in a middle-class American home, headed for a normal progression through higher education and into well-paying jobs. But while still in their teens they both were encouraged to fly to the poorest, most […]
Do you describe yourself as an influencer? I mainly mean this in the context of leadership, as there are other places and ways of influencing – including through writing articles like this. In leadership you are responsible for the behaviour and performance of others, and the question is to what extent and how do you […]
Having lost an article I’d written about three of Adam Grant’s books, I asked an AI-ologist friend to find it in my laptop. Unfortunately he couldn’t, so instead he kindly asked ChatCPT to write it on my behalf. He fed thirty of my past columns into the app so it could get a feel for […]
