What joining a book club entails

,

It’s only this year that I enjoyed my first experience with a book club, one that was being launched by my Rotary Club of Nairobi.

We have been meeting monthly ever since, and as it has proved to be such an enriching experience I thought it would be good to share something about it in my last column of the year.

It’s quite demanding reading a book each month (as Sunny Bindra has often challenged us to do), never mind being prepared to make useful contributions to discussions about them.

And just imagine if you are not just a participant but the moderator. More on that later.

There’s so much to organise in forming and running a book club.

First one must benefit from an enthusiastic convener who is able to attract the right number and quality of members and then keep them motivated and active – an easier task for this book club, given that the target is from within our tight Rotary community, plus our younger Rotaracters.

Then one must schedule times to meet that are adequately convenient to all, and decide whether to have the meetings be physical, virtual or hybrid.

A regular monthly time is ideal, but inevitably circumstances arise that result in changes having to be made.

Even then of course some members have last-minute other obligations that prevent them from participating.

‘Please can you record the session,’ they plead, ‘so I can catch up with it later.’ OK if it’s virtual, more difficult otherwise.

Obviously, physical meetings deliver the best conversations and the deepest interactions, but virtual ones attract higher numbers.

As for hybrid sessions, it’s much harder for those participating online to contribute and be heard.

The Key is selecting which books to read several months ahead. Here suggestions are sought from members and we then vote on our preferences.

We agreed we’d have a mix of fiction and non-fiction, of local and international authors, and members proposed titles they thought would appeal to the group.

Needless to say, there was no shortage of good suggestions.

Selecting the books is the easier part. More difficult is nudging members into acquiring the chosen ones, printed or online, and then actually reading them before the due date.

For it turns out that the kind of people who are attracted to join are unduly busy with their professional, family and other commitments.

So while filled with good intentions, experience has shown that come the day quite a number haven’t managed to get around to even opening the month’s book.

One of the important roles of the convener is to seek appropriate volunteers to moderate each session, as good moderation skills are vital for keeping the participants engaged.

The moderators must be skilled at introducing the book and its messages, without taking too much time over it.

They must then seek contributions from members, including the quieter ones who might otherwise not volunteer to speak.

And what about those who are in on the meeting but have only managed to read the odd chapter, or maybe skimmed just a few pages, perhaps none at all?

They can be brought in later, to react to what others have shared.

Time management is important, to ensure coverage of the key aspects and impact of the book, and then to draw the discussions to an elegant conclusion, with suitable closing remarks from the members.

Among the books we’ve dissected are a trio of autobiographies: Obama’s A Promised Land (I was asked to moderate this one, so I had to take extra time beyond the mere reading), Wangari Mathai’s Unbowed, and Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime.

Novels included Wanjiru Koinange’s The Havoc of Choice and Khaled Hossein’s The Kite Runner; while our non-fiction ones were Sunny Bindra’s Up & Ahead (about strategy), Michaela Wrong’s It’s Our Turn to Eat, Adam Grant’s Think Again, and Evelyn Mungai’s From Glass Ceiling to Open Skies.

Each discussion was wonderfully thought-provoking, including cross-referencing previous readings, and for Bindra’s and Grant’s, we talked about how what we had read should be applied to strengthen our Rotary Club.

Indeed our conclusions were later shared with the membership at large, leading us to be described as a think tank!

Each book, and each discussion, would provide excellent material for an article.

If you are not a member of a book club I hope that what you have read here will provoke you into considering joining one.

It will be tough to find the time, but you won’t regret it.

Competent or confident politician?

,

Some time ago I wrote an article about Trump as a man whose I’m-OK-You’re-not-OK behaviour, one that required consistent win-lose interactions with others, masked a deeply insecure soul. Yet despite these insecurities, despite this lack of self-esteem, he built up extraordinary self-confidence, and through bullying, cheating and lying he achieved all that he did.

I refer to this as I recently read a provocative article in the London Times about Britain’s immediate former Prime Minister, Liz Truss. The headline said it all: “Truss proves talent-free bluster isn’t just for men”. And the opening paragraph tells us she broke one of the last glass ceilings. Not as the first female PM in her country, for she was not, but as “the first woman to reach the highest office propelled by gargantuan self-belief alone”.

Writer Janice Turner rightly reckons the kind of self-belief she displayed has not been associated with her gender. Indeed, she tells us, feminists have been known to pray “Lord, grant me the confidence of a mediocre man”.

We’ve been reading a lot about women holding back from higher office while younger and less experienced men lobby their way through. Here though, Ms Turner observed “a shameless, narcissistic, talent-free sense of entitlement”. Wow. Lots in common with Trump for sure, and indeed with so many politicians the world over.

I have also written about the competence-confidence matrix, with the competent one who lacks confidence often suffering from the “imposter syndrome”, while the confident one who lacks competence displays a cocky arrogance. The ideal position, as espoused by my heroes such as Ed Schein and Adam Grant, are those who behave with “confident humility”.

So where is Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss’s successor, in all of this? In a much better place. We have been reading about the values with which he was brought up and which it appears he has been able to largely hold on to despite entering the cut and thrust world of win-lose politics: family, honesty, education and hard work. Not a bad quartet.

His competence, certainly in matters financial, is indisputable. And his communication skills are definitely superior to hers. Well, that’s no big deal, as rarely have I come across such a wooden performer as Liz Truss in such a high office. Boy was she in need of coaching…but who knows, maybe her excess of self-esteem over self-awareness made her uncoachable.

How about our politicians here? For sure some are more competent than others, and some are better communicators than others. Many are at their best at high-octane campaign rallies whose objectives are mere entertainment, hype and goodies-distribution, while others know how to switch between such show-business performance and more serious and substantive output.

To be a politician, confidence is everything. As each one puts themselves forward for election, they are certain they will win, however justified or unjustified their optimism. So it was with Truss, so it was with Sunak; and so it was with all our political candidates in August, including those who lost.

Our responsibility as citizens is to study the competence-confidence mix of those who seek our votes, where competence includes adherence to good values and where mere confidence is woefully insufficient.

It was good to see the Mkenya Daima campaign focusing on this requirement for not only selecting good men and women, but then holding those who succeed at the ballot to account. It is why the Mkenya Daima tag line is Nitatenda Wajibu Wangu (I will do my responsibility).

It’s so dispiriting to me to see huge numbers of voters in the developed world casting their support for the Trumps and the Trusses of this world.

It shows the weakness in the civic education provided in so many countries that allows for populist promise-makers to get away with what they clearly should not… including Boris Johnson and his Brexit ones.

We’ve been through our elections just a few months ago. Have we selected enough of the humbly competent? Stay on the ball, fellow Kenyans, as President William Ruto has challenged us to do.

Rishi Sunak promised British citizens a government of “professionalism, integrity and accountability at all levels”. And President Ruto, when he confirmed his new cabinet, also called for integrity and accountability. We must indeed “do our responsibility”.

Do your part to end civic illiteracy ahead of polls

,

Some of us struggled more than others in 2021: some with their health, some with their livelihoods and others with both. For me, as readers of this column are aware, my severe encounter with Covid-19 meant I was out of action for quite some time. But here we are at the beginning of a new year, and I thought it would be good to share some reflections on the state of the nation as we enter this season of election frenzy.

For quite some time now we have settled into expecting only Ruto-Raila front-page headlines in the dailies, as the media responds to our apparently insatiable appetite for following the non-stop race to State House, with all its noisy competition. Huge political rallies are the order of the day, as our politicians roam the country building momentum for their respective causes.

They gather their packed crowds, where few wear masks and those who do mainly hang them around their necks – great for spreading Covid-19. And this while shopping malls understandably require visitors to show their Covid certificates. Some have rightly asked “why not those attending rallies?”

These rallies, and so much else around political campaigning, are costing millions of shillings each and every week, and we are still gathering speed for the increasingly hectic cash-spraying we shall witness in the months ahead. This causes many of us deep concern about where all the money is coming from, with no limits imposed, as though an endless easy supply is on tap.

Equally concerning is the overwhelming attention being paid to campaigning by our politicians and others at the expense of worrying about Covid-19, the state of the day-to-day economy, and the country’s longer-term development. Except, admittedly, through their evolving manifesto headliners, with their catchy high-cost giveaway approaches to reducing unemployment and poverty.

The media loves following this source of vivid entertainment, with its cast of colourful, adrenalin-fuelled personalities. The crowds love it too, happy to enjoy as many rallies as they can be bussed to. For whom will they vote though? For the ones they believe will make the best leaders, the most skilled at governing? Or the most “generous” today, the most entertaining, the ones who are from their own ethnic group?

My sense is that reasonable awareness exists about who can perform well as leaders. But such rational awareness is too often overwhelmed by behaviour that succumbs to short-term gratification (a nice way of describing handouts).

Over the holidays, reading Robin D.G. Kelley’s foreword to America at War with Itself by Henry A. Giroux, I came across the term “civic illiteracy” – a “cultivated and imposed state” in that country according to him, and I related it to such a phenomenon here, where politicians have led voters to expect to be paid if they are to be supported. How sad.

I have never heard a single one of the candidates, at any level, refer to our national values – the ones buried deep in our Constitution and never sought out by our leaders. Such values were well promoted in the BBI document, but inevitably the politicians– and hence the media – merely selected the component that they claim mitigates against our winner-take-all style of elections and ignored everything else.

So, while the politicians play with their politics, the rest of us must find immediate and practical ways to deal with issues such as containing Covid-19; increasing the productivity of our farmers and the competitiveness of our manufacturers; mitigating the consequences of climate change; nurturing self-discipline in our schools; and reducing the digital divide.

I have now lived in Kenya for not too far off half a century, and throughout my time here I have seen the amazingly high potential of this wonderful country and its energetic, enthusiastic and entrepreneurial people, many highly educated. They are why Kenya has achieved so much since it threw off the shackles of colonialism. Equally however, it has consistently been my strong feeling that Kenya has greatly underachieved relative to its great potential.

We have outstanding leaders here, world class – including and not least in the very challenging public sector. But not so much in the world of politics. As we enter this year of elections, my appeal to you readers of the Business Daily is to do what you can to influence those around you to vote for candidates who will create that enabling environment within which we can all feel proud of living our Vision 2030 by that time.

PS. Just a few hours after I wrote this article I heard the President’s New Year message, in which he called for leadership over politics, and for boldness and vision over popularity. Kudos, Your Excellency.

Why Kenya needs brand new vision

,

From time to time I am fortunate to be exposed to the highly thoughtful, well-informed and articulate WhatsApps of John Ngumi, and his most recent was one of his best. In it he asked for “an idea, a vision of Kenya, that will help get us out of our national malaise, will give us a national goal and purpose that can excite and focus us all”.

With that he took a step back into history, starting with the immediate pre-Independence period, when the national goal and cry was “Uhuru”, regularly interchanged with “Uhuru na Kenyatta”. These reflected a fervent belief that with Independence, and with Jomo Kenyatta freed from imprisonment and leading his people, all would be well for the future.

In the immediate post-Independence years, Ngumi reminded us, the national focus changed to “Uhuru na Kazi”. There may not have been unanimity as to what this actually entailed, and there were fierce ideological battles on what “Uhuru” meant to various groups of Kenyans, some who had benefited and some who had lost out. But there was a consensus that while we had hard work ahead of us to build a nation, we could do it.

The seventies saw malaise, cynicism and anger start getting into the national body politic, a result partly of the political turmoils of the 1960s, but also because of an inevitable sense of let-down as we grappled with nascent nationhood and its challenges.

There was a short-lived attempt to reignite a sense of national purpose through the Mwai Kibaki-led “The Kenya We Want” initiative, which sought to get us focused on the difficult economic years ahead post the 1973 oil price rise and subsequent global recession, acknowledging that we no longer had easy economic options. This never really caught on.

A brief period of optimism in the late 1970s and early 1980s was then followed by a time about which the less said about national visions, dreams and goals, the better.

The Second Liberation of the late 1980s refocused and galvanised Kenyans, eventually leading to the heady days of 2002-3, when all seemed possible. We didn’t really have a galvanising rallying call thereafter. That was not in the character or style of President Kibaki, but we did have a sense of doing things, with Vision 2030 epitomising the calm, somewhat dry, technocratic approach favoured by his administration.
And today? It struck Ngumi that we have reached a period “in which cynicism and scepticism reign supreme, a widespread and almost automatic disbelief in the goodness, wisdom or purpose of anything government says or does, a belief that what’s-in-it-for-me is the ruling ethos among any who get a sniff at public office and power, that those who lead will grab, steal, manipulate all systems and institutions, in order to amass and retain wealth, power and privileges. Truly a dispiriting moment of low expectations, and even lower national self-belief and self-confidence.”

And yet, Ngumi insists, good, positive things are happening all around us. Innovation in the digital and wider IT space. An emerging rediscovery of MSMEs’ potential. A Covid-induced increasing confidence that we actually can manufacture things that we had always assumed had to be imported.

A tentative start, again Covid-induced, to tackling long standing problems such as cleaning up our towns, using initiatives like Kazi Mtaani. A laying down of infrastructure which, no matter how expensively acquired, is there, can be used. A fierce constitutionalism and sense of rights among the citizenry, who increasingly do not hesitate to assert their rights, including resorting to legal action. A growing willingness and determination to hold leaders to account at all levels.

In short, Ngumi is telling us that “Yes We Can”. But not if we don’t believe it. And for us to believe we can we must have a goal, a sense of purpose, a national ambition around which we can galvanise our energies, drive and ingenuity.

YES WE CAN

He doesn’t think “attaining middle income status by 20…” or suchlike will do it for us.

We’ll just yawn cynically, he believes. He would love for us to have a grand ambition, like leading an African Renaissance.

Thabo Mbeki tried that, to general continental indifference.

Obama beat us to Yes We Can. And yet Ngumi feels we need a spark to release all these fierce energies and drive that we have in great abundance, to turn these positively outward towards national goals.

Ngumi concluded his Whatsapp by asking for ideas, and so – with his permission – that’s how I close… for now. Ideas please, readers!

Influence, not power yields better output from employees

,

My first leadership experience came when I arrived in Kenya in 1977 to be the general manager of the local subsidiary of a multinational IT company.

Both the Kenyans who reported to me and the Brits to whom I reported expected me to be the proverbial “Big Man”, perceived as all-knowing, all-wise and all-powerful.

And when I refused to buy into such an impossible scenario, when I took time consulting with and developing the newly-promoted management team around me, I was branded by my bosses as “weak and indecisive”.

It was something I learned to live with, knowing that my style meant that the staff felt more respected, more empowered, more motivated – and hence more productive.

Dominant personalities anywhere tend to impose their will on others. Never mind if their title and corresponding authority make it possible for them to adopt a “do as I say” approach.

Yet more so in these days of flat organisational pyramids and loose networks, not to mention the nomadic tendencies of knowledge workers, it is unlikely to get a leader very far.

The challenge for such leaders is to graduate from being perpetual overloaded decision-makers and dispensers of instructions to becoming spreaders of positive influence.

OK, other than in the middle of a crisis perhaps. You need a particular kind of strength to hold back from micro-managing, and a boldness to trust others and to delegate to them.

This in turn presupposes an optimistic disposition and a positive view of human nature. It was Douglas McGregor who in 1960 introduced his Theory X and Theory Y, where Theory X supports the view that we humans are lazy and try to avoid work. Theory Y, meanwhile, postulates that working comes naturally, and also that under suitable conditions people do seek responsibility.

Each set of assumptions leads us to a different view of how we can and should lead. If we think people are intrinsically lazy then we must control them firmly for work to get done.

Theory X also imagines that most people prefer to be told what to do, and dislike taking risks or assuming responsibility. So again, we must play the “stern parent” to the “naughty child”.

Theory Y calls on us to provide inspiring visions and to focus on aligning individuals’ objectives with organisational ones.

If this is present then they will feel free to use their imagination and creativity to perform optimally. Adherents to Theory Y believe that leading through supportive influence rather than controlling authority is the path to take.

The way we lead is reflected in how we behave, and to grow our circle of influence we must be emotionally intelligent.

This means that we must, as Stephen Covey told us, “seek first to understand, then seek to be understood”, which in turn requires us to ask questions rather than feel obliged always to provide answers, and to be open listeners.

We must lead by example and build win-win relationships with those around us. We must be coaches and enablers of those we lead, appreciating that the more they grow and the more trustworthy they become, the more we free ourselves to focus on higher level strategic issues.

Such cultures, where leaders create enabling environments for learning and growth, should percolate throughout an organisation. So when we talk about leaders and leadership we don’t only mean CEOs and directors.

Indeed there are no exceptions to leading, as we should all exercise reflective self-leadership, where the coach within acts as our positive influencer.

In today’s world of rapid and uncertain change, no leader can afford to pose as “The Big Man”.

Contemporary leadership requires men and women in positions of responsibility to reassure those around them so they may cope with all the inconvenient disruptions of this 21st century while fulfilling both their own goals and those of the organisations where they work.

Leading through influence is far less efficient than exercising top-down authority. But unless one approaches leadership in this subtler style, respect and loyalty will be eroded and for sure the outcome will be unsustainable and ultimately self-defeating.

Kind of leadership needed to deal with a crisis effectively

,

I was in London last month at the time when snow covered the city, to work on a leadership programme with the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR).

One of those with me carried a wonderful book that I then also bought, The Greats on Leadership by Jocelyn Davis.

In it Mr Davis offers summaries of what 24 great authors have had to say over the centuries about different elements and circumstances of leadership, and then discusses these in a contemporary context.

So for instance he builds on Machiavelli’s writing to explore change, Plato’s to examine justice, Bernard Shaw’s to promote vision… and Shakespeare’s to help leaders deal with crises.

Mr Davis turns to Shakespeare’s Henry V for inspiration on the subject, lauding the victor over the greatly superior French forces in the battle of Agincourt as a “learning leader”.

I read this chapter with particular interest as on my return from London I was a member of the faculty delivering the Transformative Leadership programme run jointly by the Aga Khan University Graduate School of Media and Communication and the Harvard Kennedy School, within which one of my sessions was on the voice of leadership in periods of crisis.

Our whole programme was based on the Adaptive Leadership approach promoted by Ronald Heifetz, the founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School, about which I wrote in an earlier column.

Heifetz explains how leadership must be treated as an activity rather than a position, and in his chapter on crisis Davis quotes Heifetz at length on the subject.

The Harvard professor, acknowledges Mr Davis, writes eloquently on the “learning zone” and its importance to teams and organisations in crisis, showing how it exists between the overly cool comfort zone of complacency and the too-hot-to-handle zone of danger and panic.

In normal times we exist in the comfort zone where stress levels are low, but an emergency hurls us into the high-stress danger zone. There, effective leadership as practiced by the likes of Henry V delivers the sharp focus and fast action that overcome the tendency merely to fight, flee or freeze.

Mr Davis then explains more about how to remain in such a zone at these most difficult times. He does this by constructing a chart that shows “Unity” on the vertical axis and “Agility” on the horizontal one, where both need to be high for the learning zone to be alive and well – more so during and after times of crisis.

It’s not so hard for unity to be high in normal circumstances, when there is less urgent need for extreme agility. He calls the upper left quadrant, with high unity and low agility, the “complacency zone”, where signs of impending crisis are met with a chorus of “Around here we always… “.

He then takes us to the lower right quadrant, his “Disconnection zone”, where agility outweighs unity and everyone worries about saving their own skin – the Titanic syndrome. At least as lamentable is the lower left “Blame zone”, where both unity and agility are low and the concern is blame-avoidance.

Finally to Henry V territory, the upper right “Learning zone”, where great leadership first asks how we can resolve our problems and move forward together; then how I contributed to the difficulties and what I must do differently to avoid making the same mistakes again; and only after to examine how they, the other team members, contributed to what happened and how I can coach them to learn and be better prepared for the next crisis.

In the discussion during my session on leadership in crisis the participants — some of whom were in leadership positions in large hospitals — reviewed the recent one at Kenyatta National Hospital, where head surgery was performed on the wrong patient. And later they reflected on how they had dealt with crises that involved their own organisations.

What about you? Are you in the league of Henry V? Or would the Titanic have sunk under your command too? In this volatile and uncertain world of ours, it’s good for all of us to reflect on how effectively we will deal with our next crisis.

Kenya must entrench basic skills to plug unemployment gap

,

My sister’s Christmas present to me when she came from London was David Goodhart’s new book, The Road to Somewhere. I’d never heard of Goodhart, but I am an admirer of the thoughtful Prospect magazine of which he was the founder editor. (Whenever I fly with British Airways I find a copy on board, and immediately pounce on it.)

So where is the “Somewhere” in his title? Or rather, who are his “Somewheres? They are people rooted in a specific place or community, usually a small town or in the countryside, socially conservative, often less educated. And these he contrasts to the “Anywheres”, who are footloose, often urban and socially liberal, university educated (the “exam-passing classes”, the “cognitive elite”) and upwardly mobile.

In Britain, he reckons that Somewheres, many of whom are the “left-behinds”, make up roughly half the population, with Anywheres accounting for 20 to 25 per cent and the rest classified as “Inbetweeners”.

Goodhart describes them as belonging to different “Values tribes”. The Somewheres are characterised by an unease with the modern world, a nostalgic sense that “change is loss” and the strong belief that it is the job of British leaders to put the interests of Britons first.

Anywheres, meanwhile, are free of nostalgia; egalitarian and meritocratic in their attitude to race, sexuality and gender; and light in their attachments to larger group identities, including national ones; they value autonomy and self-realisation before stability, community and tradition.

You can readily deduce which tribe wishes to remain in the EU and which craves Brexit — just as you can guess where most of Trump’s supporters fit. With nearly half of British students benefitting from higher education, and — in the developed world at least — with fewer and fewer opportunities for those without significant academic qualifications, the gap between the tribes risks widening further.

I was only a few pages into the book when I began to reflect on Kenyan Somewheres and Anywheres and Inbetweeners. For these tribes exist here as they do in Britain, America and elsewhere.

Our Anywheres are drawn to Nairobi just as their British counterparts swarm into London, expecting that the capital is the only place where they can fulfill their potential. And from there so many Kenyan Anywheres find opportunities elsewhere in Africa and way beyond.

But Goodhart suggests that there can be virtue in staying put and remaining loyal to one’s community — as we are beginning to find with the newfound draw to the counties that has come with devolution.

Just as in the developed world, we have our rising middle class professionals who are at ease in the competitive global village, and we also have our “left-behinds” — those without the skills needed to make them employable and without the unusual character-traits of job-creators.

Goodhart praises Germany for having managed the Anywhere-Somewhere balance best, with its much greater focus on “the middling and the local” — not least through its apprenticeship system that continues to confer respect on even basic jobs.

In Britain by contrast the apprenticeship system never recovered from the de-industrialisation of the 1980s. They “went out of intellectual fashion”, writes Goodhart, perhaps wrongly considered too job-specific to be of use in this era of flexibility.

And like here (indeed perhaps acting as our inspiration) polytechnics were upgraded to universities, leaving an awful vacuum of institutions offering technical and vocational training.

Like here too, in Britain these skills and qualifications are looked down upon, making the low demand for them out of balance with the great shortage of those who possess them.

At least now, here as elsewhere, there is a realisation of this folly, and steps are being taken to fill the void.

Goodhart calls for leaders who not only understand the feelings and aspirations of both Somewheres and Anywheres but can find ways of bringing them closer together rather than merely appealing to one or the other for their support.

His appeal is aimed primarily at the British ones, but surely they apply equally to ours. As we launch on our journey through 2018 I close by wishing my readers a fruitful one, whether they be Somewheres or Anywheres or Inbetweeners.

Lucas Marang’a – Deadlines

,

Click image to continue reading this article on Lucas’ website:

Deadlines.