A few weeks ago, my daughter asked me to write a letter to her children, my grandchildren, laying out what it will take for them to lead a happy and fulfilled life. Here’s what I came up with: My dear grandchildren, all three of you are delightful young characters. Each of you is different, with […]
Going through my archives, I came across a report from November 1967 produced by Shell that my father Bruno had passed down to me. At that time he was Shell’s Head of Worldwide Management Training, based in London, and this fascinating document must have acted as a powerful guide to him and his colleagues. What […]
I’ve been reading an article by Carmine Gallo from the January 2020 edition of the Harvard Business Review (HBR) about how the best CEOs are the ones who know they can improve their skills further, not least their communication skills, particularly through coaching. Exactly what I have found in my work as a consultant. The […]
I recently came across this short note from my son Dan at the time he was in America at college in around 1990. Even though we weren’t then living together, he wrote, he felt my presence around in his head, and this in the form of good memories of long talks, lectures, skits and jokes […]
The way people are examining Gen Z mindsets these days one would imagine that the term “rebellious teenager” was coined just the other day. But no. It came about in the Post World War II 1950s, by when a new category between childhood and adulthood had already been identified. Beyond that surely this is a […]
Some months ago, I was sitting at Mombasa airport waiting for my flight back to Nairobi when my eye caught the cover of a book someone near me was carrying. Its title was “Values”, not at all unusual, but the word was printed upside down, and I wondered why. I asked the gentleman with the […]
Before I start let me correct an error in my last column, where I stated that it was 275th. No, it was the 475th. Then, I want to pay tribute to Sunny Bindra, who at the end of last month informed us in his Sunday Nation column which had been running weekly for over two […]
I’ve been asked to run another session on the importance of boards focusing on the culture of the organisations where they are directors. So as I sat down with my blank screen I decided to concentrate my mind on the subject in poetic form, boiling it down to its essence. Here’s what emerged. Too often […]
I drove up less than half a mile along Kabarsiran Avenue to Kibondeni College, where Lisa Issroff, the CEO of the Issroff Family Foundation, was facilitating her session at the NGO Directors’ workshop jointly hosted by them and the Women On Boards Network. In the meeting room were seated around fifty bright young men and […]
Ten years ago, on the eighth anniversary of my first column in this newspaper, I wrote one about what it’s like to be a columnist. With Business Daily celebrating the 18th anniversary of its birth a couple of weeks ago, my editor and I thought it would be good for me to go back to […]
