Entries by artkenya

Making minutes count after a meeting

Writing minutes of meetings offer interesting challenges. They must be neither too long nor unduly brief, just capturing the objective essence of what happened. We usually don’t need to know who said what, for they are not transcripts, but we must record who is to follow up on what and by when. Sounds quite straightforward, […]

Smiling with customers

As in my last article, this one again focuses on customer engagement – or rather lack thereof. The previous one found me in a hospital setting, coaching the man who had just managed me through enduring a CT scan – but without any accompanying human touch. Happily, he reacted positively to my coaching, and I’d […]

Feeling the customer’s pain

When I was in hospital for several weeks with Covid in 2021 I experienced the whole spectrum of service quality, from the outstanding to the adequate and occasionally down to the unacceptably poor, and I wrote something about it in this column – including referring to that wonderful book, If Disney Ran Your Hospital: 9½ […]

Iceberg of ignorance hurts firms

I was recently asked to be a panelist at an event hosted by Hofstede Insights Africa and its Kenya partner, Priority Activator Consulting. Its theme was Aligning culture and strategy – leveraging culture to drive organisational performance, a topic where I feel very much at home. With us were around 30 CEOs who had been […]

Good, bad world and my way

My colleague Frank Kretzschmar and I recently hosted another of our leaders’ circles, where participants tell personal stories around a theme we select. Regular readers of this column may remember articles I have written about earlier such events, including one titled Now more than ever: sustainable living with heart and mind and another, Holding on […]

Mentoring women leaders

Business Monthly magazine recently published a list of our 25 most influential CEOs, and 14 of those selected were women. So good news: in recent years, female representation on boards and in senior management positions in Kenya has been on a steady increase. Yet despite the significant gains made in the past decade or so, […]

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 […]

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 […]