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Sunwords.com by Sunny Bindra (94 unread)

Sony’s insular culture just didn’t see it coming

Posted: May 14, 2012, 2:40 pm by Sunny Bindra

“…Sony, which once defined Japan’s technological prowess,
wowed the world with the Walkman and the Trinitron TV and shocked
Hollywood with bold acquisitions like Columbia Pictures, is now in the
fight of its life.

In fact, it is in a fight for its life – a development that exemplifies
the stunning decline of Japan’s industrialized economy. Once upon a time,
Japan Inc., not to mention Sony itself, seemed invulnerable. Today, Sony
and many other Japanese manufacturers are pressed on all sides: by rising
Asian rivals, a punishingly strong Japanese yen and, in Sony’s case, an
astonishing lack of ideas.”

HIROKO TABUCHI New York Times (15 April 2012)

So what happened to Sony? Just the other day it was an iconic Japanese firm, one whose brand stood for innovation and product quality. Now, as Hiroko Tabuchi tells us in a recent issue of the NYT, it is widely thought to be in a fight for its life.

This, don’t forget, is the company that gave us the Walkman and the Discman, the Trinitron TV, the Playstation and many other hit products. It was the firm that raided corporate America and bought out Columbia Pictures. Just a few years ago, Sony products sold for a premium compared to rivals, and were to be found in many of the world’s better-off households.

This is the firm that is now declaring a $6-billion-plus annual loss; that has failed to make a profit since 2008; and whose share price hit a quarter-century low last week. Sony’s market value is now one-ninth that of Samsung Electronics, and just one-thirtieth of Apple’s – both companies it dominated in years past.

How exactly do you go from so good to so bad?

Ms Tabuchi tells us that this is “the story of a proud company that was unwilling or unable to adapt to realities of the global marketplace. Sony’s gravest mistake was that it failed to ride some of the biggest waves of technological innovation in recent decades: digitalization, a shift toward software and the importance of the Internet.”

This rings true. The company has not had a leading-edge hit product for longer than I can remember. Its Bravia televisions were the last market-leaders Sony has fielded; but those have faded badly against the onslaught of the ever-improving Samsung and LG sets. Walkmans were eclipsed by Apple’s iPods; video-game players failed to keep up with Microsoft’s Kinect and others.

Insiders reveal an astonishing tale of rigid product silos within Sony, resolutely refusing to co-operate and create products that spanned divisions. Meanwhile, the rest of the world did just that, designing music players that also showed videos; phones that took pictures and browsed the internet; cameras that connected with online photo galleries.

In other words, the focus of consumer electronics shifted from the quality of the product to the quality of the user experience, marrying software and hardware to create exciting, multidimensional new products like the Apple iPhone and iPad and the Samsung Galaxy. Sony, too consumed by internal divisions and too proud of its past, simply never saw it coming.

Sony could still be turned around, and I hope it is. But it will take much pain and re-imagination.

This could happen to your company. It is a curse to become too successful, a curse that takes years to manifest itself. It takes the form of hubris, insularity and complacency. When the curse does become clear to all, it is often too late to do anything about it.

The lesson for business leaders is to be very, very careful about premature celebrations. Do not let a sense of superiority creep in; do not allow people to take their eye off the industry and the market; do not imagine you have all the technology worth having; don’t think you’re the best you can be. A little paranoia, even in the face of heady success, is no bad thing for a leader to have.

We lost a decade in reforming Kenya’s state corporations

Posted: May 13, 2012, 10:38 am by Sunny Bindra

Back in 2003, we thought we had put the era of truly horrible state corporations behind us. The new government of the day, swept into power in a massive rejection of the failures and excesses of the 1990s, promised to reform the public sector and revitalize all of Kenya’s dead or dying parastatals.

A good start was made: new management teams were installed; performance contracts were introduced; professional managers from the private sector were recruited to inject expertise; “ICT” became the buzzword in the corridors of state corporations.

So what happened? When we look around us with an objective eye, what do we see? Wherever there is a state corporation, there is often disarray and disorder and service failure. Nine years after the vital project to construct a new world-class airport in Nairobi commenced, the passenger has yet to feel any benefit. Our great port in Mombasa is still bedevilled by unending corruption, service delays and ethnic strife in its leadership.

The energy sector remains besmirched by unending accusations of procurement scams. The Kenyan power consumer is now subjected to regular and unpredictable blackouts, and still pays a world-topping price for electricity. Our social security fund still grapples with ghosts from its controversial past. Afters years of reversals, we are yet to have a viable and useful rail network.

I could go on, but what’s the point? The recent controversies surrounding the National Health Insurance Fund, and the subsequent farce played out in front of television cameras, should prove to us once and for all that we have a problem here. Wrangles, scams, political divisions and power plays are the order of the day.

If we keep looking away and pretending nothing is wrong, we will retard our national progress for another decade. This madness has real consequences, after all: it costs us the education of our children, the health of our citizenry, the competitiveness of our industries.

I write this with a heavy heart. I meet many excellent managers and board members from state corporations, with good intentions and a professional approach to their work, and have no wish to discourage them. But they are mostly hamstrung by the tentacles of the system in which they work; one in which political patronage, rampant corruption and narrow private interests prevent any real progress.

What can we learn from the handful of state corporations that have actually excelled and made a difference? First, that leadership matters. You cannot leave the board and senior executive positions of these vital institutions to the whims of politicians – you have to recruit purely on merit, qualifications and integrity. Second, that you have to instil a fresh work ethic and culture in employees used to slovenly standards of service, and that invariably takes time. Third, that you need a layer of protection from the politicians who always circle around state corporations like vultures, seeking campaign funding.

The new constitution, when properly implemented, will address many of these issues. New policies governing state corporations are also due to be published soon. But the path to reform will be a rocky one, resisted by all those who have benefited from badly run, poorly controlled public institutions.

Meanwhile, the people of Kenya should stop accepting bad performance from state bodies as somehow natural or expected. It is not. We have lost a decade in which decisive action and systematic reform could have achieved wonders. Instead we are left wondering what might have been.

A good public corporation should have no lesser standards then a private one. If anything it should have the advantage of meaning, of working for the public good rather than private enrichment. But to attain this, state corporations should be run by the best and brightest and ring-fenced from partisan politics and narrow interests. For a state corporation to have any meaning, it must work solely in the interest of the people.

Manage the essence, not the message

Posted: May 7, 2012, 11:22 am by Sunny Bindra

The biggest problem with the reputation industry, however, is its central conceit: that the way to deal with potential threats to your reputation is to work harder at managing your reputation. The opposite is more likely: the best strategy may be to think less about managing your reputation and concentrate more on producing the best products and services you can. BP’s expensive “beyond petroleum” branding campaign did nothing to deflect the jeers after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Brit Insurance’s sponsorship of England’s cricket teams has won it brownie points in the short term, but may not really be the best way to build a resilient business. Many successful companies, such as Amazon, Costco, Southwest Airlines and Zappos, have been notable for their intense focus on their core businesses, not for their fancy marketing. If you do your job well, customers will say nice things about you and your products.

The Economist (21 April 2011)

Business leaders these days are bombarded with fresh advice regarding what might be their biggest asset: their reputation. They are asked actively to manage their reputations via heavy investments in public-relations contracts, brand building, social media engagement and “mind-share.”

I have always found such advice to be wrong-headed and self-serving, and it was good to see a comprehensive rebuttal recently in The Economist‘s Schumpeter column.

There can be no doubt reputation is an extremely valuable thing. As companies and markets mature, importance moves away from tangibles (buildings, equipment, locations) to intangibles (reputation, customer loyalty, employee spirit). After a while, anyone can do the “tangibles thing,” but few can pull off becoming distinctive through things that you can’t even see or touch.

Reputation is one key intangible. No one denies its importance. Ask giants such as Toyota, BP, News International, Goldman Sachs, RIM and many others who have suffered huge reputation damage in recent years. The best way to manage or improve your reputation, however, is where the problem lies.

The excerpt shown touches on the essential wisdom: you don’t manage reputation by managing it directly; you manage it by working on the essentials of your business, which in turn influence your reputation. If you want to boost your reputation, in other words, boost your business basics: your efficiency, service levels, product quality, reliability and consistency.

Few managers want to hear this, as getting the basics right is hard work that takes years to get right. It’s far more seductive to think you can gain a quick and relatively cheap reputation boost by having a savvy PR advisor, advertising guru, or spin doctor. You can’t. No amount of spin can turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse.

This is a growing trend in Kenya, and an unfortunate one: a flow of positive messages in traditional and social media, about essentially bad companies. The thing is this: people who run good businesses spend their time running good businesses, not talking about them. When products and service are great, that fact is obvious. Reputation takes care of itself. Smart brand management is then an additional layer of excellence, not a shallow substitute for the real thing.

When the basics are bad, however – when quality is shoddy, service is sour, reliability is non-existent – no amount of massaging can get rid of that problem. You have to fix the basics first. Feel-food advertising, sugary social-media management, corporate social responsibility projects or manipulation of online metrics will not help you.

If your investors, employees and customers don’t have faith in you, your goose is cooked. No amount of smoke or mirrors can get you out of that one. The best reputation is not a wig or a smart suit; it is a reflection of inner goodness.

The ‘Uta do?’ culture that kills quality standards

Posted: May 6, 2012, 11:19 am by Sunny Bindra

Whatever happened to “First-Time Quality?” It seems to have become an irrelevance in Kenya today.

The idea is simple enough. If you get something right the first time, you don’t have to incur the cost of inspections, revisits, rework or repeat jobs. If you pay acute attention and maintain a high standard when you do something, you will make a lot more money: because you’ll have a satisfied customer who will want to stay loyal to your company; and because you’ll cut out all the costs of redoing the work.

So what happened in Kenya? Why do so few business leaders impose the mantra of first-time quality on their teams? Why are we constantly fielding complaints and offering to redo things? I just don’t get it. Do we actually enjoy being second-rate, or what?

What is wrong with building contractors? They seem to routinely put up shoddy constructions, full of defects. They then spend months redoing the wiring, fixing obvious leaks, re-plastering walls that were done badly. Why? Why is it not possible to maintain a high standard every time you do something, so that you build your brand reputation and minimize the costs of reworking?

Why are utility companies constantly on the road, attending to leaks, blackouts and cut-offs – simply because they didn’t do something right in the first place? Why do power transformers keep breaking down, water pipes keep bursting, and roads have to be re-carpeted after every bit of rainfall? It’s not about the weather; it’s about the missing quality standard.

Consider the philosophy of “Zero Defects,” coined by management specialist Phil Crosby. Is such a thing even possible, you shout? Out here in Africa? Where so many things can go wrong?

Consider this: How many times have you mistakenly picked up the wrong child from school? Or erroneously paid out the wrong salary to an employee? Or inadvertently gotten into bed with the wrong spouse? Right here in oh-so-difficult Africa?

Not often, I bet. Those tasks are usually done just right the first time and every time, with great precision. Why? Because a bad outcome would be unthinkable. The attention is focused because the consequences are grave.

Our building contractors, utility providers and assorted other businesses are getting away with utterly slipshod quality, first time and every time, simply because the consequences are not grave enough. Bad quality doesn’t lose them business for many reasons: because their customers are docile and uncomplaining; because their competitors are often worse at this quality thing than they are; or because they are corrupt monopolists who routinely shout a rude and crude “Uta do?” to their customers.

This is a national shame. You don’t stand up to be counted in the world if your quality is slovenly. You don’t build international competitiveness; you don’t create a national export engine; you don’t command premium prices if you are content to play in the fourth division.

I fear too many of our organizations are all too happy to languish in the lower reaches, and neither their customers nor government regulators are demanding better. Take a look at the quality of buildings, roads, consumer products or hospitality offerings and you will understand why “Made in Kenya” is not a badge of honour; why we have a persistent trade deficit; why we produce such few world-beating enterprises.

We have to demand better. It is not good enough to spend our hard-earned money and taxes on people who can’t run their organizations properly. It is not good enough to fund the activities of cowboys and rogues. It is not good enough to look away from the corrupt practices that allow the slapdash and the slipshod to prosper unchecked.

Make it an issue in your life. This is a drum worth beating.

A great leader takes the blame when things go wrong

Posted: April 30, 2012, 12:45 pm by Sunny Bindra

“Pep Guardiola has defended Lionel Messi after his penalty miss as good as cost Barcelona a place in the Champions League final.
Messi has enjoyed an extraordinary run of form in the past four seasons, scoring 63 goals in all competitions this season alone. However, he failed to find the net in either leg of Barcelona’s semi-final against Chelsea – and crashed his second-half penalty off the bar during their 3-2 aggregate defeat.
…Guardiola said: “We have got this far thanks to this kid. More than ever I want to thank him for what he’s done.
“My admiration for him knows no limits. He is an example for all of us, his competitiveness inspires us. He’s daring, he’s brave and he plays fantastically well in all kinds of different conditions.
“I don’t doubt he will have a few bad hours now but sometimes you smile and sometimes you are sad and it’s our turn to be sad.”

The Guardian (25 April 2011)

Many years ago, I was a very junior management consultant working on my first ever assignment in London: a very high-profile privatization project. I was part of a team of hundreds, and it was the single biggest assignment in the history of my employer at the time. The privatization was also a highly politicized event, attracting much opposition and media attention.

So what did I do? I carelessly left a bag containing highly confidential documents entrusted to me lying in a car park.

After realizing my error in a heart-stopping moment later, I rushed back to the car park. To no avail. The bag was gone.

I had been in the job just a month or so, and had already messed it up. I went into the office of the senior partner of the consulting division to explain what had happened, and to hand in my resignation.

After hearing me out patiently, this is what she said: “It doesn’t matter. It was a human error. I’ve done the same in my time. Never mind, I will take responsibility and handle the matter.”

I looked at her dumbstruck. As we were speaking, the phone rang. A taxi-driver had found the bag and was calling to return it. The situation was saved.

I have never forgotten that act of leadership. Rosemary Radcliffe, if ever you read this article, I still salute you and talk about you to leaders everywhere.

I was reminded of Ms Radcliffe when I read Barcelona coach Pep Guardiola’s comments on his star player, Lionel Messi, following their crushing Champions League defeat to Chelsea last week.

A lesser coach may have directed some blame towards Messi, who missed several chances over the two legs and even wasted a penalty that would probably have decided the outcome. Not Guardiola.

As shown in the excerpt, the coach was protective of his player and effusive in his praise of the latter’s achievements to date. He would not countenance a blame game.

Contrast that with leaders you (and I) know, who look for a scapegoat the minute a crisis occurs, and readily offer up a blood sacrifice to appease the baying crowd. These are the leaders who protect their personal image at all costs; who treat employees like expendable resources; who will never have the expansiveness of spirit to do something for others.

Leadership is, and always has been, about character. It is about getting the best out of others, after all. You don’t do that by protecting yourself first and throwing your team out to the dogs. Nor do you do it by setting the example of self-absorption. Ms Radcliffe and Mr Guardiola know something we should all understand: true character is revealed during a moment of truth, when the leader has something significant to lose.

Do remember that when you face your next crisis.

It’s not the superhighway that counts – it’s what you do with it

Posted: April 29, 2012, 10:48 am by Sunny Bindra

Kenya has spent more on infrastructure projects in the past decade than at any other time in its history. And there is more to come.

That is a great and necessary thing. Projects like undersea cables, superhighways and bypasses, link roads, rural power connections, bridges and port expansions will all have significant impact on our national income and growth. As Kenyans, we are proud to be coming of age in infrastructure terms.

But here’s the thing: it’s not the infrastructure that aids development; it’s what you do with it.

I read with dismay a police report that there have already been seventy-plus deaths on the new Thika Superhighway since January this year. That figure seemed to pass without comment. Did any leader look at it and shout: “This is unacceptable?” Because it is indeed unacceptable.

Why have so many deaths occurred? For two reasons: first, that highway has been opened to the public in the most slipshod manner possible. It has had neither signage nor road markings; lanes are opened and closed without warning or indication; and there is hardly ever any traffic-police presence on it to guide motorists.

Second, we know Kenyans have become some of the world’s most reckless, ill-disciplined, ill-mannered and self-centred drivers. The story is repeated every day on every road; but when that crazy behaviour is taken to a major highway, only mayhem can ensue.

Without controls or regulation of drivers, the death rate on the superhighway can only climb. Drivers enter and leave the highway at random; they engage in very dangerous cross-lane stunts; they drive against the traffic; they stop suddenly to pick up passengers. Add to that the number of pedestrians who jaywalk on a highway meant only for vehicles, and you have created all the conditions for a deathtrap.

Why do we do it like this? These deaths are not a necessary cost of development; they are the cost of bad implementation. Why can we not hold contractors to account when it comes to proper signage, drainage and lighting? Why can we not police and regulate that road to impose good behaviour and penalize the worst offenders? Do we have no feeling for all these needless deaths? What will it take for our leaders to be concerned – do they need to be personally affected in order to take any meaningful action?

There is a wider point to be made here. Just because we are in Africa, we need not settle for second- and third-best every time. We must not be grateful for just getting new roads – we must demand roads that are well-made, well-commissioned, well-maintained and well-run. And that demand must be made across every bit of infrastructure that is introduced.

We are on the cusp of a great moment in our history. All of these infrastructure developments, combined with changes in governance and in spiralling economic demand, will indeed bestow great dividends. But that does not mean things don’t have to be done properly. Let us not undo all the good work we are doing because we can’t be bothered to do it right.

Infrastructure is the ‘hardware’ of development. What people do with it is the ‘software.’ So far, our software is shoddy. To work on this software, we must engage some fundamentals. Great delivery doesn’t just happen – it has to be led and managed. People don’t just behave themselves for the common good – they have to be made to. Drivers used to potholed, unregulated chaos don’t just automatically become accustomed to the protocols of a new, complicated highway – they have to be shown the way.

So let those whose job it is to manage these things wake up and do this infrastructure thing properly. We must demand no less.

When you don’t say what you mean – a new poem by Sonya Kassam

Posted: April 25, 2012, 4:46 pm by Sunny Bindra

Diplomacy Today

Today yesterday tomorrow
Diplomacy is was will be hollow
Say it like it is
What’s with the “excuse me please?”
Do you, in the boxing match
Hold back the power of your punch?
Or do you fail
To fully exhale?
Coat words with honey?
No! Claim back your money!
Is the smell of the dead
Covered by a flower spread?
The rupture of seething rage
Smothered by smiles so strange?
Let it be known
They will reap as they have sown
Pleasantries gestures
Bowing to false masters
Do you think we don’t see
Who the winner will truly be?
Hiding behind diplomacy
You sell the pride that belongs to me

Is your ‘great’ company sowing the seeds of its own future failure?

Your business is centered on customers? I don’t believe you…

Posted: April 23, 2012, 1:25 pm by Sunny Bindra

“I’ve been living in the Thank You Economy since a day sometime around 1995, when a customer came into my dad’s liquor store and said, “I just bought a bottle of Lindemans Chardonnay for $5.99, but I got your $4.99 coupon (later) in the mail. Can you honor it? I’ve got the receipt.” The store manager working on the floor at the time replied, “No.” I looked up from where I was on my knees dusting the shelves and saw the guy’s eyes widen as he said, “Are you serious?” The manager said, “No, no, you have to buy more to get it at $4.99.” As the man left, I went over to the manager and said, “That guy will never come back. I was wrong about that; he did come back. He came back a couple of months later – to tell us he would never shop with us again.”

GARY VAYNERCHUK ‘The Thank You Economy’ (2011)

Thus begins Gary Vaynerchuk’s excellent new book. Take a look at the excerpt again. What should that store manager have done? Should he have lost a dollar and accepted the coupon that was late? Most of you, if you have any iota of enlightenment about customers, will say yes. But I don’t believe you.

I don’t believe you because everywhere I look businesses are still designed to do things that are shrewd rather than wise. Saving the dollar is shrewd; saving the lifetime customer is wise. I believe you know the difference. I don’t believe you act on that knowledge.

Be a customer. Walk into a shop and try to return something that turned out to be defective. The chances are the shop will try to blame the defect on something YOU did. Or try to say you’ve just changed your mind about what you bought, and look at the expressions. You will be shown a sign on the wall, or small print on your receipt, that will read: “Good once sold cannot be…” (You know the rest.)

Be a customer. Walk into a bank and try to get a loan for something. Watch the paperwork hoops you will be asked to jump through for the next few weeks. Watch how you will be asked to provide not only cash or a property as collateral, but also insure your own life in the bank’s interest in case you default. Then watch how the bank will make you pay for every single expense related to the loan: insurers, valuers, lawyers et al. Watch how it will also charge you something large for “arranging” the loan (it’s a costly favour they’re doing you, apparently). And watch how the bank will earn a huge spread on the interest payments you will now be bound to make for much of the rest of your working life.

What are these businesses doing? They’re being shrewd, of course. They’re protecting themselves against nasty customers like you, who will abuse and misuse them if given the slightest opportunity. They’re looking after themselves; you have to look after you. That’s the way business is done.

Or is it?

There’s a better way, people. I just don’t think most of you will have the breadth of vision, the acuity of insight, or the bigness of heart to see it. That kind of person, like Gary Vaynerchuk, sees very clearly that the overriding purpose of business is to create and hold happy customers. That making customers happy makes employees happy. That happy customers create happy shareholders. That you make more money, not less, by not sweating the little stuff so much. That archaic rules and regulations kill the relationship and make every transaction coldly economic, instead of warmly emotional.

I don’t believe your business, whatever industry you’re in, knows this. So go on, prove me wrong.

Why waiters (or their guests) can’t predict the weather

Posted: April 22, 2012, 9:50 am by Sunny Bindra

I was sitting by my favourite ocean (there is only one) the other day (I was on a break, remember) and I noticed some ominous-looking dark clouds over the ocean. I asked a passing waiter whether he thought it might rain.

He looked at the sky, and said with gratifying certainty: “No chance. Those clouds are not coming here.” Reassured, I re-immersed myself in my book, ignoring the fact that the sky was darkening and the wind was becoming more insistent. Half an hour later, I was sitting in the hotel lounge soaked to the skin, having just managed to protect my book.

The book itself truly deserved saving: it is called Fooled by Randomness, and it is written by that very entertaining and erudite iconoclast, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I love iconoclasts of all shapes and sizes; their being entertaining is an additional bonus.

Taleb tells you that if you place an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters and let them clatter away, it is CERTAIN that one of them will produce an exact version of the Iliad. This is not very interesting, because the probability of any one monkey doing it is ridiculously low.

But here’s the thing: should one monkey pull it off and present you with the Iliad, would you now be willing to consider the possibility that he could next write the Odyssey? No? What if you knew nothing about this experiment with infinite monkeys, and were simply presented with this hero-monkey who had just (verifiably) written the Iliad: would you not be rather disposed to expecting another great work from this remarkable primate?

The waiter was confident because his last couple of predictions about the rain had been correct. He was on a run, and thought he had exceptional skill in weather forecasting. The point though, is this: pretty much every waiter I’ve ever met on any beach thinks the same thing. They all think they’ve got the weather figured out; none of them actually do.

This is because the underlying process by which it rains on a particular beach at a particular time is pretty random. It is influenced by humidity, cloud formation and winds in ways that is very difficult for even a professional weatherman with proper measuring equipment to forecast. So the correct answer to the question, “Is it about to rain on this beach in the next half-hour?” is, “Who knows? Take precautions in case it does.” That is the answer almost no one gives you.

As you may have worked out, this column isn’t really about waiters or monkeys. It’s about you. Don’t you have the same irrational confidence in your forecasts – about the stock market, business performance, exchange rates? Don’t you feel that a string of successful predictions make you a forecasting guru – when in all likelihood that string was just a run of luck?

If the underlying process creating the result is stochastic, you have no reason to be confident. And many more results – share price performance, currency rates, business and personal success – have strongly random underlying generators than most of us imagine.

So abandon your bravado and get real. You may know much less than you think. Think more deeply, and get other opinions. Don’t make big bets on your (or anyone else’s) predictions. Be prepared for forecast failure, and be prepared for the possible consequences. Stay humble, and recognize the huge role of luck in your life. We are quick to extol the virtues of a businessperson who has had a successful run, and quick to forget the many others who failed by doing the exact same things as our “winner.”

My waiter friend learned from his forecasting error, and refused to attempt a prediction the following day. He’s wiser than many overconfident business leaders I know.

No related posts.

The enemies of innovation are usually found inside the company

Posted: March 26, 2012, 10:45 am by Sunny Bindra

1. The Victims (“Can you believe what they want us to do now? And of course we have no time to do it. I don’t get paid enough for this. The boss is clueless.”
2. The Non-Believers (“Why should we work so hard on this? Even if we come up with a good idea, the boss will probably kill it. If she doesn’t, the market will. I’ve seen this a hundred times before.”)
3. The Know-It-Alls (“You people obviously don’t understand the business we are in. The regulations will not allow an idea like this, and our stakeholders won’t embrace it. Don’t even get me started on our IT infrastructure’s inability to support it. And then there is the problem of ….”)

G. Michael Maddock AND Raphael Louis Vitón, BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK (NOVEMBER 8, 2011)

The excellent article excerpted above caught my eye recently.

To succeed in today’s world, it’s pretty much a given that you have to be aggressively creative and innovative. “More of the same” just won’t work anymore. There is too much disruptive change looming on every horizon. It’s time to experiment and try stuff out.

But guess what? Messrs Maddock and Vitón tell us that the greatest enemies of innovation may well be found right inside your organization. They identify three types of people who “block innovation from happening and will suck the energy out of any organization.”

This rings true. Most organizations are filled with ‘victims’ who whine and moan incessantly; with ‘non-believers’ who don’t believe anything can ever change or improve; and with ‘know-it-alls’ who will find a hundred reasons something CAN’T be done.

The frightening thing is that these employees aren’t just employed in peripheral roles; they often sit close to the top of the pyramid, blocking and stifling every attempt to do something new.

Consider this: if Safaricom had had too many of these types of naysayers in influential places, would it ever have launched the epochal M-Pesa product? An initiative like that took genuine guts. It was not for the faint-hearted. If the doubters prevailed, it would never have even got off the design table. But it did, and Kenya, Africa and the world is better off as a result.

If Equity Bank was populated with cynics and pessimists, would it ever have attempted its game-changing mass banking model? At a time when every bank in Kenya was doing the precise opposite – closing branches and setting minimum-balance requirements? Of course it would not have. A more jittery management team would have played safe and played me-too. It would never have found the spine to make a billion-shilling investment in IT infrastructure to attempt so unprecedented a feat. But it did, and now the world applauds.
These examples reveal something about management. If you’re a leader who wants to change things, shake up a market, attempt something never seen before – you’d better have the right people around you. Big hearts and open minds are needed to do the unthinkable.

Most managers, sadly, are rendered timid by too much education, too much experience, and too much interaction with the mandarins of their own industry. These people will shoot down every attempt to bring in the new and ring out the old. They can’t help themselves. Their every interest is to maintain the status quo, not to challenge it. And they will very likely infect everyone around them with the same fear and loathing of new things.

The authors put it nicely: “(The right employees) must fail fearlessly and quickly and then learn and share their lessons with the team. When they behave this way, they empower others around them to follow suit—and presto, a culture of discovery is born and nurtured.”

———-

For the first time since its inception, this column now takes a short break. Back soon…

To rate the leader, study the followers

Posted: March 25, 2012, 9:42 am by Sunny Bindra

To rate the leader, study the followers.

Here’s the first reason why. Good leaders seek out, and attract, good followers. Bad leaders seek out, and attract, bad followers. So if you want to know whether the leader you are about to follow is any good, look around you. Who are your fellow followers?

Are they decent folk who want to see change and general uplift in the world? Or are they self-centred goons who want nothing but their own gain? If the leader is a me-me-me maniac, he will generally attract people exactly like himself. If the leader is on a genuine mission for good, the good people of the world will emerge to lend her their support.

Study the leader’s core team, inner circle or kitchen cabinet especially carefully. The people who are the leader’s essential aides, advisors and confidants can tell you everything you need to know. If that core team consists of truculent tribalists and famed fraudsters, you know exactly what kind of leader you are dealing with. The quality of the people that a leader holds closest to the bosom will reveal all.

This applies to organizational leaders as much as it does to political ones. The core team is something hugely important to every leader. A leader must have people around him who can deliver on his mission. To know what that mission really is, study the key appointments. If the top team is mostly from one tribe; or consists of feeble-minded flunkeys or sweet-talking sycophants; well, then, all is revealed.

To rate the leader, study the followers.

Here’s the second reason why. Leadership isn’t really about what happens to the leader; it’s about what happens to the followers. Good leadership’s primary aim is to deliver a collective result, not an individual one. That’s why studying the wellbeing of followers during a leader’s reign is so revealing.

Who really benefitted from the leadership: the leader or the followers? If you see a leader who is dramatically richer; emphatically more self-absorbed and generally high on his own supply – something has gone very wrong.

Political leadership is not measured in the size of the leader’s mansion; it is evaluated on the number of followers who have a roof over their heads. It is not measured in the size of the leader’s foreign bank account; it is rated on the number of followers who have escaped from poverty as a result of the leadership.

This applies equally to corporate leadership. If only the CEO’s ego, office and quota of aides and assistants has grown during his tenure, then this is not a leader of substance. Leadership is best measured in the unseen wealth that it creates: in goodwill, wellbeing and sense of belonging. A great leader works on culture and behaviour, because she knows that her job is to do things through others. When the average employee feels like an integral part of the mission of the collective, and comes to work ready to go the extra mile – then real leadership has occurred.

So, if you have to select a politico to vote for, or a CEO to work for, take your eyes away from the leader and study the followers instead. Leaders mostly know how to talk the great talk these days. They are often masters of persuasion and charm. To understand what’s beneath the surface, ignore what the leader says and study what the followers are: their nature and quality; and their general wellbeing.

The followers are the leader’s most important result, and therefore the most important measure of character and success.

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For the first time in nine years, this column goes on a short break. Back on this page soon.

The spectacular resignation that shook this famous employer

Posted: March 19, 2012, 11:10 am by Sunny Bindra

“TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.
To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.”

GREG SMITH, New York Times (March 14, 2012)

There are resignation letters, and then there are resignation letters.

Greg Smith got his published as an op-ed in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune. Mr Smith, executive director and head of Goldman Sachs’ US equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, quit spectacularly. He made very public accusations about the state of his former employer, which, in the social media era, soon traversed the world.

Now this, folks, was not the sort of letter by a disgruntled employee that we are used to in this part of the world. This came across as a deeply felt, acutely observed, poignant missive. And it hit its mark.

Goldman Sachs would probably qualify as one of the world’s most mistrusted organizations right now. It has faced accusations of unethical practice repeatedly, from its role in the global financial meltdown of 2008, to its questionable role in mergers and in selling instruments to clients that seemed designed to fail. Many observers feel the company only gets away with it because its influence extends deep into the corridors of power.

This, however, is the first blow struck from within. Mr Smith did not mince his words. Try this for size: “I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.” Or this: “I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival.”

What could hurt Goldman most is the allegation that firm has stopped caring about its clients, and is interested only in maximizing its take in every transaction. Mr Smith alleges: “It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail.”

Now that one will hurt. Customers of the venerable firm are going to take note of those words, and will undoubtedly review their options. At the very least, the “muppets” will examine every deal curated by Goldman henceforth with a beady eye. Watch this space – Mr Smith’s letter is going to have repercussions.

I have written on this page many times that the time for being merely “shrewd” in business is over. Serious businesses are going to have to choose wisdom over trickery. You have to go beyond mere maximization of profit on every deal, and start to think deeply about long-lived, shared value that nurtures a whole ecosystem, not just a few shareholders. It is astonishing that this point is lost on what was one of the world’s most prestigious institutions.

Mr Smith says he intended his public letter to be a wake-up call to the Goldman board of directors. I suspect they’re wide awake now.

Is it going to be game over for your product soon?

Posted: March 17, 2012, 6:32 am by Sunny Bindra

The Encyclopedia Britannica has ended print publication after 244 years.

I must admit I fell silent after hearing this piece of news earlier in the week. Anyone who admires books and has encountered the venerable encyclopedia in a home or library cannot fail to feel some sadness. The weathered leather covers, the musty pages, the scholarly style – it’s gone now.

As The Guardian put it: “Its legacy winds back through centuries and across continents, past the birth of America to the waning days of the Enlightenment. It is a record of humanity’s achievements in war and peace, art and science, exploration and discovery. It has been taken to represent the sum of all human knowledge.”

After some moments of reflection, however, a more rational thought took prominence: what took the printed Britannica so long to go?

The encyclopedia is not dying, remember: only its print version is. Britannica will survive as a digital-only product, accessed via a DVD version, a website, a subscription service, or an app on your tablet or mobile phone. Britannica’s future is no longer as a reference work, but as a multifaceted digital educational brand.

If you stop for a moment to think like a customer, you will realize why this development was both necessary and inevitable. The print version of Britannica consisted of 32 hefty volumes. It cost US$ 1,400 (KShs 115,000) to buy. The information in it was static – to update it, you had to buy a whole new set.

Contrast this with the DVD Britannica which includes two dictionaries and a thesaurus (US$ 30); or the annual online subscription of US$ 70. Here, the information is cheap and portable; easily updated; and contains embedded video and audio links. Which one were you going to buy for your family?

Another hallowed brand also underwent dramatic change recently. In the case of Kodak, the transition was more painful: it is now technically bankrupt. I wrote about Kodak’s “slow puncture” in the Business Daily recently: “When was the last time you bought photographic film, inserted it into a camera, took snaps, removed the film, took it to a photo lab, and waited for the film to be developed and prints made on special paper? Modern mass-market photography is just not like that, is it? These days we take snaps on our smartphones, upload the photos to “cloud” sites, and print only the exceptional results, if that.”

For both printed encyclopedias and photo film, thinking like a customer makes the need for change obvious. So which other long-standing products or businesses are about to be disrupted and will have to undergo significant transitions? Here’s a list from me:

The textbook. The atlas. The map. The camera. The watch. The calendar. The diary. The travel agency. The compass. The bank. The petrol station. The fax machine. The scanner. The business card. The bookshop. The library. The music store. The magazine. The television. The credit card. The personal computer. The post office. The e-mail. This newspaper. And many more.

Don’t believe me? Think like a consumer or user of the product, and look at the options increasingly available, and you will get the point. Every item on that list will have to change. Some will narrow their focus; some will get unbundled into different sub-products; some will morph into new incarnations; some will be absorbed by other products; some will simply fade away.

When customers are offered better utility, convenience and value, it’s usually game over for the older version. Those that survive will have to reinvent themselves to provide value in different forms, to customers who still appreciate them. I will always be a customer for the printed book, no matter how much more logical the electronic version is. But the drumbeats of change are getting louder.

In business, as in soccer, strategies require time to play out

Posted: March 11, 2012, 6:09 am by Sunny Bindra

“Our strategy requires time to play out. It is a strategy designed to build sustainable long-term value for our constituents, beginning with serving our customers best. The performance metrics that matter to us are not the typical Wall Street trailing financial output indicators. Instead, they are the metrics that reflect industry thought leadership, high customer satisfaction, low employee turnover, increasing market share and traction in changing our business model to delivering more solutions-based offerings rather than cost-based services. These are the metrics that will tell us if we are making progress in achieving our longer-term goal of building the leading company in our industry.”

DAVID LANGSTAFF, Brookings Institution Keynote Address (December 13, 2011)

The excerpt is from a very thoughtful speech made by David Langstaff recently.

The first sentence shown is one of the most forgotten of modern business life: “Our strategy requires time to play out.” Whose strategy doesn’t? It wouldn’t be a strategy if it provided instant gratification or immediate impact. Strategies, by their vary nature, unspool slowly. Nothing seems to happen for a long while, and then suddenly…boom. Yet most CEOs and boards have forgotten this basic fact.

It took Walmart’s Sam Walton a very, very long time to get going. For years he sat in the same corner shop; and for decades with just a small bunch of chain stores. All that time, however, Sam was refining his strategy: interlinked, out-of-town stores offering the lowest prices. When he got it right, boy, did he get it right: Walmart now has thousands of huge hypermarts all over the world, and is the globe’s largest private employer. It also made Sam the world’s richest man of his time.

At the other end of the scale we have Chelsea Football Club. I wrote on this page that that this club was on the wrong path in 2009, when Russian oligarch owner Roman Abramovich was on his 5th club manager. In 2012 nothing has changed: Roman is now looking for his 8th manager in 9 years. The latest, Andre Villas-Boas, lasted just 8 months in charge before he was unceremoniously tossed out, like so many before him.

What’s the problem here? Roman is very rich. Roman is very impatient. Roman wants trophies for his cabinet, and Roman wants them fast. Unfortunately, Roman thinks everything hinges on just two things: having the right man in charge; and throwing easy money at the problem.

That’s not how it works. Football is about culture and systems, not just talent. You can’t buy those things off the shelf, you have to develop them over the years. Having the right leader in place is indeed a prerequisite; giving that leader time and space in which to develop the winning ingredients is equally a very necessary condition. That condition is not present at Chelsea FC.

That’s why David Langstaff’s point is so important. You don’t win by focusing on the trophies – the return to shareholders. You win by slowly but surely building the sources of competitive advantage. Trophies and shareholder returns are outcomes, not strategies. They happen when other things happen. In business as in soccer, those other things are high-quality thinking, customer and employee loyalty and competitive positioning. Then the success, when it finally comes, will be robust and long-lived.

It’s time for CEOs to come clean on this fact. They can’t live quarter by quarter, announcing airbrushed results to cheering analysts and impatient shareholders. A corporation is not just a dividend-producing milch cow; it is a social entity that can produce great value for a wide variety of constituencies, not least its own employees and customers.

The greatest returns to shareholders always come from the companies with the best products, culture and intangible bonds. But shareholders must learn patience; the trophies will eventually arrive in the cabinet when other things are done properly.

This corporate “Mugiithi” dance is out of date

Posted: March 11, 2012, 9:27 am by Sunny Bindra

If you attend a corporate retreat in Kenya, you just know what you’re going to do during the outdoor dinner, don’t you?

After sufficient alcohol has been imbibed and inhibitions have been sufficiently loosened, you will undoubtedly do a “Mugiithi” dance. This is where you form a human train with the leader at the front, and jiggle and weave your way round a fire, through the bushes and back again.

A witty reader wrote in recently and told me the “Mugiithi” dance doesn’t end with dinner. During the actual strategic deliberations in the conference hall the next day, the same dance will be repeated. Metaphorically, that is.

After I stopped laughing at this, I reflected on the matter. And it is indeed true: in way too many corporations here and elsewhere, there is a “Jogoo” or a “Mwenyewe” who rules the roost with an iron fist, calls every shot, and scripts every strategy. It’s his way or the highway, and only the meek and the compliant survive in his reign.

Now, it must be admitted that things are not quite as bad as they used to be. In the Nyayo Nineties, many company heads took on the persona of the leader of the land. They brooked no dissent, and their word was law. I had to sit through many a corporate “Mugiithi” dance, and watched many blunders being effected, simply because everyone was too scared to question the leader. Unsurprisingly, many of our leading organizations foundered, along with the economy of the nation.

Many have seen the light since, and no longer seek the big-dog leader. They understand that in today’s complex, unpredictable, disruptive environment, having all the power to make decisions vested in a single individual is very dangerous. These days, no one person can know it all, make every call, watch every corner, anticipate every new force.

Modern leadership is about the power of the team, the wisdom of the crowd, the harnessing of the collective. This is not a lesser form of leading; it is merely the model that suits the context. It is not weakness to lead from the back from time to time: it is in fact the model perfected by Nelson Mandela. Many of history’s most renowned leaders were indeed larger-than-life characters who had it all their way. But there are just as many who held the reins more loosely and allowed others space to think, contribute, participate and grow.

So what is it like in your organization? Does everything stop and wait for the arrival of the great leader? Can no decision be taken unless the boss has said so? Are the perks of high office all concentrated on the corner office? Does the big man have the air of infallible invincibility?

If so, get worried. The times are too unpredictable and the directions from which disruption will come are too many. Customers are younger, more savvy and more connected. Technology renders hit products redundant in months, not years. Competition comes from left field. This is a time for dissipation of power, not its concentration.

Most of our ministries and our state corporations, and a chunk of our listed companies and our family-owned firms are still run under the big-man model. And look out, they are coming unstuck by the day. They lack the collective intelligence needed to stay ahead of the pack and stay connected with an ever-changing customer.

Don’t misunderstand: to lead through others is not to fail to lead. It is an act of wisdom, not abdication. Leadership is mistakenly seen by some as the loud person shouting orders at the front, when it is actually the coach coaxing and cajoling the entire team at the side. It requires just as much strength of character and steeliness of spine to NOT impose your view on everything.

#TwitterBigStick and #TwitterThumbsUp: where to from here?

Posted: March 6, 2012, 11:53 am by Sunny Bindra

The 2 hashtags, #TwitterBigStick and #TwitterThumbsUp were never intended to be finished products in any sense. As I have said from the outset, they were simply a demo of what focused tweeting can do. They play on very human needs: to express frustration when good service or value for money is not provided; and to record applause when an organization or individual excels. That is all.

They remain just hashtags, and never pretended to be anything else. They provide a start in getting Kenyans (and others in the Twitterverse) to express themselves and tag their ‘yays’ and ‘nays’ collectively. This has already had a good response from many organizations – and all credit to those who have embraced the feedback.

So where does it go from here? The tags were not meant to be products designed to be of use to corporates. They just gave ordinary people a chance to vent and collect their reactions to products, service and more general issues. I have stated repeatedly that personally I have no business model or profit-making motive here: none. It is for others to use the data and refine the idea as they see fit. Social media has no owners, and these are just tags.

Others have indeed expressed interest in continuing the work initiated. For example:

The Kenya Institute of Public Policy Research & Analysis (KIPPRA) is interested in the fact that most tweets tagged under #TwitterBigStick in Kenya seem to be focused on the societal problem of dangerous driving. They intend to download data and evaluate it to understand whether there are particular geographical areas, roads or even organizations most often cited for dangerous driving. This will help craft policy responses in future.

OverlapKE, a private initiative, is also interested in doing something similar: consolidating its own hashtag #overlapKE with #TwitterBigStick to study repeat offenders, serial overlappers etc, and publicize this material on their website, www.overlap.co.ke. Good wishes to them in this worthy endeavour.

Gotissuez wish to conduct something similar for corporates, helping them understand mentions and patterns pertaining to their brands, also consolidating with their own hashtag, #gotissuez.

Corporates in general will require richer data and more subtle insights regarding brand sentiment. Sentiment engines and the like will be deployed by specialists to generate deeper insights from social media metadata. Again, good wishes.

To conclude: customer connectivity is the real revolution. Customers are using cheap, widespread, mobile connectivity to take more power and have more say in the products and services provided to them. That is especially pertinent in Africa, where consumer power has been muted in the past. Whether this revolution uses Twitter, Facebook or any other platform, or one not even invented yet, is impossible to say. It is still early days, and the power shifts are still nascent.

All we can do is to make a start, and try small experiments. #TwitterBigStick and #TwitterThumbsUp were just such an experiment in drumbeating. I was extremely gratified by the usage of the tags in Kenya and beyond. They no doubt provide a place to voice collective satisfaction and dissatisfaction about value provided by organizations. But they are just a start. If you want to do more, whether for public good or private profit, it’s your call. Take the social consumer revolution to new heights using more refined products and ideas, more powerful platforms. Use your expertise to provide a greater impact. Join in the dance. The aim should be to give customers, consumers, users, voters, citizens a greater say in whatever affects their lives.

No related posts.

Today’s hit product may be in tomorrow’s junkyard

Posted: March 5, 2012, 9:44 am by Sunny Bindra

“One of the odd questions I keep being asked about the iPad is “Where do you plug in USB stuff?” It’s a sister phrase to the weird criticism oft thrust at Apple’s device, “Ah, it’s too limiting for me: I can’t plug in USB sticks.” This is weird because other makers, notably Apple’s biggest competitor, Samsung, follow the same proprietary connector path and because I’ve never once thought about plugging a stick into the iPad. Maybe, soon, most people won’t think like this either–because the USB memory stick is very swiftly about to be obsolete.”

KIT EATON, Fast Company (February 14, 2012)

How fast are products changing these days?

Almost exactly 10 years ago, I remember being “wowed” by my first ever USB memory stick. It had just 256 Mb of memory, but I recall feeling the elation: a tiny pocket-sized device? On which you can carry your most important files? And share easily by simply plugging into any computer? Joy. At least it was then.

Since then that same gadget has barely changed, but the world around it certainly has. The memory stick has become smaller in size, larger in capacity and hugely cheaper than it was. It is also ubiquitous, and any one stick is largely the same as any other. In other words, it’s a commodity. Many people don’t even buy them anymore – they get given them as freebies at corporate events.

What killed the USB drive? Cloud computing. There are now very user-friendly and very cheap (often free) cloud memory products available that allow you to store files with one click on one device, and retrieve them with one more click on another. As these products approach tipping point, many savvy users are replacing all their portable and backup drives with a cloud account.

Just two years ago, I was in the market for a recordable DVD player. They had just been released then, and to me they felt rather useful. I procrastinated, though: the early players lacked features and were very expensive for what they offered. The other day I thought I should just go and buy one regardless. Guess what? You can barely find them any more in this country. It turns out there isn’t much of a market for people wanting to record things on discs any more. Why should there be, when TV sets, satellite decoders and set-top boxes come with hard drives on which you can store your programmes? And when content is more easily shared via iTunes and cloud systems rather than physical devices?

These days, something can be excitingly cutting-edge one year, and boringly redundant the next. Palm devices (remember them?) were the switched-on executive’s gadget of choice not so long ago. Now they don’t exist. Meanwhile, the Flip video camera took the US and Europe by storm – and died before it even reached Africa.

If you’re a business person in this world, you have to be very, very alert. Today’s winner is easily tomorrow’s also-ran. Your much-applauded product can either end up irrelevant (like the Palm personal organizer or the Flip camera); or can end up so popular and so easy to produce that it becomes a commodity (like the average DVD player, which is now sold in supermarkets alongside the vegetables).

A tendency to rest on your laurels is the attribute least useful in this new world. Do you have a hit product? You haven’t achieved anything yet. Start examining it, reworking it, rethinking it – even as it’s top of the pile. As Howard Ruff pointed out, Noah didn’t build the Ark when it was already raining. There’s plenty of rain visible on the strategic horizon for everyone, so make your preparations now.

Meanwhile, as Kit Eaton advised in the excerpt, don’t be one of those people who still wonder why iPads don’t have USB drives…

Why should one examination make or break a child’s life?

Posted: March 3, 2012, 5:41 am by Sunny Bindra

Another year, another set of Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education results. And another year in which parents, children and the media go into a seemingly uncontrollable frenzy about the significance of the results.

I have written about this peculiar phenomenon before, and no doubt will again. For I fail to understand why we have to hype the results of the public examination of young children to high heaven.

Can we honestly imagine, in today’s day and age, that the result of that one exam will make or break a child’s life? That if you get good grades you are on your way to assured success; and that if you mess up your life is gone? Once upon a time, in a less enlightened age, there may have been a modicum of truth in that statement. But I fail to see what the fuss is about in today’s (and tomorrow’s) world.

Let me address the various actors in this fevered drama. Parents, what do you think you’re doing? Why do you place such intense pressure on your children to perform well in public exams, and why do you ululate so unabashedly or grieve so unashamedly, depending on the result? Can you not see that the examinations process is designed to produce just a few winners, and that the chances of your child being in that group are statistically quite low? Why would you want your child marked ‘loser’ at such a tender age – most notably by you?

Employers: what is this unending obsession with ‘grades’ and ‘papers?’ It was thus when I was a boy; why is it still thus today? Have we not refined our thinking about talent and success in the intervening decades? Why do you still use a relatively arbitrary grade achieved on a single day by a young person as a cut-off? What results have decades of employing only the ‘A/B’ students given your organization? If childhood grades are so strongly correlated with future performance, please explain this: why do most of your organizations remain so ineffably mediocre?

The coming world will be unbelievably disruptive. It will require reinvention and reimagination of business models. The old assumptions and formulae will not hold. Creativity, freshness and boldness will be at a premium. So when you insist on hiring only the top-graders, who are you employing? Someone who has been able to apply his mind and dedicate herself to study, yes; but as management guru Tom Peters often points out, you’re also hiring someone who “buys the act” and has always “coloured between the lines.” An ‘A’ student is very unlikely to be the revolutionary mind or radical thinker that you may actually need.

Finally, let me address the actors that matter the most: the students. Kids, this thing is not as important as the world around you has led you to believe. If you achieved a high grade, well done; it’s likely that you are dedicated, orderly and can apply your intellect well. Those are good things. But getting a great grade is only a beginning, not an end. Many more attributes are going to be needed to succeed in life, and most of them are about character and attitude, not just intellect.

If you received a poor grade, on the other hand, worry not. It’s not the end of the world. Many of history’s most spectacular successes have also been the most emphatic school dropouts. You still have every chance of making it. This archaic ranking system belongs to a less enlightened age, and you should not fret over it too much. Pick yourself up, dedicate yourself afresh. Hard work, empathy and creativity can all make up for low grades. If the world doesn’t accept you, excel so hard in doing your own thing that the world is forced to blink and rethink.

It’s time to think “What-if”

Posted: February 27, 2012, 11:48 am by Sunny Bindra

“A tumultuous 12 months that saw revolutions in the Middle East, a worsening debt crisis in Europe and a tsunami in Japan has set the tone for corporate activity in 2012.
Caution, flexibility, nimbleness and deep knowledge of host countries are more important than ever, executives and their advisers said at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting.
Fear of a major geopolitical disruption over the next 12 months has risen to 54 percent, up from 36 percent last quarter, a WEF poll showed at the start of this week’s meeting.
“You have to more than at any time in recent memory think in terms of ‘what ifs,’” said Vasant Prabhu, chief financial officer of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc (HOT.N).
“This is a world in which you have to think in terms of scenarios and alternate outcomes and what you would do.”

REUTERS (January 29, 2012)

Business leaders gathered at the recent World Economic Forum seemed to come to an important realization: no one really knows what’s coming next.

(I could have told them that on Twitter for free, but they prefer to hear this stuff while rubbing shoulders in swanky settings.)

I have been sending the same message to every corporate I interact with in recent years: we’re all winging it now. No one knows what’s going on, and no one knows what we have to prepare for. Consider the following:

What if you were a business with deep interests in Egypt, Libya and Syria in 2010? Did you know what hit you in 2011? What if you were a globally-dominant mobile-phone maker called Nokia or BlackBerry in 2008? Could you have predicted your market trajectory downwards after that year? What if your core revenues came from the apparently very strong economies of Spain, Greece and Ireland pre-2007? Where would your business be today?

Today, Arab countries are in the eye of the storm of violent political revolution; European countries are engrossed in a game of pass-the-parcel as they try to avoid a ruinous debt default; and once-dominant technology companies fall like flies.

Africa faces its own hugely disruptive force: the coming-of-age of a VERY young, VERY connected and VERY disloyal population. This has very serious consequences, as these people are the consumers and employees of tomorrow. And they are nothing like any generation that came before them.

So what are you going to do, business decision-makers?

The answer is to stop planning and predicting, and start building resilience and a culture of experimentation. The era of stable 5-year plans is done and dusted, and the era of severe uncertainty is with us to stay. Now, it’s all about your philosophy of business rather than your plan; your ability to recover from the unexpected rather than your ability to manage business as usual; your intangible strengths rather than your physical assets.

Strong brands and strong bonds are essential in this environment. Your survival will predicate on how well your customers regard you and how essential you are to their lives; and how much you can attract the most talented employees to give you, rather than your competitor, their best years.

It will also be a time when the most avid experimenters will win. You are going to have to try 10 different things in order to produce one or two winning ideas. It will be a time to fail in many things in order to win in a few. So prepare yourself and your organization in the art of failure: fail often, fail small and fail fast. Learn every lesson from every failure deeply. Then win. Maybe.

This is the age of paradox: a time to have a very clear, but intangible, core to your business; and a time to have a continuously changing periphery. If that sentence makes sense to you, you have a hope.

Are you a relationship manager or just a huckster?

Posted: February 25, 2012, 5:32 am by Sunny Bindra

In business, relationship management is all the rage these days. There seem to be no salespersons any more, just relationship managers (RMs). It sounds warm and fuzzy and touchy-feely, as though you, the customer, have someone in the organization specially focused on you.

Most of the time, it’s an elaborate hoax.

What’s the difference between transacting and managing a relationship? To put it crudely, it’s the difference between a one-night stand and a marriage. The former is easy, momentary, fleeting and soon forgotten. The latter is difficult and hard-won but accrues benefits over a lifetime.

Most selling by most businesses has historically been transactional. Both sides to the transaction try to squeeze out the maximum benefit for themselves. You win if you outdo or outplay the other guy. Therefore you hoard information and try to pull a fast one. It’s a crafty card game, not much more.

Over the years, some sellers have cottoned on to the fact that good business could be more than just a series of shrewd transactions. A customer that stays willingly with you for a long period of time is worth far more than many transient customers making short-lived transactions. In other words, relationships matter and have an economic value. Hence the need for relationship managers.

That’s all very well, but it isn’t being done at all well so far. As a customer, despite having been assigned a large number of relationship managers in recent years, I can count on one hand those who have actually managed a productive relationship with me. Most just maintained the facade of intimacy, when I was really just another client in their (very) large portfolio.

This is rarely the fault of the individual; it emanates from the policies of the organization. Most selling departments have changed only superficially over the years; they have resprayed themselves and changed their job-titles, but the ethos remains the same: hit the numbers. If you reach your targets, you’re a winner; if you fall short, you’re the saddest of losers.

So, many relationship managers are often just glorified hucksters who have tough targets to meet and need to sweet-talk you into a deal that is worth more to them than it is to you. And that is the antithesis of what genuine relationship management is all about.

In a nutshell: relationship management focuses on the lifetime sale, not just this year’s target. It aims to deliver sustained value to both parties, not just one. It is focused on creating an incentive for long-lived loyalty, not short-term profiteering. When selling is done through a genuine relationship, each party wants the other to gain. It’s not a zero-sum game; it looks for win-win outcomes.

Some organizations and their managers get this; most don’t. To learn some lessons, let me suggest something rare: learn from the best management consultants. They immerse themselves in the depths of their client’s businesses, understanding their nuanced needs. They win when their client wins, and they have every incentive to think deeply about what creates genuine value for both sides. The relationship is a slow burn, and the benefits accrue gradually. And yet, the trusted lifetime advisor earns way more than the one-hit wonder.

If you are a customer assigned an RM, this is one gift horse you must look in the mouth. Lots of sweet talk and lunches are probably setting you up for a one-way bet. Genuine attention paid to your needs and deep insights generated into your life or business, on the other hand, are what differentiate authentic RMs from mere pretenders.

When done well, relationship management yields outstanding value for both sides. The seller gains loyalty, a stream of revenues and higher margins. The buyer gains relevance and genuine utility.

When done the way it’s mostly done, it’s just a silly facade.

Isn’t there a better way to handle layoffs?

Posted: February 20, 2012, 12:14 pm by Sunny Bindra

“Soon after Citigroup let go of 100 employees across India last month, many functional heads received an unusual brief. They were asked to scout for jobs for those who had been terminated.
Counsellors were also roped in to soften the blow and professional services firms were hired to make the career transition of the terminated employees – some of them star performers – smooth.
At this moment, Citi is not the only company trying to find jobs for the people it has let go. A few others, including Bharti Airtel and DLF, are also doing it right now or have done so in the recent past, officials at these companies said. ”

The Economic Times (February 9, 2012)

My attention was directed to an article about layoffs in India’s Economic Times, excerpted above.

Apparently, Indian firms are learning the lessons of handling layoffs well, with Citi and Airtel being amongst the standard-setters.

Layoffs are a fact of economic life. Some of the people, some of the time, will always be surplus to requirements. But many companies respond very badly to the ebb and flow of commercial fortune. As I myself wrote on this page a while back:

“…these days the ability to be ruthless when it comes to downsizing is a badge of honour, a sign of macho credentials in a CEO. And we are paying a price. What is so wrong with having the right number of employees in your organisation at a given time, you ask? Nothing at all. The problem is that we get carried away when times are good, and recruit too many; and then we get carried away at times of trouble, and sack too many. “Right-sizing” is a fluid and dishonest term, because we never know what the right size is.”

There are sound reasons for giving a damn about people we lay off. First, it is quite simply the right thing to do. Throwing someone out onto the unemployment heap should never be done casually or frivolously. It is a serious matter to interrupt a livelihood, and providing soft landings makes us bigger, not smaller, as people and as organizations.

A second reason is that humane policies when it comes to redundancies are actually good for the company itself. The Economic Times made the point thus: “HR gurus say how a company parts ways with employees will have a significant bearing on the morale of the remaining workforce and also on the company’s ability to attract talent in the future. Managing layoffs well is important for the sustainability of the ‘employer brand.’”

I can’t emphasize this enough: if you are known to have a culture of ruthless layoffs, you are risking damaging the very thing that should be at the heart of your competitive advantage: your corporate culture. Few things bestow advantage to companies better than a culture that gets the best performance out of people and gets them to behave in the right ways. Frequent layoffs can cause irredeemable damage to that culture. The best organizations know this, and use redundancies as an absolute last resort.

The real cost of layoffs is often in the form of damage to the employees who stay (who know carry fear in their hearts, wondering when the same might happen to them); and in the potentially great employees who fail to join the organization, knowing it is run whimsically and ruthlessly.

These days, employment brands really matter. We should craft such brands with great care and protect them as much as we do our product brands. Your reputation as an employer is an important thing if you are to attract great people and get them to give their all to your organization. The character and essence of the employment brand is revealed most tellingly in the manner in which layoffs are conducted.

Are you a happy-clappy optimist or a sour pessimist?

Posted: February 18, 2012, 5:51 am by Sunny Bindra

Do you get the feeling that slowly, painfully, a new Kenya is being born?

So do I.

The old guard are being forced to concede ground; the old ways will soon be consigned to history. A new Kenya, one fit for the young and the connected as well as the decent and the discerning, will emerge from the ashes of the old.

This process will be neither smooth nor pretty. Far from it. There will be many roadblocks and reversals of fortune as the guardians of the old model of leadership resist the advent of the new. There will be many battles in court, in print, in parliament and on the streets before we settle into a new order.

This will therefore be a time of arguments and differences of opinion. And so, people of Kenya, we need to be ready to argue in the proper way. The other option is insults, name-calling and snide sneering. That style is already taking root in social media, where a vile breed of hecklers (known as “trolls” in the new lingo) do their best to hurl daily insults under the veil of online anonymity.

This is not a time to engage with imbeciles; it is a time for focused and determined actions. What those actions should be, inevitably, will be subject to debate. In that debate many labels will be used and many people will be typecast.

One of those labels will be whether you are “positive” or “negative” about the future of Kenya.

This is a strange one that seems to mean different things to different people at different times. I, for example, am often bemused by how I am placed in both camps. Some people see this column as a beacon of positive thinking about our country; others think I am an inveterate cynic who sees only negative things in Kenya.

I don’t understand those categories. Seeing things as they actually are is what matters, not viewing them through the lenses of bias. I am neither a career optimist nor a lifetime pessimist. Creating these strange boxes is simplistic thinking at its worst.

To be an Afro-optimist is not to blind yourself to the fundamental changes that are needed in African society. To refuse to see that root-and-branch change is needed in our governance is to be wilfully stupid. The new Africa will not emerge just by singing happily about it or by viewing utopian computer-generated imagery – tough decisions and ruthless reforms are needed.

The trouble with most of us, as Norman Peale once said, is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism. And so anyone stating problems robustly and not shirking from pointing out issues is viewed as a cynic and a wet blanket.

To which I can only provide one response. Seeing corruption as a cancer that must be excised; warning against moral entropy; railing against the needless deaths caused every day by negligence, greed and incompetence: if any of those things makes me or anyone else “negative,” then I wear that badge with pride.

But I urge caution. Inane labels don’t serve the cause of national enlightenment. We need reasoned and reasonable discourse, not mudslinging and name-calling. There is so much to think about and so much to do. Let us conduct ourselves with calm decorum rather than occupy intemperately partisan positions.

There are of course irredeemably sour gloom-merchants in our midst, and we need to move past them. There are also lightheaded happy-clappy optimists who will do little to help us design policy or take hard decisions, and we need to let them sing on the sidelines. I’m with George Bernard Shaw on this one: those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those already doing it.

Happy employees create happy shareholders

Watching Japan’s tumbling giants

Posted: February 13, 2012, 10:16 am by Sunny Bindra

“Japan’s Panasonic Corp forecast a record annual net loss of $10.2 billion on Friday, joining beleaguered rivals Sony and Sharp in a sea of red ink as they struggle to fix their broken TV businesses and overcome criticism that they have lost their way.
Panasonic said it was headed for a loss of 780 billion yen ($10.24 billion) for the year to March, dwarfing expectations for a loss of around $6.2 billion. The loss was almost entirely due to big restructuring charges and writedowns, including to its Sanyo Electric unit.
Its grim outlook follows loss forecasts at Sony and Sharp Corp – almost $17 billion combined for the three Japanese electronics firms – highlighting the impact of fierce competition from foreign rivals such as South Korea’s Samsung Electronics, weak demand and a strong yen.”

Reuters (February 3, 2012)

Last week brought the news that Japan’s giant Panasonic corporation is forecasting an eye-popping loss of US$ 10 billion. Yes, you read that right. Yes, I know that’s a third or so of Kenya’s GDP. And yes, Panasonic will not be the last of the traditional giants to tumble in this way.

Panasonic is not alone. Iconic Sony, stylish Sharp, reliable Toshiba – all are in different degrees of trouble, and the water they’re swimming in is becoming increasingly hot for all of them.

What is ailing these respected Japanese giants? The usual suspects are trotted out with ease: it’s the competitors (the Japanese firms can’t handle the more vibrant upstarts from Korea and China); or it’s the know-how (they didn’t see the new technology coming).

Both those reasons are valid, but they don’t answer the more essential questions: why CAN’T Japanese firms compete; and why CAN’T Japanese firms innovate?

To me, the blame should lie not in external factors, but in internal ones. The failures of these Japanese behemoths are not caused by exogenous shocks, but a series of slowly worsening endogenous flaws.

Take Panasonic, and think like a customer. What is it that makes you walk into an electronics shop anywhere in the world these days and actually ask for a Panasonic product? Are they the best quality? The best value? The most alluring brand? The most cutting-edge technology? Struggling for a reason? I thought so. It’s a long time since I felt a burning need to own a Panasonic product (and increasingly, a Sony, Sharp or Olympus), and I don’t think I’m alone.

I’m old enough to remember the 1980s, when the West was made to quake in its boots by the Japanese assault on its markets. The Japanese, it seemed, could offer better quality at a lower price than anyone else in the world. And so they wiped the floor with the cheaper European and American brands. However, they laid not a glove on the differentiated high-end brands: Bosch, Bose, Miele, B&O et al. Japanese brands all adopted a “me-too” approach, trying to relentlessly copy each another and drive prices down instead of up.

And so, when Korean and Chinese competitors appeared with markedly lower cost structures and access to the same benchmarked technology, it was game over for the Japanese. They could neither compete at the classy upper end; nor the price-sensitive mass-market. This is not bad luck. These failures are mishaps in strategy. Bad choices were made.

I also blame demographics. Japan has one of the world’s most aged populations. There is a severe shortage of young people. Despite this, Japan is notoriously reluctant to allow any immigration. Those again are choices. The Japanese do not wish to have many children; and they wish to protect social cohesion.

That’s all well and good, but the cost comes in the loss of creativity and innovation. A corporate sector dominated by grey-heads simply won’t come up with daring and different products. I fear there is more corporate decline to come.

A rule of life: If it’s “free”, it’s probably very expensive

Posted: February 11, 2012, 5:11 am by Sunny Bindra

People everywhere love freebies. If it’s “free,” we want it. And we want lots of it.

Here’s the thing, though: nothing is really free. Resources are limited. To provide or make anything on this planet consumes resources. So if something seems free, it’s up to you to work out who’s bearing the cost.

Some simple examples. When a shop tells you to “buy two, get one free” the third item is not really free at all; all three items are being offloaded at a discount. And this is not a wonderful act of charity by the retailer; he is merely disposing of dead (and often sub-standard) stock.

Kenyan politicians are known to offer “free” t-shirts and handouts in exchange for votes. Was the t-shirt free? Not at all. In exchange, you received a leader who buys votes; who has paid heavily for shirts, caps, cars, stooges and helicopters; and who will most likely recoup this investment by aiming to plunder taxpayers’ funds at the first opportunity. That is what the t-shirt cost you: your children’s development retarded in future.

In Kenya we have “free” primary education. Or do we? What is “free” about billions of shillings intended for the awakening of little minds going “missing” and no one raising a finger in response? What is “free” about schools where parents have to contribute a kitty to pay teachers’ salaries, or where children have to come early to clean the school first?

Driving in Kenya is “free.” Well, not quite, as you do have to pay for your vehicle and the costs of fueling and maintaining it. But a big part of the cost of driving is free – the cost that driving imposes on society in the form of congestion and pollution. That is not charged to any individual, but someone pays. You guessed it – that someone is everyone. We all pay because when something is not priced it is over-consumed. Vehicles of all description pile onto roads that can’t take them, simply because the roads are “free.” The cost comes in time wasted and health lost.

In business, in economics, in life in general: what is touted as “free” ends up being very expensive indeed. It only gives the illusion of being free of cost. But someone is footing the bill, and usually that someone is you. You will pay in one way or another: in the form of higher future taxes; in pain and inconvenience; in shoddy quality; in stress and health problems; in failing to receive better offerings because you took the “free” ones instead; in the loss of your privacy; in being bombarded by adverts you don’t have the slightest interest in.

If you want value and utility you have to pay for them. Quality products cost money, so no one gives those out for free. Quality people cost money, so they can’t be procured with peanuts. What goes in is what comes out. If you are being offered something for free, think hard about what you are getting, and who will really pay for it.

There is, of course, something called altruism: selfless concern for the wellbeing of others. Some people do indeed do things for others and bear the full cost of doing so. But this is a rarer phenomenon than you might think, and it pays to be circumspect. When dealing with politicians, policymakers and business folk, be very suspicious of the thing they are giving you if they say it’s free of charge.

At a personal level, always being on the lookout out for things we don’t want to pay for is a dangerous strategy. It turns us into mendicants who are always ready for the freebie, the lottery, the pyramid scheme. It harms our psyche and our self-esteem. Far better to realize that there is a price to pay for anything that’s worth having, and being willing to work and save to pay that price.

Yes, CEOs: you WILL need to understand and engage with social media

Posted: February 6, 2012, 9:34 am by Sunny Bindra

“As I jogged down Wall Street in New York in October through the barricades, police horses, and thousands of activists, something became clear. The masses had self-organized and social media had added yet another social movement to its résumé. At the same time, something else became clear to me. Much higher than street level, in the boardrooms of America’s largest companies, social media expertise was far from entering the résumés of most C-suites.
Why is there confusion inside these glass fortresses around the world? Senior executives are struggling to get a grasp of what to do about the social opportunity for their kingdom. But hey, it’s new, right? The kids only started signing up eight years ago. ”

MICHAEL SCISSONS Fast Company (December 15, 2011)

“Social media? Kids, right? That’s where they hang out, arrange dates, all that stuff? What on earth has that got to do with my business?”

That sentence would be the reaction of many a CEO to the social media phenomenon. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+ et al are usually dismissed as a trivial social pursuit. Surely only the very young or the very idle have time for it.

Here’s the thing, though: your staff, your customers and your competitors have plenty of time for it.

It is indeed true, much of what constitutes social media content is irredeemably trite and banal. But that is NOT all there is to it. Social media has become an essential tool of life for the online generation. Social media is also where information is found, news is tracked, views are exchanged, opinions are refined, networks are grown, deals are done, careers are advanced, brands are built, reputations are polished.

Why would you not want to be part of that?

Consider this, too: social media is ALSO where brands are destroyed; where complaints about your organizations reach thousands of people in minutes; where you can gauge the reaction to your new product instantaneously.

If you’re an enlightened chief executive, you should be rubbing your hands in glee. One of the biggest problems most leaders have is getting hold of the right information. Leaders are usually separated from reality by many layers of bureaucracy. Market information passes through many minders before it reaches the boss. Courtiers prevent people with valuable insights from accessing the head honcho.

Now, simply having a (visible or invisible) Twitter account can allow a CEO to gain real-time, direct access to customer feedback. Unfiltered and unaltered. Straight from the horse’s mouth. And it’s free. Is this not leadership nirvana? Try it and see how your data is enriched daily.

In addition, many social media platforms allow you to follow experts, thinkers and news sources. They allow you to track opinion and competitor activity. They allow you to gain easy access to the knowledge you want to keep abreast of.

Social media, like life in general, is what you make of it. It can be noisy and meaningless and trivial. It can also be a powerful tool for leadership engagement, personal awareness and keeping tabs on the world.

Sadly, many CEOs either dismiss it out of hand, or lead botched attempts to enter the social space without any clear thinking, objectives or rules of engagement. The result is the brainlessly obvious marketing and robotic customer engagement many corporates are guilty of.

Social media is a conversation, not a brochure. It’s where things are discussed, debated, criticized, praised, rubbished, adored. To benefit from it, you have to enter the conversation without trying to control or manipulate it. Honest, open engagement is the best policy.

You can’t leave your social media engagement to a ‘department.’ In today’s and tomorrow’s world, it’s a leadership issue. It requires judgement and insight to get right, and no consultant or techie is going to do that for you.

For things to change, policymakers must feel the pain

Posted: February 5, 2012, 8:05 am by Sunny Bindra

A drive on one of Kenya’s highways is, we can all agree, a hair-raising experience. We have one of the world’s highest road fatality rates, for one simple reason: the roads are full of what our president fondly calls “pumbavus” who have inexplicably been allowed to drive.

So you will get pea-brained drivers coming at you from all directions: overtaking on bends and inclines; overtaking from the left; stubbornly blocking the “fast lane”; trying hair-raising manoeuvres for no reason at all. The result is daily death and destruction. In full view of the police.

I think we should adopt a measure famously suggested by American economist Armen Alchian: mounting a small spear on every steering wheel, pointed directly at the driver’s heart. Do that, and watch all that speeding and dumb driving go down overnight.

You probably laughed at that policy proposal, but there is an important principle that underlies it: people respond to incentives and penalties. Most pea-brained drivers have little sense of the risks they take by driving like damn fools; it is therefore in society’s interest to incentivize them not to do it, by making the danger very personal and immediate. A Maasai spear pointing at the chest will do the job very nicely. Average speeds will slow dramatically.

This principle can be applied to other areas of policy. The reason people misbehave is that they have incentives to do so and face little risk of meaningful penalty. The policy prescription is to reduce the incentives and amplify the penalties of bad behaviour. And particularly, make sure this applies most acutely to the policymakers themselves.

Suppose someone with supreme authority issued an edict: Each and every government vehicle is herewith banned from any form of dangerous driving, including overlapping and driving on pavements. This is a strict order, and there will be severe repercussions for any vehicle caught flouting it. The media, and the ordinary citizenry through social media, are invited to highlight any instances of abuse. Reprimands will be punitive and immediate, regardless of status.

If such a thing were done, believe me the effects would be instantaneous. For the first time, government bigwigs would have every incentive to fix the traffic problem, because for the first time they would be exposed dramatically to its consequences. You would see a flurry of projects aimed at improving and extending the roads quickly; and would see an emphatic crackdown on bad driving. Suddenly, traffic police would do what they are paid to do, and many new ideas for fixing the traffic problem would emerge.

Simply because the repercussions had been brought to bear on the Big People.

You can apply this to many other situations in life. Don’t allow important personages any extra security, and watch security improve for all. Restrict the children of all ministers and civil servants to attending government-funded schools, and watch the quality of free education rise rapidly. Force CEOs to queue up for their own products, and watch the lines reduce dramatically in a short space of time.

You get the idea. When the Big People suffer alongside the Little People, they fix problems. Otherwise they ignore them. In Kenya today we offer exemptions from ordinary pain to all our Big People. They can dodge the traffic, evade the law, be exempted from taxes, hire private security, get free health treatment abroad. Therefore they have no incentive to fix any of our entrenched problems, since they never suffer their consequences.

This is because only the Big People set the rules today. But that will change. The impact of the new constitution, combined with an ever more youthful population powered by mobile social media is going to change the game forever. Wise leaders and policymakers, please start noting the need for rules that apply to all, equally and without fear or favour.

What #TwitterBigStick is, and which organizations have responded

Posted: January 30, 2012, 1:52 pm by Sunny Bindra

#TwitterBigStick is a hashtag that escalates bad service and bad behaviour by organizations. Thousands have used it to give instant feedback on poor experiences and neglect. It give ordinary people a voice and an instantaneous way of channelling feedback constructively. Ignoring #TwitterBigStick can lead to a severe reputation battering, often in a few hours of retweeting.

#TwitterBigStick is a crowd-sourced initiative that is run and governed by the crowd. It tries to stay entirely neutral and has no vested interests whatsoever. There is no attempt to profit from this endeavor, and there should be none in future. It has been initiated for the general good, because ordinary people are fed up of neglect and of being taken for granted as customers and users. Tweets and retweets are entirely voluntary, and people join in when they feel they want to. There is no central plan here – it’s just a hashtag.

#TwitterBigStick has a more pleasant twin: #TwitterThumbsUp. It tags praise and commendations for organizations and individuals doing the right things, and doing them well.

#TwitterBigStick is trying to keep this feedback clean and genuine. As with any crowd-sourced initiative, abuses will no doubt occur. It is for the collective to decide what is credible and what is not, and what complaints to support by replying, mentioning or retweeting. There is no central authority of any sort.

#TwitterBigStick is being supported daily by leading social media influencers and journalists (as well as some CEOs!).

#TwitterBigStick is currently aimed at organizations with a brand to manage and a reputation to protect. It puts the spotlight on any failures in their service delivery and corporate behavior, as highlighted by their customers and users.

#TwitterBigStick has been discussed in the media in several countries, including the BBC World Service.

#TwitterBigStick is being used in Rwanda and Seychelles as well.

Many organizations have responded positively to online complaints and have engaged with the idea, seeing it as a valuable real-time feedback tool. Despite their positive engagement, they too will stay on the radar.

To date, organizations that have responded with promises to address issues include:

The United Nations
British High Commission Kenya
DHL Kenya
KCB Group
Safaricom Ltd
Airtel Kenya
Orange Kenya
Yu Kenya
Bata Kenya
BM Security
Strathmore University
Kianda Foundation
Riara Schools
Kenya Railways
Zuku
DSTv Kenya
Braeburn Schools
Ashleys
Wells Fargo Kenya
G4S
Regent Management
Nation Media Group
The Mortgage Company
Kenya Airways
Nairobi Water
Kenya Bus
Cube Movers
Sarova Hotels
KAPS Parking

Learn from the disastrous leadership of this ship captain

Posted: January 30, 2012, 10:18 am by Sunny Bindra

“The Italian cruise ship the Costa Concordia sank off the coast of Tuscany last Friday night, after smashing into rocks off the island of Giglio. The 114,500-tonne vessel, carrying 3,200 passengers and 1,000 crew, hit a submerged reef at 9.42pm, after the ship’s captain, Francesco Schettino, had steered it to within 200m of shore to “salute” a retired colleague who lived on the island. The rocks ripped a 50m gash in the Costa Concordia’s hull. The ship began to list, and the captain steered it into shallow water close to a headland. At 12.30am, it suddenly capsized. As of Wednesday, 11 people had been confirmed dead and 21 were still missing.”

The Week (January 21, 2012)

We all know about the Italian cruise ship disaster – the image of the capsized luxury liner lying marooned off the Tuscany coast was on our TV screens for many days.

However, those aspiring to leadership would do well to focus on an even bigger disaster, the man whose version of leadership caused this tragedy that has led to so many unnecessary deaths: captain Francesco Schettino.

First, consider that this gentleman caused this disaster reportedly because he was using the ship to ‘salute’ a friend who lived on the island. How many leaders similarly misuse their positions and resources to feed their own egos or private aims? Leadership is not a personal enterprise; it involves taking heavy responsibility for the lives and livelihoods of others.

Second, note the captain’s laxity in taking the problem seriously. Reports suggest Schettino was terribly slow to react to the disaster, even though the ship had suffered a huge gash in its side. He is said to have told the coastguard that it was just a “technical failure”; he is alleged to have then ordered a meal for himself and a female companion; he only sent out a mayday call at 10.30 pm; and did not give the order to abandon ship until nearly 11 pm. By then the boat was listing so sharply that many lifeboats could not be lowered. It was too late to save lives.

This type of denial is also ego-related. Too many leaders are utterly loath to admit to any mistake, and in the process will worsen the problem. Honest leadership requires coming clean, quickly. If you’ve messed up, say so and get on with the more important imperative of damage control. Don’t dance around denying there’s a problem. Look at so many CEOs across the world in 2011, and you will see that this kind of dance is very common.

Lastly, and most egregiously, the captain is accused of abandoning his ship: an audio recording from the Italian coastguard, widely heard across the world’s media, suggests he left his sinking vessel with his two senior officers while hundreds of passengers were still trapped on board. He is reported to have told magistrates, in comical justification of this cowardice, that he “tripped and fell into a lifeboat.”

Again, a profound lesson is contained therein. If you have created a problem, stay to fix it and bear the consequences. If you have enjoyed the perks of leadership, you must carry the burdens as well. Too many business leaders float away from the problems they create, often with handsome payoffs. In Schettino’s case, there is no such luxury. He will face manslaughter charges. The business world similarly needs a system of repercussions for incompetence and mismanagement. At the top, there is much upside and little downside.

In the meantime, the words “Vada a bordo, cazzo!” have become famous in Italy. They were uttered repeatedly by the furious head of the Livorno port authority when ordering Schettino back onto his stricken ship.

I’ll leave you to go online to learn what the words mean. Let’s just say they could apply to many a political and corporate leader, too.

How good are the parts the world doesn’t see?

Posted: January 28, 2012, 6:51 am by Sunny Bindra

Looking at Apple’s fourth-quarter 2011 results is enough to boggle the mind. Which company do you know that grows its revenues at more than 70%; that sells a million (expensive) iPhones every three days; that sells more phones every day than there are babies born in the world; and that is currently worth more than two Wal-Marts?

Having created this gravity-defying money machine, Founder Steve Jobs will surely become the most studied CEO in history; but I sometimes wonder whether this is a productive exercise. He was one of life’s one-offs: a maverick; an iconoclast; a near-pathological control freak. Who is going to repeat that combination?

Nevertheless there are things he believed in that should make us all sit up and pay attention. I found one such belief in his biography, written by Walter Isaacson. Here it is:

“From his father Steve Jobs learned that a hallmark of passionate craftsmanship is making sure that even the aspects that will remain hidden are done beautifully…”I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s inside the box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though no one’s going to see it…you’ll know it’s there…for you to sleep well at night…the quality has to be carried all the way through.”"

I’m clapping. Are you? No shoddy quality, even for the invisible parts? Why? Because YOU WILL KNOW it’s shoddy at the back. Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is called having a personal standard. It matters not a jot whether people will EVER see your standard; the point is, you have to maintain it. For yourself, and your own peace of mind.

Steve Jobs was famous for wanting even the inner circuit boards in his Macintosh computers to not just work well, but look good. Why, when no one would ever see them in there? Because HE would know they weren’t right, and HE would feel he had let himself down.

Now look around you. Who on earth lives up to this principle? Pretty much no one. Take a look at big buildings in Nairobi. Most of them will have a very shoddy rear wall – often even unpainted. The reception may look nice, but walk down to the basement car parking: unfinished floors, unpainted walls.

Big Nairobi hotels have flamboyant common areas, but you don’t ever want to visit most inner working areas and staff quarters, where guests are not allowed to venture. You would be shocked by most of what you see. Only the very best hotels care about the staff areas.

Most people, simply put, cannot live up to the principle of “quality all the way through.” They are just putting up a facade, a shopfront, an illusion of grandeur and nobility. The minute something is not seen by others, it is neglected and abused.

A caveat: even Steve Jobs’ Apple doesn’t live up to this total-quality ideal fully. Its products exude sophistication, inside and out; but its supply-chain practices do not. Manufacturing is outsourced to China, and there are well-documented examples of egregious working conditions in its partner companies. To its credit, Apple is cracking down using a strict supplier code, but there is some way to go.

Nonetheless: please apply the “back of the cabinet” principle to your life and your organization. The visible parts may have a nice sheen to them. What about the invisible ones? How much quality and nobility is there in the bits the world doesn’t see? True greatness lies in being the same throughout. It is a standard few of us can live up to. So go and examine the backs of the cabinets of your life today, and think about what you really stand for.

To become better at business, read more…novels

Posted: January 23, 2012, 9:30 am by Sunny Bindra

“1. Reading stories can fine-tune your social skills by helping you better understand other human beings.
2. Entering imagined worlds builds empathy and improves your ability to take another person’s point of view.
3. A love affair with narrative may gradually alter your personality—in some cases, making you more open to new experiences and more socially aware.”

KEVIN OATLEY, Scientific American Mind (November 20, 2011)

I have often advocated the reading of novels not just as a pastime, but as a method of making you better at running your business. This was mostly just gut-instinct, as I have always been an avid lover of great fiction.

But now I have proof.

Studies done by psychology Kevin Oatley and his associates (a recent one is quoted in the excerpt) reveal great practical benefits to be derived from reading fictional works. The reason is simple: good fiction gives you an invaluable tool – a better understanding of human beings, their emotions and motivations.

Think about it: creating a great business these days is less about great technology, structures or processes. Those are not the problem, nor are they scarce. The thing that sets great organizations apart from merely good ones is the ability to engage people – staff and customers – thoroughly and wholeheartedly. It’s about inspiring others to give their best, and to feel included and integral to the work. And that’s where fiction comes in.

A lifelong habit of reading great novels exposes the mind to many more human dramas than are available in person. It enables a deeper understanding of the human animal and its subtle psychological nuances. That understanding will help you deal with people much, much better – and in business these days, it’s the people, stupid.

Oatley’s studies suggest that people who read more fiction are, amongst other things, better at perceiving emotion and reading social cues. How does this happen? Prolonged exposure to fiction, MRI scans reveal, open up neuronal pathways in the brain that assist in the understanding of human emotion.

Anne Kreamer, reviewing this work in the Harvard Business Review recently, put it nicely: “It’s when we read fiction that we have the time and opportunity to think deeply about the feelings of others, really imagining the shape and flavour of alternate worlds of experience.”

Truly great novelists have a very sharp eye when it comes to watching the way people live, relate and interact. They are able to weave this understanding into their characters and plot and dramatic structure, to create a product leaves the brain stimulated in a way few other experiences can deliver.

As I have written on this page in the past: “Business is about life, and so is fiction. The great businessperson must understand people, their driving emotions, their ambitions and their fears, and what causes their rise or fall. A great novelist delivers precisely that understanding. If you want to know your employees and their motivations better; if you want to comprehend the lives of your customers better; if indeed you want to do the Socratic thing and know yourself better; you could do worse than crack open a great novel by a great writer.”

So what are you going to do, folks? Let’s be realistic: those who hate fiction aren’t suddenly going to run out to buy Dickens and Tolstoy. Love of novels is generally created and sealed in childhood. But those who do read novels need no longer regard it as a guilty pleasure: it’s probably a vital tool in helping you run things better. For those who don’t read “made-up” stories, you’re going to have to find other ways of being exposed to the swirl of human emotion all around you, and figuring it out.

Fiction may be a lie, but as Stephen King pointed out, good fiction is the truth within the lie.

Organizations: prepare for online firestorms in 2012

Posted: January 22, 2012, 8:26 am by Sunny Bindra

A few weeks ago I predicted that 2012 would be the year of the “Twitter Big Stick” in Kenya: a time when both politicians and large organizations feel the force of feedback from social media.

I pointed out that the reason for this is that the little people – customers, users, voters – now have networked little devices in their pockets. Most of these mobile gadgets have cameras attached, and are connected to global social media platforms. A single tweet complaining about your organization can therefore reach tens of thousands of people in just hours, if not minutes.

Don’t believe me on this one, Kenyan CEOs? Well, it’s already happening.

In recent months, many corporations have had to undertake humiliating U-turns after new proposals caused social media explosions. Take Netflix in the US. This very successful company suddenly announced plans to split up its businesses and charge more for each service. The resulting Twitter uproar amongst its user base was deafening, with thousands threatening immediate cancellations. Guess what? The company reversed course, but the damage was done.

Bank of America announced a new $5 monthly debit card charge – but changed its mind fast once a social-media storm focused its attention. Gap was forced to recall a new logo – after seeing all the derision it excited. Verizon’s ill-thought-out $2 online-payments charge didn’t even make it past 24 hours. And HP announced plans to ditch its personal-computer business – but found surprisingly high levels of support for its PCs on social media, and decided to keep the division going (after dumping its CEO instead).

Are these all foreign examples, not applicable here, I hear you saying? Well, Kenya Power faced widespread derision from its customer base online when it launched a new brand – minus any appreciable improvement in customer service and supply reliability. Local ISPs who use blatantly misleading marketing in launching new offerings are feeling the heat every day.

A localized dispute between business directory Mocality and Google here in Kenya last week took just hours to spread around “Twitterville” and elsewhere, and was all over leading global online news media the same day, forcing Google to issue a quick apology and the promise of a thorough investigation.

So don’t doubt it: the Twitter Big Stick is swinging. If your organization routinely frustrates its customers, makes them swelter in queues, mis-sells its products, or allows its staff to engage in anti-social practices – await the online caning. Which will be very, very bad for your reputation and your business.

What this heralds is a startling sea-change in the relationship between organizations and their customers. The little Davids are able to connect virtually in a way they never could physically, and teach many a Goliath a stinging lesson.

Is this always a good thing? No, because abuse is possible and in some cases consumers should not have so much say in company decisions. However, in an environment where customer abuse is rampant and bad service the norm, the social-media firestorms will mostly do a great deal of good. Businesses will be forced to remember why they exist in the first place – to deliver unique value to customers.

Good organizations should prepare themselves now. Take a fresh look at what causes anger and frustration in your customer base, and act on it before you spark any uproar to avoid severe reputational damage. Be more honest and open in your dealings with customers in this new, more transparent world. Embrace feedback, no matter how robust, and use it to become better and stronger. Think hard about your own social-media presence and strategy.

The good organizations who care about their reputations will be the first to use this development positively. For the rest, only prolonged online caning will discipline them. It should be a fascinating year.

To really understand a business, don’t talk to the CEO

Posted: January 16, 2012, 9:23 am by Sunny Bindra

“I long ago realised that to understand a business I would learn much more by talking to people involved in day-to-day operations than the chief executive. They represented “what is really going on here?”"

JOHN KAY, Financial Times (January 3, 2011)

The excerpt shown, from Professor John Kay’s regular FT column, caught my eye. I agree wholeheartedly. To truly understand a business don’t talk to its CEO. At least, not at first.

I have spent the better part of my life looking at and into businesses, and trying to figure them out. And it is true: most CEOs are not equipped to tell you the truth about their businesses.

Years ago, when I was still an active management consultant, I was asked to come and offer advice to a very successful, rapidly growing business. My response was simple: “Fine, but I won’t come to head office first. Please arrange for me to tour customer-facing facilities, talk to customers, talk to front-line staff. Only then, much later, will I come for discussions with the CEO.”

The CEO agreed, and we have had a mutually interesting relationship for years.

Most CEOs, by their nature, operate on feel-good statements. They are required to be optimists exuding positivity. They spend most of their time persuading shareholders, investors, regulators and the media to believe in their mission. They operate at the level of the vision statement and the list of corporate values. They talk loftily and aim for the stars. Don’t mock them for this – inspiring others is part of the deal in leadership.

Anyone wishing to get a true understanding of how a business works and a clear picture of its position in its industry, however, must seek out other voices. The most important of these is the voice of the customer, the person who spends money on the product and feels the value, or not, of what is being produced most acutely. Equally important is the potential customer – the person who could buy the company’s product but currently doesn’t. “Why not?” is a crucial question to put to this party.

And then we take our enquiries to employees, big and small. Especially small. Many CEOs think their staff resemble a happy-clappy church where employees are imbued with overwhelming belief in their boss and his vision, and would rather work in his organization than any other. A few candid minutes with junior employees usually explodes that notion.

Lastly, don’t ever forget to talk to competitors. If you are an acute observer, talking to a company’s rivals will reveal a great deal about its true strengths and weaknesses.

Customers, staff, competitors – and then the CEO. It’s a good rule for consultants, analysts, investors, students and business journalists. It’s almost never followed. Most allow themselves to be swept up in the boss-man’s hubris and buy the story wholesale. Remember, most chief executives are seasoned charmers and missionaries: they can spin the tale. They often even believe it, wholesale. It is part of their role to marshall the troops, generate energy and inspiration in others. Unfortunately, they often do this at the expanse of reality.

If you really want to understand a business, work backwards. Look at what it produces, and what value it adds to the lives of its users and consumers. Look at those who don’t buy the product, and study what they buy instead. Look at the people who do the producing, and study their engagement and commitment to their work. Look at competitors, and study the differences and similarities. If you find truly distinctive elements in the business model, and gauge unusual levels of satisfaction in the workplace and the shopfront, then you may be on to something good.

Then, by all means, have coffee with the chief executive.

A country of Big People and Little People

Posted: January 15, 2012, 7:28 am by Sunny Bindra

In Kenya there are Big People, and there are Little People. There are very few Big People, and very, very many Little People. The Big People call all the shots and make all the decisions, and the Little People obey.

The slightly bigger Little People spend all their time and effort trying to become Big People, because if you are one of the Little People in Kenya you are nothing. It doesn’t matter how you became one of the Big People, as long as you are Big.

Big People have many privileges. They ride ‘back-left’ in limousines, while Little People ‘kaa square’ in matatus. Big People do not have to obey normal traffic rules and do not notice the gridlock around them, because they use journey time to rest and work in air-conditioned comfort. Little People lose several hours a day marooned on clogged-up roads. But that’s fine, because the Little People’s time doesn’t really matter.

Big People are exempt from queues and general inconvenience. They can go to the front automatically and be served first, as all the Little People will make way for them. Big People do not have to be searched or subjected to security checks, because they are too Big for that. A Little Person attempting to impose any inconvenience on a Big Person will soon be made a Tiny Person.

Big People do not pay taxes. They are either given official exemptions, or they find more creative ways of escaping the net. Little People pay lots of taxes and pay for everything that the Big People do.

Big People do not go to jail. They commit many crimes, but are too Big to be punished. As a result, they commit even more crimes and become even Bigger. Little People are punished immediately for even the smallest misdemeanour, unless they are protected by Big People.

Big People are surrounded by lots of Little People called aides, assistants, drivers, bodyguards and relatives. These Little People protect the Big People from other Little People, and in return are made to feel like Slightly Big People.

Big People learned long ago that there are many more Little People than there are Big People. They realized that the only way to keep Little People from noticing they outnumber the Big People was to keep them in separate pens called Tribes. Once the Little People were herded into these special pens, they could be controlled easily by the Big People who would warn them about the danger that comes from other Little People in other pens.

The good news for the Little People is that things may be about to change for them. For one thing, more than half of the Little People are now Very Young People, because the Older Little People had been too active in procreating Little People. For another, the Little People now carry Little Devices that allow them to connect to all the world’s Little People. This has allowed the Little People to realize that being forcibly kept Little is backward and primitive.

Many more of the Little People are also becoming Medium People, and are asking why the Big People have it all their own way. They are asking pesky questions and refusing to fetch the ball for the Big People. The Little People are now realizing that they don’t have to be so Little after all. Some of the Big People are also realizing that the exclusive Big life is not sustainable.

Someday soon, Kenya will become a country for All People, where every person lives under the same rules and has the same rights; where anyone who has earned it on merit can become bigger; and where what is good for All People is what is done. Then, we will read in our history books about the bad old days when only Big People mattered.

On The Bench with Jeff Koinange on Friday 13 January 2011

Posted: January 12, 2012, 5:58 pm by Sunny Bindra

I have a Friday 13th date with Jeff Koinange on his famous bench, K24 TV Capital Talk. The show will be aired at 8.00 pm Friday, repeated 10.30 pm. Also repeated Saturday morning, 9.00 am, and Sunday evening, 10.30 pm. It will also run on www.YouTube.com/K24TV.

Do you have any meaningful say in the work that you do?

Posted: January 9, 2012, 8:38 am by Sunny Bindra

Since the mid-80s, academics have been carrying out regular skills surveys, asking detailed questions of thousands of employees. In 1986…72% of professionals felt they had a great deal of independence in doing their jobs. By 2006, that had plummeted to just 38%.
Which is shocking but also makes sense: if you’re a teacher you now have to work to a national curriculum. If you’re a bank manager you have far fewer individual powers than your predecessor would have had in the 80s. And if you’re a teller, it’s standard practice to work from a script.

ADITYA CHAKRABORTTY, www.guardian.co.uk (Dec 19, 2011)

Aditya Chakrabortty pointed out an interesting aspect of modern life in The Guardian recently: the more variety we enjoy as consumers, the less autonomy we enjoy as employees.

It is not a surprise that most blue-collar workers in large companies have little say in the work that they do. As enterprises have become more complex and more far-flung, consistency across units is paramount. When you are producing multiple product lines across multiple geographies, you cannot afford to have inconsistencies in quality and customer experience. Having a rigid, centrally defined process for everything is the path that most complex organizations have taken to address this problem. This means that the workers at the coalface simply do as they are told – there is no room for experimentation, flexibility or creativity.

The more recent phenomenon is that white-collar workers, including very senior executives, often suffer the same loss of independence. They, too, are tightly controlled from a powerful centre; they, too are permitted few decisions; they, too have to work like cogs in the system.

As a customer, you may have encountered the consequences of this. The bank manager, for example, who cannot make an exception on your loan application simply because he can’t overrule the process; the chief executive who can’t make any adjustment to his local product despite overwhelming data suggesting the global one is not what’s needed in his patch; the team leader who is powerless to make any meaningful change to the rewards flowing to his team members.

Where is this leading? Customers are increasingly facing faceless organizations where the person dealing with you, and that person’s next five superior officers, are unable to make any meaningful decision. All they can do is feed your information into the opaque system, and await a reply.

Certainly, this reduces fraud and poor local decisions; it automates mundane tasks; it makes products and services cheaper. But it also means that the number of people who actually think, create, innovate and make decisions is shrinking. Academics foresee a world in which perhaps just 10 per cent of the world’s workforce has “permission to think.” The rest simply have to do as they’re told. After decades of massive expansion in education across the globe, we may be heading back to an assembly-line model; the difference being that the worker drones are now well-educated graduates.

This phenomenon is going to trouble many an ambitious employee; it will trouble many a customer who wants a meaningful emotional engagement with a business; and it should trouble many a thoughtful leader. Good luck in keeping the best people when your business model disallows them from thinking or contributing ideas.

As 2012 unfolds, I suggest this should be one of the top issues challenging chief executives: how do you manage smooth and consistent delivery without turning your best people into drones and clones?

It also offers a huge opportunity to startups. Big, global businesses are going to struggle, really struggle, in offering human interactions to their customers. They are going to struggle to motivate their best people to be accept being mere ghosts in the machine. And that gives you every chance to thrive by playing on those very weaknesses. Go for it.

Large organizations: that long queue demonstrates only your inefficiency

Posted: January 9, 2012, 8:25 am by Sunny Bindra

We are becoming a country of queues. Wherever you look, and wherever you go, people are standing in queues. Increasingly long queues. What is a queue? A place where a long-suffering user or customer gets increasingly annoyed with your organization and your brand.

Given how widespread this problem is, it always amazes me how little attention management teams give it. You, the reader, have almost certainly stood in a long queue somewhere recently: a bank, a government agency, an airline check-in counter, a utility firm, a supermarket or large store, a bus station, a hospital, a hotel reception, an immigration line – and many others. How did you feel?

If the queue was short and moved quickly, you probably felt fine. If the queue was long and moved slowly, however, you were undoubtedly filled with increasing frustration and annoyance towards the service provider who had corralled you there. Most customers have a common complaint: a huge number of customers in the hall, but only one or two counters open.

Managers, why is this not a big deal for you? There are angry people in queues all around us, but hardly any thought is given to queue mitigation. There is often a fatalism at work here, which perceives this phenomenon as somehow natural, too expensive or too difficult to deal with. Perversely, there is also a triumphalism I find in some management teams – a feeling that long queues are indicative of success (“we must be good if so many people line up for us.”)

Both perspectives are fallacious. The queue problem is neither insurmountable nor commendable. A queue is not proof of popularity. It is a management challenge, and your inability to address it only demonstrates failure. It is also deeply inefficient; how much revenue is lost by making people queue up unnecessarily and possibly abandon you; and how much expensive goodwill gained through good advertising and PR is squandered daily on the shopfloor?

The truth is, a thoughtful management team can come up with several ways of reducing and managing queues. All these approaches involve intelligent combinations of technology and people.

First, work the technology. Many Kenyan organizations have done this: banks have introduced ATMs and online transactions; service providers have allowed for mobile money payments. But it is not enough. Many managers are still wondering why the queues don’t diminish. The answer is that you have not sold and communicated the new channels well enough. Most customers require serious hand-holding before they trust a new technology, and this is rarely provided.

Second, rethink the people equation. Introducing new technology is not just a chance to reduce your headcount costs; it is a golden opportunity to enhance the customer experience. Having fewer tellers may save you salaries; but they add huge costs in lost goodwill. Intelligent peak traffic measurement is needed, and rarely seems to be done.

Third, try new approaches. Top global organizations are introducing handheld checkouts, so that a sale can be clocked anywhere in the shop. They are introducing self-checkout / self check-in lanes for more tech-savvy customers. They are pre-scanning shopping baskets to reduce time at the till. They are deploying staff to act as queue-busters: keeping customers engaged and directing people to the correct line and the next available counter. They are isolating the most common causes of holdups, and addressing them.

There are many interesting ways to reduce queues. The first step is to realize you can and should reduce them. Users of your service are not cattle lined up for milking; they are human beings with things to do and places to be. Most people do not get any inherent pleasure from being at your premises; they want to complete their business and leave quickly. It is your duty to make that happen.

2011 was a bad year for business leadership

Posted: January 2, 2012, 10:06 am by Sunny Bindra

“This was a year, sadly, when examples of poor leadership (bad decision-making, selfish actions and inexplicably bone-headed moves) seemed to outnumber the good.”

JENA MCGREGOR, The Washington Post (Dec 19, 2011)

As we end another year, we in the business world have to concede an uncomfortable fact: 2011 was not a great year for corporate leadership.

Too many CEOs have been involved in inexplicably bad decisions, as The Washington Post pointed out last week. Despite their vast experience and sterling CVs, business stewards seem increasingly prone to serious leadership gaffes.

Let’s start with the heads of RIM, maker of the famed Blackberry phone. How exactly does one destroy a market share as dominant as the Blackberry enjoyed just a few short years ago, and watch a share price plummet as much as 77% over the year? Answer: you place not one, but two CEOs who don’t get it at the helm. As this column commented in August, RIM is run by a coterie of insiders who all see the world in the same way. When that view is plain wrong, there’s no one around to say so. The only salvation, it seems, will come from a sale of the company.

Move on to HP, once an equally dominant maker of computers, now on its 4th CEO of recent times, all hired as messiahs from outside the company. Why this company’s board carries on being allowed to choose CEOs by its shareholders is beyond me. It has laid to waste a proud legacy and wonderful heritage of innovation.

Let’s look at another company whose woes hit the headlines in 2011: the legendary Kodak. Kodak has been a slow-puncture that began some time ago, but this year it was forced to concede that Chapter 11 bankruptcy may not be far away. This for a company that once held a 90% market share in the US? Ironically, Kodak actually invented the technology that has eviscerated it: digital photography. It just didn’t understand the power of what it held in its hands.

And what about that Japanese icon, Olympus, now revealed to have been hiding losses of $1.7 billion on its books? At the time of writing, the Olympus board is still largely intact – and trying to influence its own succession instead of slinking off in shame.

The list could continue. India’s mobile telephony firms are ensnared in that country’s 2G scam – when government officials seem to have conspired with corporates to underbid for licenses some years ago. That has now put a brake on their global ambitions – not least in Africa. Essar’s India bosses were recently charged, and more charges seem likely.

Meanwhile, the Murdochs showed how ridiculous it is for a leader to use the “I never knew it was happening, honest” defence. Having created an “anything goes” culture, Rupert Murdoch can hardly hide behind the span and scope of his global enterprise and say he didn’t know his newspapers were doing bad things. But he did, and has suffered irreparable reputation damage late in life as a result.

We are not spared back home. The venerable CMC Motors has given us one of the ugliest boardroom spats of recent times, resulting in its suspension from the Nairobi Stock Exchange. Kenya Power seems more preoccupied with collecting awards for rebranding than giving its customers the one thing they want: reliable, affordable power. And too many Kenyan CEOs are proving to be tone deaf when it comes to listening to customers, ignoring or justifying mounting complaints about service.

If you are a business leader, learn from the bungling of your less competent peers in 2011. Leading a corporation is a big deal, and it should be done with great vigilance. It is a huge responsibility to take so many livelihoods into your hands, and we owe it our ecosystems and future generations to take this responsibility very, very seriously.

Way too many leaders are proving narrow-minded, self-absorbed, intellectually hidebound by previous successes, or just plain larcenous. I hope 2012 will herald the coming of a new order, one that sets high standards in delivery and integrity, and one that works for something way bigger than the personal payoff.

I wish you all a 2012 full of wealth – in its true meaning

May these be the things you achieve in 2012

Posted: January 1, 2012, 9:04 am by Sunny Bindra

I attended a graduation ceremony recently, and was struck by something said by one the graduands, a class president. She quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson, certainly one of the more quotable people who ever passed through this planet. Here is the quotation:

“To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children…to leave the world a better place…to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”

[Important note: this quotation has probably been wrongly attributed to Emerson. See comments below]

I am repeating it here because today is the first day of a new year, and we need inspiration as we take on the rigours to come. Success has become one of the mantras of individual life, but are we defining success correctly? Every parent wants her child to succeed; every youthful aspirant wants this universal good called success on his curriculum vitae.

Modern life seems to have got success horribly wrong. When people talk about being successful, they are nearly always talking about making a lot of money; about gaining power over others; about getting applause from an adoring public; about having lots of things to show off and invoke envy in others.

Most will not admit it, but if they care to look at that list again, that is what they are really after. Look again at the people you think are successful, and you will see that what you are measuring is their baubles and trinkets, their suzerainty over others, their popularity.

Emerson reminds us that this life is fleeting, and that to succeed in it properly is difficult. The first step, however, is to understand what constitutes success, and that is where his quotation offers timeless wisdom.

Winning the respect of wise people: is that not a much forgotten achievement? Today, people wallow and even revel in utter ignorance. They celebrate their populist idiocies. They strut in bling and delight in gibberish. In this era of easy and vapid celebrity, the need to win respect is gone.

Even more important is Emerson’s next measure: winning the affection of children. How many of us even attempt that? We ignore children, park them in front of televisions and video games, watch their minds rot before our eyes. We no longer engage them, entertain them, stimulate them, guide them. Upbringing is electronically outsourced.

We also sit around in fatalistic indifference. The world’s a mess, but what can one person do about it? What can little, insignificant me do to change things? Emerson provides something of great meaning: make sure even one person has a better life because you lived. That, surely, is in everyone’s grasp. We can all be successful, truly successful, by simply making things a little better for the people immediately around us.

Betterment is often confused with economic uplift. It may or may not be in your power to provide material gain to others. But it is certainly in your grasp to provide counsel, kindness and attention.

So let 2012 measure these things in your life: how much respect you earn for your values and principles rather than your cars and houses; how many children laugh and smile when they see you; and how much your presence on this planet boosts the wellbeing of others, not just yourself.

In closing, let us also not forget another worthy Emerson quotation: “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.” Let us not merely record our successes in terms of wisdom received from others. Let us strive to think for ourselves and know our own things. Wise persons prompt and goad us into thinking more deeply. But they cannot do our thinking for us. Reading good things and marvelling at them is not enough. We have to be good, do good and make good things happen.

May your year be measured in smiles, respect and appreciation.

No related posts.

Here are the Sunshine Awards 2011

Posted: December 25, 2011, 9:01 am by Sunny Bindra

It’s time for the annual Sunshine Awards from this columnist: highlighting the significant events and people of 2011. Before you proceed, please remember the selection process is opaque, peculiar and idiosyncratic, and not subject to external auditing.

The Damburst of the Year was the amazing outbreak of popular uprisings. Starting from the Arab world this time last year, mass protest took on a new momentum in 2011. The protests spread like wildfire across North Africa and the Middle East. One of the world’s ancient civilizations, Greece, had its people repeatedly causing havoc on its streets. The Occupy movement spread across the globe to protest elite hegemony. And there’s much more to come in 2012, as ordinary people resist becoming the victims of the privileged.

Linked to this, the unpredicted Phenomenon of the Year was the spectacle of big-men dictators falling like dominoes. Ben Ali, Mubarak, Gaddafi, Gbagbo, Saleh, Assad, Kim are gone or going. All over the globe, sitting dictators looked on in disbelief and many must be dreading the words “Up Next…”

The Fiasco of the Year has to be the near-collapse of the Eurozone. Who saw that coming at the beginning of the year? Europe’s diverse and indebted economies are now seeming virtually impossible to shackle with a single currency, and the proposed salvation measures – print more money to spread around a failed system – only seem to kick the can down the road for future taxpayers to pick up. For those of us in East Africa: let’s watch this space keenly in 2012 – and learn the lessons about economic blocs.

For Kenya, the Technology of the Year must be social media. Sure, it’s been around a while, but 2011 was the year Kenyans joined in droves, primarily using inexpensive mobile devices. Apart from allowing Kenyans to exchange inane trivia, this cheap, widespread connectivity has two more meaningful consequences: first, for our politicians, who are going to discover how difficult it is to keep young people in ignorance and stifle debate amongst them; second, for our companies, who are going to wriggle on the hot plate of instantaneously transmitted customer dissatisfaction and reputation damage in 2012.

In Kenya, the Idiot of the Year is undoubtedly the overlapper. This creature displays some distinguishing characteristics. He (the overlapper is nearly always male) comes from all walks of life and all social classes; he does not give a damn about anyone else around him, as long as he gets a few metres ahead; he is evidently dimwitted, since his actions make things worse for everyone, himself included. 2011 was the year in which overlapping became a plague rather than a minority ailment. And all the while, leaders and regulators looked away.

Kenya’s positive Change of the Year is the slow but steady building of an independent judiciary. For too long, our legal system has been in the steely grip of the executive and the grubby paws of the rich, which is why the country now displays its soiled linen in the International Criminal Court. There are strong signs that a judicial system that enforces laws fairly for all may be on its way back. There will be many roadblocks ahead, but the journey is well worth continuing. Our future wellbeing and prosperity depends on the untainted rule of law.

And finally, the Transition of the Year was the passing of Kenya’s iconic heroine, Wangari Maathai. The good lady moved on, but left us a legacy of unbowed courage in the fight for a cause. It is wonderful to see so many brave souls picking up her baton to continue the fight for Kenya’s trees – all strength to them.

May 2012 be a year of peaceful transition of power, and of more people doing the right thing even when no one around them sets the example. Festive greetings to all.

You should enter high-growth industries – right?

Posted: December 19, 2011, 2:30 pm by Sunny Bindra

“Managers often mistakenly assume that a high-growth industry will be an attractive one. Wrong. Growth is no guarantee that the industry will be profitable. For example, growth might put suppliers in the driver’s seat, driving up the industry’s costs and limiting profitability. Or, combined with low entry barriers, growth might attract new rivals, thereby increasing competition and driving prices down. Growth alone says nothing about the power of customers or the availability of substitutes, both of which would dampen profitability. The untested assumption that a fast-growing industry is a “good” industry, (Michael) Porter warns, often leads to bad strategy decisions.”

JOAN MAGRETTA, blogs.hbr.org (Dec 8, 2011)

Joan Magretta, blogging on the Harvard Business Review site, had an important point to make recently: don’t assume that a high-growth industry is your best bet.

Is that counter-intuitive? Surely we should all go to where the action is? Where consumer demand is strong and industry turnover is rocketing? Not at all, says Magretta, reminding us of the work of Professor Michael Porter in assessing the attractiveness of industries. You should enter an industry where you can build a competitive advantage – not to join the crowd. Just because an industry is good for market leaders does not mean it will be good for you.

Consider these examples. Should you enter the mobile-phone space in Africa, where we have had double-digit growth in recent years and where analysts predict many rosy years of growth to come? I would hope you would be a little circumspect. I hope you would see the formidable task of taking on industry leaders such as Safaricom, with their vast network advantages and grip on customers via must-use products like M-Pesa.

Would you look at the huge profit margins enjoyed by soft-drinks manufacturers like Coca-Cola, and conclude you need to get some of that action? I would hope that industry would be way down on your list of startup options, for you would be taking on a 100-year brand with one of the world’s biggest advertising budgets.

Mobile-phone apps are similarly growing amazingly fast, with 18 billion downloads already in Apple’s iOS ecosystem and 10 billion in Google’s Android world. So you should start up an app-making company, yes? Yes – but only if you have something truly distinctive, attractive or useful to offer. Remember, everyone and their uncle (or nephew, more likely) is trying to build apps now. Some of these people are very good at what they do; most are not. Unless you can be in the former group, don’t bother trying. When you’re up against hundreds of thousands of competing products, you’d better have something really different to tout.

You get the picture. An industry is not attractive because it’s fast-growing or in the news; it’s attractive because you have the capabilities with which to make your mark in it. What Porter said all those years ago is still relevant: study the barriers to entry; the power of customers and suppliers; the intensity of rivalry; and the threat of substitute products destroying the market.

Modern technology has made that last factor particularly potent. Substitutes are arriving from left-of-field at an alarming rate, and whacking many previously complacent industries. Would you care to count with me the number of industries that have been laid waste by the sudden advent of smartphones, tablets and apps? Think about it, and you will realize you need more than the fingers of both hands to count the industries where purveyors of old business models have been brought to their knees.

At the end of the day, strategic advice is not complicated. You compete by being distinctive and innovative and by delivering genuine value to customers, not by joining crowds of competitors. The first step is always to be very, very good at what YOU do.

Nairobi’s traffic problem is a behaviour problem

Posted: December 17, 2011, 5:09 am by Sunny Bindra

I have been beating the traffic-gridlock tune on my drum on this page since 2003. Every year, the situation in our capital city gets worse. Every year, leaders yawn and look away. But for how much longer?

As Nairobians of all walks of life can testify, the situation is now at breaking point. In recent weeks we have had several days on which traffic has been at a complete standstill in pretty much all corners of this once-proud city. It has taken unfortunate residents five, six or seven hours just to get to their homes.

The thing that perplexes me most: where’s the leadership? This thing cannot be resolved by the people. The people, in fact, have fallen into grave civic disorder, breaking every rule in the traffic book at will. But that is where leadership is meant to come in, is it not?

Political leaders, we know that the traffic-standstill problem does not affect you personally. We see that some of you travel in vast convoys and have the traffic cleared from your path. We observe that most of you feel you are above the law, instructing your drivers to overtake and overlap without the slightest concern for others.

But is that your leadership – that if something doesn’t hurt you personally, you need do nothing about it? Leadership only matters if it improves the wellbeing of the collective – otherwise it is of no consequence and no meaning. A real leader should look at this situation and feel severe pain in the gut.

Why does it not matter to ministers, permanent secretaries and senior technocrats that the city is becoming unlivable? How many billions of shillings in GDP are being squandered on the roads every year? After all, all those people are not doing anything while they fidget in a jam – they are waiting to do something. Waiting is not productive.

CEOs: I know you sit in air-conditioned comfort at the back of your limos, typing away on your BlackBerries and iPads. You may be working during gridlock – but what about your employees? They don’t have that convenience. Their productivity and morale is being hammered every day by time wasted in jams, early starts and late finishes. So why aren’t you using your collective clout to attack this problem?

The thing is this: the jams are neither inevitable nor insurmountable. This problem can be solved. It is within our reach. There is an obvious thing that can be done, literally overnight.

The real reason we are in gridlock is sheer breakdown in social order. So what happened to the traffic police? Are overlapping, driving on pavements, refusing to use designated stops, parking on busy roads no longer an offense to the Highway Code? Do we even have a code any more? Regulators seem to have completely abdicated their duties, watching wananchi descend further into misbehaviour every day. All it would need is even one week of reinforcing the law and the laid-down rules to have a significant impact. Is that beyond us now?

Of course, there are bigger solutions, but they will take time. Accelerate the new road network – and build roads to last more than just six months. Address corruption in car importation and licensing, and in driver training. Introduce properly regulated, affordable public transport solutions. Use taxation and road pricing to ensure that the full cost of driving is imposed on drivers. And overhaul police governance so that the enforcement of even the smallest regulation is not a vehicle for extortion.

Those things must come. Without them, our whole economic engine will seize up. But we can also act on the here and now. Bad behaviour is everywhere, and it is worsening every journey for everyone. Simply making drivers behave like civilized human beings is now the burning issue. I hope someone will step in to address it.

The modern problem of corporate fluff

Posted: December 12, 2011, 10:07 am by Sunny Bindra

“As a simple example of fluff in strategy work, here is a quote from a major retail bank’s internal strategy memoranda:”Our fundamental strategy is one of customer-centric intermediation.” The Sunday word “intermediation” means that company accepts deposits and then lends them to others. In other words, it is a bank. The buzz phrase “customer-centric” could mean that the bank competes by offering depositors and lenders better terms or better service. But an examination of its policies and products does not reveal any distinction in this regard. The phrase “customer-centric intermediation is pure fluff. Pull of the fluffy covering and you have the superficial statement “Our bank’s fundamental strategy is being a bank.” ”

RICHARD RUMELT Good Strategy, Bad Strategy (2010)

The peerless Richard Rumelt has written one of the best books on strategy in recent years, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. It is required reading for anyone with an interest in the subject.

In the excerpt shown, the professor is scathing about the use of ‘fluff’ – meaningless, wishy-washy, feel-good jargon – to describe strategy. He makes two points: merely saying what you do in fancy language (“intermediation”) does not confer any distinction. And if you use words like “customer-centric”, you had better mean them. The bank in question does not – it’s just a nice thing to say.

Most banks, in most people’s experience, are in fact anything BUT customer-centric. They are self-absorbed, navel-gazing, inbred institutions that suit themselves, their executive teams and their shareholders at every opportunity – rather than customers. Most banks make it hard to bank, hard to borrow, hard to get served. The idea of placing the customer in the centre of anything would be anathema. Yet pretty much every bank you encounter anywhere in the world will try to say it has a “customer-centric” strategy.

This, you will agree, is absurd.

Rumelt tells us: “A hallmark of true expertise and insight is making a complex subject understandable. A hallmark of mediocrity and bad strategy is unnecessary complexity – a flurry of fluff masking an absence of substance.”

One of the most impressive strategic turnarounds ever is the return of Steve Jobs to Apple in 1997. He said at the time: “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.” The Apple of that time was utterly unfocused, churning out dozens of unnecessary products with meaningless number tags (Macintosh 1400 to 9600, for example). This was not the Apple way. But the Apple of 1997 was doing its best to be just like any other computer company, bloated product portfolio and all. It was committing corporate suicide by destroying its uniqueness.

Jobs became enraged at one product strategy session, and shouted “Stop!” According to biographer Walter Isaacson, he picked up a marker and drew four quadrants on a flipchart. The two columns were labelled “Consumer” and “Pro”; and the two rows “Desktop” and “Portable.” That was it. Four product lines were all that were needed.

This sharp focus resulted in outstanding products for each of the four quadrants, as Apple’s engineers finally achieved focus and channeled their energies appropriately. The effect was quick: after years of huge losses, Apple returned to profitability in 1998. The rest, as you know, is history.

That is an example of a leader seeing quickly what needs to be done and why, and making it happen through clarity of communication. That, in other words, is strategy. So toss out those tired and banal statements you keep using, and get to the point. Your strategy is simply what needs to be done and why, and how it’s going to be done. Try saying that for a change.

The sad saga of the Kenyan Ark

Posted: December 10, 2011, 5:03 am by Sunny Bindra

Once upon a time, it rained and rained and rained in Kenya. And then it rained some more. It began to look like the rain might never end. As the nation had never invested in proper drainage systems, the whole country looked like it might be lost underwater.

Someone came up with the bright idea of building a Kenyan Ark to leave all the myriad problems behind, escape and start the country afresh elsewhere. However, the government soon noticed this initiative and made it a political project. And then the problems began.

The first difficulty was to elect a captain. Leading politicians disagreed violently, even resorting to fisticuffs. Eventually, Kofi Annan flew in and announced a coalition captain at a press conference held on a decommissioned ferry.

The second difficulty related to the passenger list. Tribal chieftains clashed on proportional representation. After much thunder and lightning, it was agreed that all the tribes registered at the National Museum would send representatives in two by two. Briefly, some Kenyans started an SMS lottery to sell Ark tickets, but closed their offices overnight and disappeared after selling a million seats in a week.

The next problem was the cost of construction. The Chinese government offered to build the Kenyan Ark in exchange for exclusive rights to all the water resources in the country. This was readily agreed to and signed. However, vigilant activists filed a court injunction and the proposal had to be rethought.

MPs and ministers formed a fact-finding committee to tour Venice, Amsterdam and the Amazon Basin to learn international best practice in ark-building technology, for an outlay of just Sh 2 billion. They were accompanied by wives, concubines and offspring, both legitimate and illegitimate.

Eventually, tenders were issued and finally a contract was awarded to a new company called Uwongo Brothers for just Sh 50 billion. The company had been formed just a month prior, and its website contained photos of successful projects completed across the globe.

Many months and much waterlogging later, the Kenyan Ark was ready for launch. A sparkling function that cost just Sh 5 billion was arranged to say goodbye to the Kenyans setting off for a brave new world. However, this was delayed by the chief guest arriving five hours late. An activist who had chained himself to the side of the Ark also caused a brief commotion. Passengers failed to make an orderly queue, and overlapping led to further delays.

Finally, it was launched! The Ark set off to the resounding cacophony of a navy band. As Kenyans waved from the shore, however, disaster struck. The Ark did not even make it out of the Likoni channel before it capsized, killing all on board. The Kenyan Red Cross was immediately on the scene, but it was too late.

Accusations threw thick and fast about Uwongo Brothers’ standards of workmanship. Witnesses revealed that the Ark had in fact been constructed by prisoners and kidnapped street-children using leftover plywood. The builder was now discovered to have no registered office in London or anywhere else. The Minister for Systematic Obfuscation however issued a statement denying any wrongdoing, stating that the passengers had in fact sat badly.

It was also discovered that several other Arks had been commissioned with official government papers, and had sold millions of seats. None were actually built.

An official commission of inquiry was ordered into the fiasco, at a cost of just Sh 10 billion. Two years later, it issued its report which absolved all public officials of blame and found no evidence of wrongdoing. It noted that no money had been stolen, and the episode was filed as an act of God.

(With much gratitude to Kenya’s witty “Twitterati” who contributed many thoughts to this article)

If it’s just about you, nothing will outlast you

Posted: December 5, 2011, 10:01 am by Sunny Bindra

“The I.B.M. lesson, Mr. Palmisano said, is never become wedded to what you make, but to the values the corporation stands for. After all, I.B.M. started out making clocks, scales, punched card tabulators, and cheese slicers (“the world’s fastest at the time,” he noted).
“The history of business is a bone pile of companies that had an extraordinary initial success,” Mr. Palmisano said, “but were unable to achieve a second act.” Mostly, he added, the bone pile companies “could not get beyond an emotional attachment to the past.”
The enduring corporate values Mr. Palmisano had in mind were not ethics or corporate responsibility, though those are certainly values, but a company’s lasting goals — in I.B.M.’s case, satisfying customer needs, building long-term relationships and pursuing breakthrough innovations.”

New York Times (3 November 2011)

I wrote about IBM’s centenary on this page recently:

“IBM’s ability to survive is driven less by being ahead of an ever-changing curve, and more by its ability to stay bonded with its customers in its role as their trusted advisor. Put that one in your pot, good people, and cook it to your own specification. It’s less about your business genius, and more about your ability to stay true to some enduring beliefs and practices. Mostly, it’s about building a unique culture inside the company, and very strong loyalties outside.”

Few companies last the longer race. Most die out after some short-lived successes. The art of longevity in business is the art of exercising wisdom over shrewdness; it is the art of valuing relationships over transactions; it is the art of cherishing values rather than products.

So it was good to hear Sam Palmisano, IBM’s outgoing chairman and CEO, confirming this message recently. In the excerpt shown, Mr Palmisano tells us that many businesses can have a successful first act: they can have a hit product, be at the right place at the right time.

To have a successful second, third and fourth acts, however – that takes some doing. IBM shows us how.

It is NOT about being wedded to your products. Sony did that, and has not produced a hit product in years now. Microsoft did that, and is now scrambling to make up lost ground as its desktop-based software suites lose relevance by the day. RIM did that, but its hit BlackBerry phone is now looking like an also-ran – its stock hit a seven-year low the other day.

It is NOT about being shrewd at the expense of your customers. Have you ever wondered why you almost never see long-lived restaurants in Nairobi? Why so many appear, offer great food and ambience – and then fade away and disappear? How many favourite restaurants from your childhood are still present? Long list? Most commit the following fatal mistakes: they cut corners on quality after their initial success; they take customers for granted; they fail to build a distinctive working culture. And so they die.

Mr Palmisano’s message is to focus on enterprise-specific culture, values and goals: to be, for example, the best relationship manager; the most innovative product developer; the most trusted supplier. Those sorts of things create long-term success – and they require consistent leadership that cherishes and deepens them.

Mr Palmisano’s final message was perhaps his most telling. A CEO, he said, is merely a “temporary steward of a great enterprise.” This humility is necessary if you are going to steer a durable enterprise. It’s not about you: it’s about keeping the great ship on its course, and then handing over to younger, better hands.

Now there’s a lesson many, many leaders need to learn. It’s never about you; it’s always about the greater good and the bigger deal. In yourself you are nothing. If it’s just about you, nothing will outlast you.

A big thank-you to all the decent people out there

Posted: December 3, 2011, 4:58 am by Sunny Bindra

Let us take some time this Sunday to be thankful for certain types of people.

Let us thank those who are polite and courteous, even when everyone around them is rude and obnoxious. Those who maintain etiquette and decorum even though that doesn’t get you anywhere in this increasingly ugly world. Those who say “please” and “thank you” even though no one says it to them.

Let us be grateful for those who maintain road discipline and manners, even when every cretin around them is mounting pavements, overlapping obscenely, cutting in rudely and overtaking dangerously. Let us thank those who still give way, dip their lights, use their indicators, and wait patiently for the traffic to clear.

Let us express our gratitude for those who still try to run their businesses honestly. Those who don’t evade taxes, who try to create a genuinely good product or service, who compete legitimately by offering better value. They are a dying race, surrounded as they are by dodgers, scammers and corrupters masquerading as businesspeople.

Let us record our debt to those few remaining civil servants who still work with a sense of public duty, who do their jobs to a high standard and hold the fort against the networks of patronage all around them. They are in there, deep in the heart of the system. They are underpaid and undervalued. But they matter.

Let us recognize those honest, public-spirited brave-hearts who go to the polls every 5 years to try to become councillors and members of parliament, presidents even. These courageous crusaders haven’t got a hope in hell of winning, as they actually campaign on issues and integrity rather than tribal vitriol and cheap handouts. They will finish in fifth place at best, whilst known drug-runners and tribal overlords are re-elected. Because our unsung heroes do not give out tee shirts or arrive in large convoys, they will never be voted in. But they keep trying. And thank goodness they do, otherwise the only voices heard would be of loudmouths and hate-speakers.

And finally, let us sing a word of appreciation for those who just smile. It is hard to do that in this brutish, uncouth world, where customers are rude and arrogant and bosses are worse. It is hard to smile when scowlers get every promotion and win every prize. But there are many who smile in greeting and smile in farewell, and smile in between. Thank all that is good for their presence, for without them we would all live in a snapping, barking hell.

We must thank all these people because they are the only ones holding on to the cloak of civilization, whilst the rest do their damnedest to descend back to jungle rule. Without decent, honest and considerate folk in our midst, we would be no better than grunting beasts killing each other for every scrap of self-gain.

Why do they do it, these decent folk, when there is nothing to gain from it? The answer is simple. They do it for themselves. They do it because they have dignity to protect, values they believe in, a standard they will not drop. Their behaviour does not depend on the behaviour around them. Just because everyone is a boor is no reason for these good-hearted folk to be the same.

Good people don’t descend into the mire, they rise above it. There is great peace to be had in personal dignity.

And so, please join me in thanking all the good people. They make the world still worth living in; they keep hope burning; they give everyone a reason to carry on. If they didn’t exist, neither would anyone else, for the world would be in flames. This week, remember to thank one of the good people in person.

Is business really a force for good?

Posted: November 27, 2011, 4:38 am by Sunny Bindra

“Japanese police, prosecutors and securities agencies in Japan, the United States and Britain are investigating Olympus after the firm admitted this month that it hid losses on securities investments for decades, disguising some as acquisition payments and fees. The scandal at the once-proud firm has rekindled concerns about lax corporate governance in Japan and revived worries about links between companies and organized crime. A unit from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s organized crime division has joined the investigation, a source familiar with the matter said on Friday. But the source added it was premature to say if gangsters were involved.”

REUTERS (21 November 2011)

There are news reports that make you despair. This is because I am somebody who believes in the nobility of business. I believe that corporations can be a force for good in society. I believe many products are created that are of great utility for the ordinary person. I believe corporations can provide meaning and fulfillment for their employees, in a world largely devoid of meaning.

But there are days when all those beliefs are challenged.

Reading the excerpted article about Olympus provided one of those difficult days. Yet another famous brand, yet another organization with a proud heritage, is found to have been cooking the books. Olympus’s top brass, after weeks of strenuous denials, we’re forced to admit that they had been hiding losses in the form of bloated payments for acquisitions and professional fees. In other words, Olympus was living a lie.

This comes in the wake of many similar fiascos, all over the world. India’s Satyam was revealed to have been showing inflated margins to investors and keeping fictitious cash reserves on its balance sheet. America’s Enron gave us the mother of all corporate frauds, creating a much-lauded company that was actually a phantom. Also in the US, Bernie Madoff gathered money from gullible employees for decades while pretending to invest it and earning unbelievably consistent returns.

What do these multifarious scandals have in common? In all of them, hype outstripped reality. The egos of a few took precedence over the interests of the many. Regulators were asleep at the wheel. Big-name auditors faced questions about what they actually do, and why they can’t provide meaningful oversight. The media happily constructed myths around larger-than-life business leaders. Professional advisors took the tainted coin and looked the other way. Whistleblowers were treated with aggression and derision.

Some days, it’s all I can do to stop myself from giving up on the business world.

And yet, carry on we must. Those of us who believe business should be bigger and better than glorified gangsterism need to carry on fighting. There are plenty of good businesses driven by more than the need to accumulate grotesque personal fortunes and feed bloated egos. Those businesses must be honoured and show-cased.

Casino capitalism must be seen off the premises. Society must learn to see through the spin-doctoring of PR practitioners. We must separate the wheat from the chaff. Bad businesses give you plenty of signals that they are up to no good. Regulators, journalists and business schools must join hands to analyse and expose bad practice before it gets out of hand, not partake in the gravy train that usually signifies bad companies.

If we don’t do this, we are all complicit. Those who believe in a greater good, and in the power of the business world to transform ordinary lives, must step forward and prove it. We can only do this if we anchor our businesses in genuine values.

Company directors and executives are very good at talking the good talk. They are less good at walking the good walk. What status do you attain, however, from masking the facts, selling a lie, succeeding by corrupting others, competing by cheating? There can be no pride in common criminality, where business bosses behave no better than common street tricksters.

Organizations, be very afraid of social media

Posted: November 27, 2011, 9:23 am by Sunny Bindra

Once upon a time, businesses could get away with being bad to customers. They could neglect them and abuse them and not face any real consequences. What could a customer do in that world, anyway? Throw a fit on the company premises? Only a few employees, and possibly a handful of other customers, would observe it.

What else could the unhappy customer do? Go and tell a few friends and family about the bad incident? Go to the trouble of writing a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, and hope it got published? No, businesses didn’t really face any consequences to bad behaviour, because the fallout could be contained.

A few years ago, the Daily Nation started the “Cutting Edge” column which became very popular very fast. It published, amongst other titbits, complaints by customers. Companies, realizing that this bad news would now be read by many more people every day, began taking this column very seriously. They deployed Corporate Communications departments to respond to complaints quickly and decisively.

Consumers also cottoned on to the fact that the way to get a complaint resolved was to have it published in the famous column, because that was where the company’s CEO would read about it and summon managers to minimize the damage to company reputation. But it was only one small daily column, and many thousands of complaints would never get published.

Fast forward to today. In case you haven’t noticed, there is something called social media. It includes Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+. These networks have users in the hundreds of millions. Everyone is connected to everyone else. It costs next to nothing to connect. All you need is a simple mobile phone – not even a computer.

Kenyan CEOs, start paying attention here.

If someone ‘tweets’ a complaint about your organization, it may reach perhaps a few dozen “followers” of that person. Some of those followers will “retweet” it to their followers. Somewhere along the line, an “influential” follower, one with hundreds or even thousands of followers, will come into the net. Once this follower retweets the complaint, it will reach other influencers, with thousands more followers at their disposal.

Within minutes, your customer’s complaint could be on the screens of tens of thousands of Kenyans, and many more overseas.

Are you getting worried yet? You should be. If your company is a serial abuser of customers and attracts many complaints and influential complainers, a single morning can wreak untold damage to your corporate reputation. Not just text, but photos and videos taken on smartphones can go “viral” instantly.

A consumer revolution is coming in Kenya, and social media will be the weapon of choice. Anyone who is unhappy about your product, your service or your staff can tell thousands of people about it. All your grand rebranding and fancy advertising can be negated overnight. Some noted Kenyan companies are taking a serious reputation-battering every day. The consequences to leadership teams will follow.

What should your company do? The obvious thing is to have a social media presence, to enter the conversation about your organization quickly, calm the waters, make amends, address the problem before it goes viral.

The even better thing is to run an organization that cherishes its customers. If your customers love you, no one can harm you. If your customers merely tolerate you, social media places a potentially deadly weapon in every pocket. If you are a leader, it is really time to take a very personal interest in what your customers feel about your organization. It is time to check which of your practices annoy your customers the most.

Organizations with happy customers have little to fear. Those with customers on the edge of the tolerance zone should be very afraid. That customer walking out in anger now knows what to do.

Is there a skill every leader must have?

Posted: November 21, 2011, 10:28 am by Sunny Bindra

“”We hired a new CEO, but had to let him go after just seven months,” the chairman of an East Coast think tank complained to me recently.” His resumé looked spectacular, he did splendidly in all the interviews. But within a week or two we were hearing pushback from the staff. They were telling us, ‘You hired a first-rate economist with zero social intelligence.’ He was pure command and control.”"

DANIEL GOLEMAN blogs.hbr.org (14 October 2011)

Daniel Goleman has, over the years, taught me much of what I know about real leadership. That it is not the ability to bark orders or use your position; it is actually the ability to inspire good behaviour in others, and get the best out of them, without even seeming to do it.

To achieve that level of leadership, one must be able to command through influence, order through example, direct through demonstration.

Leadership is a many-splendoured thing, requiring many skills and attributes. But some, Goleman tells us, are more important than others. Leaders require a synergistic set of skills, and the more they have, research suggests, the more likely they are to succeed.

One skill-set, however, is absolutely vital. Without it, the others may not matter at all. In Goleman’s words: “…some competencies matter more than others, particularly at the higher levels of leadership. For C-level executives, for example, technical expertise matters far less than the art of influence: you can hire people with great technical skills, but then you’ve got to motivate, guide and inspire them.

You can be the most brilliant innovator, problem-solver or strategic thinker, but if you can’t inspire and motivate, build relationships or communicate powerfully, those talents will get you nowhere.”

Think about it. A modern organization is actually just a web of relationships: between executives and board members; between directors and investors; between leaders and followers; between employees and customers; between managers and society. If you aren’t going to understand the nuances and subtleties of those relationships, you don’t have much business occupying the C-suite.

But do we understand this? Do boards seek social intelligence as a threshold quality when recruiting CEOs? Do chief executives look for people who will have the interpersonal skills to get the best work out of others, when they look for their direct reports?

You may cough in embarrassment at this point.

Too many senior executives I encounter have been recruited with no concept of social intelligence in mind. They were the most technically gifted; they were the most experienced; they were the most senior; they were in the right place at the right time; they had a good record of achieving targets.

All those may be good things, but they are useless in leadership if you don’t have the essential leadership quality: the ability to get the best out of OTHER people. That is why we have so many social retards with great CVs running great organizations into the ground.

Please understand: this is not a recipe for hiring vapid schmoozers, smooth-talkers, bar-flies or cocktail junkies. We are not discussing superficial social skills here; we are talking about the real deal. Leadership must go to people who have a deep understanding of human psychology; who understand the inner motivations of their people; who have the gift of empathy; and who can lead simply by being themselves – not by fabricating a fake leadership brand.

When I seek out outstanding leaders, I look at the faces of their followers. Those who can make people work out of their skins for them, willingly and enthusiastically, are like gold dust. Those who don’t fake their curiosity and concern for others; those who command attention without issuing an order – they are the real thing. Look out for them this week.

Taxpayer, you’re footing all the bills all by yourself

Posted: November 19, 2011, 5:25 am by Sunny Bindra

I feel I need to write something this Sunday that some of you may dismiss as a statement of the bleeding obvious. But here goes anyway.

A government’s only real source of revenue is taxpayers.

That’s it. I said it would be obvious. Yet it needs restating nonetheless, for I fear in the modern economy in general, and in Kenya in particular, people are forgetting this basic fact of life.

Governments don’t really engage in income-generating activities, and when they do they’re not usually very good at them. Governments over the sweep of history have had to abandon their attempts to be income-generating. Of course, government still tries to have stakes in some critical sectors – but the hand of government is rarely a steady one when it comes to efficiency and profit-generation. Witness the performance of our myriad parastatals to see this.

No, the only sustainable revenue engine available to most governments is taxation. This involves taking away a proportion of the income generated by the true actors in the economy – productive individuals and productive companies. The money so collected pays for roads, security, defence, law and order, basic health and education, etc. All good things when the money is spent carefully.

When governments spend (or lose) more than they collect in revenue, they are forced to either create debt (in which case the funding is passed on to future taxpayers who will foot the bill someday); or take money in grants from foreign governments or aid agencies (in which case the money is taken from foreign taxpayers).

Here’s the point. In Kenya, there are precious few taxpayers. Of our 40 million population, only a couple of million or so pay any income tax (those in ‘formal’ employment). Only a relatively small set of businesses pay the corporation taxes and other duties so necessary to sustain government.

Given that such a small group of valiant people sustain the huge machine called government, I am flabbergasted by how little concern there is for what is actually done with the money. If you’re a taxpayer, know first that you’re in a small minority. Know second that nearly all the infrastructure, salaries and public activity you see around you is paid for by you, out of your earnings (or those of your children in future).

So when money goes missing, or ends up in a few pockets, that is not money that appeared from Mars. It came from what you the taxpayer earned from your sweat. Treasury has no mysterious hidden cache of funds: “mali ya serikali” is only your own money in disguise.

When bigwigs enrich themselves through procurement scams, they are dipping into your pocket, not the “public purse.” When they gorge themselves on illicit takings, that is money taken from the futures of your children. When Treasury steps in to “refund” money lost by government, it is you stepping in to fund criminals. When donor money is returned, it is poor Kenyan taxpayers refunding rich foreign ones for something they never saw the benefit of.

When civil servants are lax in guarding government funds, it is your money they are allowing to be stolen. When roads, ferries, cranes and helicopters are sub-standard, it is your shillings being misspent. When some people successfully evade tax, you and/or your children will end up paying on their behalf.

We don’t take all this seriously because we don’t “see” the money leaving our pockets. But if a minister came to your house every day and took some notes out of your wallet, you’d want to follow him to see what he does with the money. It is high time ordinary tax-paying Kenyans woke up to the fact that all the public activity they see, as well as all the scams, are paid for by them.

How many employees would like to leave your organization?

Posted: November 14, 2011, 2:59 pm by Sunny Bindra

“Employee loyalty is dropping around the world, according to new global analysis of Mercer’s What’s Working™ survey. The research, conducted among nearly 30,000 employees in 17 geographic markets between the fourth quarter of 2010 and the second quarter of 2011, shows that the percentage of workers seriously considering leaving their organization has risen since the last time the survey was conducted in each market (between 2003 and 2006 prior to the economic downturn).
In many markets, the increase is 10 percentage points or more. In the US, the increase was 9 points, from 23% in 2005 to 32% in 2010.”

MERCER ‘WHAT’S WORKING’ SURVEY (October 2011)

A question: is it possible to proclaim “people are our greatest asset” (as so many leaders do) when up to half your employees want to leave your organization at any given moment?

Mercer runs a regular survey on workplace attitudes, and the results are becoming more and more depressing. Rather than getting better at motivating employees and retaining them, we are mostly getting worse. The most recent “What’s Working” survey is damning: the percentage of employees seriously considering the exit door is increasing significantly. In many markets like America and Europe, one in three employees are thinking hard about leaving. In some countries, that proportion rises to half.

What gives, leaders and managers? Why are you creating organizations that so fail to inspire people to give their best and be part of something big? Why can we not make people believe their own futures, and the best work of their lives, lies within our organizations?

I have beaten this drum on this page before, and will no doubt beat it again. What is the point of all those supposedly-inspiring CEO speeches, all those mission statements and slogans about values – when as many as half the people in the audience are brushing up their CVs?

Now here’s the thing: talk to senior executives and they invariably tell you that their employees have become mercenaries who jump for a bigger paycheck at a moment’s notice. That is an easy, and lazy, answer. The Mercer survey reveals deeper insights: “The global analysis also reveals that non-financial factors play a prominent role in influencing employee motivation and engagement – a finding that could prove useful to employers facing budget constraints. Workers worldwide say that being treated with respect is the most important factor, followed by work/life balance, type of work, quality of co-workers and quality of leadership.”

In other words, monetary reward is of course important to all employees – how could it not be? But we kid ourselves when we assert that it is THE most important motivator. Study after study suggests that people yearn for something deeper than money – and that they rarely get it. They want respect for their person and work; they want appreciation and recognition of their contribution; they want to remain human beings who are allowed to have a meaningful life away from work, not “human resources” who are exploited for someone else’s gain; and they want to work alongside and under people of substance, not bullies and sociopaths.

That is the huge failure of modern management – the inability to make work a part of the essential purpose of the human being. Instead, we have reduced work to a transaction, a drudgery that you undertake in exchange for “compensation,” a labour of hate that you do because you have to do it; an act that enriches others, not yourself.

Well, the result is before us. Everyone is a mercenary now. After all, if companies provide no reward other than money, why not just work for the money? Think about that one as you stand before your people and give a speech. In up to half the faces before you, the lights may seem on, but there’s no-one at home.

Why I stopped watching cricket

Posted: November 12, 2011, 5:23 am by Sunny Bindra

When I was a very young boy in Nairobi, watching wrestling on TV was all the rage. Every week, whole families would sit down and be regaled by the antics of the likes of Big Daddy, Johnny Saint and Giant Haystacks. Not to mention evil incarnate, Kendo Nagasaki (those of a certain age will remember those names).

It was only as I hit my teenage years that a niggling suspicion entered my mind: is what I’m seeing real? And as I probed deeper, I discovered what for me was a truly awful truth: it was all make-believe. They were faking it. The heroes and villains of wrestling were actors, not sportsmen. This was soap opera masquerading as sport.

I felt cheated and violated, and never, ever watched wrestling again.

Unfortunately, a much bigger sport did exactly the same thing to me many years later. As a boy, I was at every cricket match on Sundays watching our local boys regale us with their batting and bowling prowess. Over the years, I followed every World Cup tournament and every major test series. When I was a student in London, I would park myself at the historic Lord’s cricket ground for five full days when a great test series was happening.

That was then. It is now a decade since I watched a cricket match with any seriousness. In 2000, South African cricket captain Hansie Cronje and other players were implicated in a match-fixing scandal. They had been taking payments to influence the outcome of matches, in cahoots with bookmakers who would then place huge bets on matches. That was just the tip of the iceberg. Over a torrid few months, accusations and revelations flew thick and fast. Players and administrators from nearly all the major cricket-playing nations were implicated. A few were given life bans.

That was cricket’s moment of truth, and it was the chance to clean up the sport once and for all. But it was not done. Apart from a few cosmetic punishments, nothing of substance was done. Why? Because the amounts of money involved are colossal. Cricket commands manic audiences of billions and huge TV ratings in Asia, and provides a bonanza for advertisers, TV companies, commentators and administrators. No one really wants to stop the show. So cricket says tut-tut to every new revelation of match-fixing, does nothing much about it, and moves on.

And so suspicion and mistrust have shrouded the game ever since. It is impossible for me to watch a game, any game, of professional cricket without wondering what is really going on. So I don’t watch. I am not interested in manufactured entertainment on the sports field. I prefer to watch school-kids – at least they are trying to play the game.

Most recently, former Pakistan captain Salman Butt and his opening bowlers, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir, were convicted and sentenced to jail terms in England for spot fixing in a test match at the same Lord’s ground last year. At long last, custodial sentences have been handed down. At last, some deterrent may exist for other players thinking of making some money on the side instead of playing the game to the best of their ability. Yet, these 3 are only part of a huge web of cheats.

There is a wider lesson here. If you can’t believe in the rules, the activity can’t be run. When rules are not followed, only the rule-breakers thrive. Honest strivers are shut out. The activity soon plunges into a farce, a sham, a fake and hollow entertainment with stunning last-ball crescendos and needle-edge finishes. Cricket is not yet at the level of the wrestling of the 1970s, but it will get there unless it gets its act together.

One day I hope to watch an international cricket match again. A proper one, where I believe it is a battle between genuine players, not cheats and sellouts.

Business in Kenya is not so different. Match-fixers and market riggers are allowed to prosper at the expense of those who build honest businesses that strive to do all the right things. The effect over the years is to drive out the good and elevate the bad. It is little wonder then that such few businesses are focused on the long-term sources of success: great products; warm service; pioneering business models; value for all. Why do that hard stuff, when you can just fix the game in your favour?

Consumers, not corporates, are now driving tech innovation

Posted: November 7, 2011, 10:29 am by Sunny Bindra

“The rise of tablets and smartphones also reflects a big shift in the world of technology itself. For years many of the most exciting advances in personal computing have come from the armed forces, large research centres or big businesses that focused mainly on corporate customers. Sometimes these breakthroughs found their way to consumers after being modified for mass consumption…
Over the past ten years or so, however, the consumer market has become a hotbed of innovation in its own right. “The polarity has reversed in the technology industry,” claims Marc Andreessen, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist…Now, he says, many exciting developments in information technology (IT) are appearing in the hands of consumers first and only then making their way into other arenas—a trend that tech types refer to as the “consumerisation” of IT.”

The Economist (8 October 2011)

The Economist ran an engrossing survey of personal technology last month – I hope you saw it.

One of the most interesting phenomena of recent times is highlighted in the excerpt shown: the “consumerisation” of IT. Not so long ago, “consumer” was a term of abuse in the average IT director’s lexicon. Information Technology was expensive, over-engineered, procured by tender and implemented as a multi-year project. Plug-and-play was unthinkable in the workplace. A technology that was for the consumer market was ridiculed and avoided. “Serious” IT was created for the corporate market, by people like IBM, Microsoft, HP and BlackBerry. Those people understood the seriousness of IT: the need for security, privacy and robustness.

Well, last time I checked, 3 of those 4 names were in some disarray. IBM has just celebrated a successful centenary; the others are trying desperately to reinvent themselves.

Just over a year ago, pretty much every senior executive in Kenya carried a laptop and a BlackBerry phone everywhere. Now look around: most are carrying an iPad, and increasingly, an Apple iPhone or Google Android phone. Those are things that were anathema to IT managers: they are, after all, open, entertainment oriented and fun, rather than solid and serious.

So what happened? CEOs, behaving like consumers, spotted the utility of a tablet computer faster than their IT managers did. They realized that an iPad gave them mobile email, full-screen web-viewing, mobile diaries and address books, maps, digital notepads, a video viewer, and a glorious newspaper, magazine and book reader all in one. What’s not to like?

However, I still find myself advising my CEO friends on how to do much, much more with their tablets – like using proper word-processing and spreadsheet applications, running presentations, writing reports, editing shared documents, and the like. Interestingly, their IT departments are rarely able to help them, as many are still steeped in the IT world of yesteryear.

Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter: these are the names responsible for the new democratisation of IT. Their products were targeted squarely at the consumer, not the executive. They gained scale by producing lovely-to-behold products that just worked out of the box – Apple’s iPad has no manual, for example. You just start playing, and figure it out.

Now, those same attributes that roped in millions of ordinary consumers are being taken to corporate devices: great design, flexibility, customisation – and good old fun! Microsoft and BlackBerry are playing catch-up to revamp their consumer products – as well as liven up their corporate ones (Windows “Mango,” anyone?).

CEOs are scrambling to get acquainted with Twitter and Facebook, things they had previously dismissed as trite platforms for social trivia. They are sporting Kindles and iPads, and delighting in the many apps their devices offer.

Long may this democratisation continue. I only hope IT professionals can wake up and learn that you learn more about technology these days from looking at what ordinary consumers use.

Another dose of Agony Uncle Sunny

Posted: November 5, 2011, 5:24 am by Sunny Bindra

As we all know, we live in a peculiar country. A very peculiar country. There are so many confusing questions that bedevil us every day, and precious few answers. So I have decided to occasionally become an “agony uncle” in this column, to tackle some of your more thorny conundrums. Here’s the latest instalment.

Q: I am always struck by how nice, polite, well-mannered and professional our leaders are on TV. Are we blessed?
Gull Ibo, Narok

Dear Gull
Indeed we are truly blessed. Our leaders are angels on earth. They fight against wretched circumstances on all our behalves every day. They are patriots and nationalists to a man, who spread goodwill and fraternal love to all tribes and communities. Nothing bad has ever happened in Kenya, and no public money has ever been stolen. These are all just stories manufactured by the media, and computer errors. Oops, excuse me, must go, a pig just fell out of the sky right outside my window…

Q: I prepared all my business budgets at the beginning of the year at KShs 80 to the dollar. The year is ending at around KShs 100, and both inflation and interest rates are sky-high. What happened? How will I plan anything for next year? I am suspending all my projects.
Selfmade K Shah, Nairobi

Dear Selfmade
You see, it’s people like you who bring the economy down. First you don’t plan professionally, and then you want to blame your hardworking government for your woes. You keep borrowing unnecessarily, and you import luxury items like oil and machinery unpatriotically. Then, when there is a little problem in the economy, you panic and withdraw into your hole and cause unemployment. The shilling’s collapse is caused solely and specifically by those spendthrifts in Greece. Also by foreign speculators and colonial spies. And weather patterns caused by Somali terrorists. So stop blaming others. In any case the IMF is back and has taken over our economic policy, so it’s back to the good old days. You can relax now and “jienjoy.”

Q: Kenyans made a lot of mournful noises about the Sinai slum explosion recently. But I notice that slum is still right there and still situated on the pipeline. What gives?
Eagleye Wasike, Embakasi

Dear Eagleye
Now why are you trying to remind us about something that happened so long ago? In Kenya we don’t have time for ancient history. We are a forward-looking nation, and we hate getting mired in the minor mistakes of the past. I mean, we have managed to forget decades of land-grabbing; Goldenberg and Ango Leasing; collapsing buildings; gridlocked traffic; assorted massacres; post-election violence and IDPs. What is a slum or two and a few burnt bodies on that vast landscape of forgotten things? Try to be positive, and look ahead.

Q: Bindra, your agony column is a sham. You should stop wasting our time and resign.
Shakespeare Oduor, Kisumu

Dear Shakespeare
Resign? Why? Was any money stolen? Will my resignation place ugali in your pot? Kenyans need to move beyond childish accusations. It is obvious you have been sent to bring down my community. Kalasingas have been intimidated for too long. This is obviously a political witch-hunt and it will not be tolerated. If I resign so must every other puffed-up columnist. We cannot have selective justice. In any case nothing can be proved, as literary taste is subjective. If I go down so must all my editors. Tomorrow I will organize my people to protest in a mass motor rally against these false allegations. I will also seek legal redress, though with a name like yours I really doubt whether you actually exist.

Don’t rush to join that board

Posted: October 31, 2011, 1:11 pm by Sunny Bindra

“Female executives packed the room as former Xerox CEO and Chairman Anne Mulcahy took the stage at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit to share her best and worst practices on building boards. Throughout her career, Mulcahy has sat on boards of six public companies, three non-profits, and one privately held international company. “Sometimes, I did not choose wisely,” she recalled. “There were some tough mistakes to rectify.”"

Fortune (4 October 2011)

The very accomplished Anne Mulcahy was in fine form at a Fortune event recently. In typically forthright fashion, she gave her views on working on boards – and on the tricky question of women and boards.

The first thing to note is that most accomplished people will be asked to join a board of directors at some point, and many will make at least one major mistake in this regard. Would you, for example, care to be sitting on the board of News Corporation right now, whose shareholders are in revolt against the family-controlled board? Or HP, whose board has been described as one of the worst in history by a former director?

Would you have been delighted to join the board of Enron in the 1990s? I suspect you might not have been averse to taking your place alongside other international luminaries on what was one of the most acclaimed companies of the time? It’s a good thing you didn’t join, though: all those renowned directors had to hang their heads in shame and retreat into oblivion, their reputations shattered, once Enron became America’s biggest-ever corporate collapse.

Mulcahy’s advice is firm: “Do your homework. Understand the calibre of the CEO and the management team [of the company]. Do your homework on your fellow directors…[Ask yourself] is it a club I want to be a part of?” To which I would add: imagine yourself sitting at that table meeting after meeting. Is this something you will enjoy, or find fulfilling? If not, please stay away.

The second point to note is that board work is hard work these days. You may typically find yourself putting in the equivalent of 3 working days or more every month (counting meeting attendance, reading board papers, following the numbers, keeping abreast of issues, deep reflection). Mulcahy says she has “zero tolerance for people who don’t come completely prepared. I expect contribution, I expect attendance, and I expect directors to take trips and visit the company’s programs.”

The final issue is about women joining boards. Here, Mulcahy is at her most scathing. She asks women to stay away from boards that are looking for women! “It’s a bad sign. Boards without women – blacklist those suckers. It’s 2011. They’ve had the time – it’s significant that they don’t have women.”

Every Kenyan board seems to be looking for women directors these days. But why are they looking? The good reason is to bring fresh voices and new perspectives to enrich the dialogue. The bad reasons, and the more common ones, are to “tick the box”, to appear politically correct and gender sensitive, and to show diversity in the group photo that will appear in the company’s annual report.

If the board that’s inviting you is doing it because they value your experience and contribution, do take interest. After all, providing wise stewardship in major corporations is one of the pillars of capitalism. However, look out for boards that want the decisions of principal shareholders or controlling families rubber-stamped, or who want a ‘PR board’ assembled for photographic purposes. Those ones should attract stooges, not independent-minded directors.

Anne Mulcahy’s advice is a useful antidote to those who rush to join boards. Once upon a time it was a no-brainer; in these more complex and turbulent times, a board position is a gift horse you do want to examine very carefully in the mouth.

The shilling is weak. So where are our exporters?

Posted: October 30, 2011, 10:40 am by Sunny Bindra

Last week I discussed the manic dance of the Kenya Shilling in this column. I wondered whether our economic “fundamentals” are as sound as many claim, and whether this phenomenon of low-currency-high-interest-rates-high-inflation will go away any time soon.

I also wondered why we have accepted a persistent trade deficit for so long. Kenya exports way less than it imports, by billions of dollars. We don’t produce most of the things we regard as essential: oil; machinery end equipment; vehicles; industrial inputs; computers and mobile phones. Increasingly, we don’t even want to consume things that we do produce locally.

Equally, we have failed to diversify away from our staple exports: tea-coffee-flowers-vegetables-fish-landscapes. Our exports look pretty much the same as they did when I was a boy.

This is what lies at the heart of the problem. We are all-too-willing to import heavily and then cover ourselves not with export revenues, but with financial inflows, most notably remittances from our diaspora and project aid from our donor friends. This, I submit again, is not a sustainable model.

Many countries rejoice in low exchange rates. China has been accused for years of keeping its currency deliberately undervalued against the dollar, to boost its export economy. South Africa seems to do the same in Africa, to help its relentless penetration of neighbouring markets. If you visit southern African countries, you might be forgiven for thinking everything they consume comes from their giant neighbour.

So why is it that when the currency falls in Kenya, we hear only cries of anguish? Why are our exporters not rubbing their hands in glee? Surely this is the chance they were all waiting for, to price lower in dollars and saturate all those waiting markets?

Here’s why: on the supply side, many of their inputs are imported: petrol, vehicles, fertilizers, pesticides, expatriates, machinery and the like. So they face a rising cost bill just like everyone else. And on the demand side, they are up against a multitude of competitors, many of them more competitive on price AND quality, and many of them supported actively by their own governments. That’s why no one is jumping for joy. The weak shilling will bring high inflation and high interest rates in its wake, but may do little for the trade deficit.

This reveals two things: a deficiency in our long-term economic strategy; and a shortage of ambition on the part of our business people. Are there Kenyans scouring the globe looking for export markets, the way the Chinese, Indians and Germans do? Are there Kenyan brands that sell themselves thousands of miles away, like Google and Toyota do here?

Our reliance on non-essential imports is growing, but why is that? It is because Kenya crawls with foreign entrepreneurs looking to sell. So why are our boys content to be homeboys? Africa should be Kenya’s big export target, but it is only now that our larger companies have anything like a presence even in our immediate neighbours. And I note that Kenyan executives have a marked aversion to living away from home. That is not the stuff export champions are made of.

The nub of the matter is this: we have to compete with the best. We have to have ambition, have to build brands, have to have compelling selling propositions for our goods and services. We have to sell on quality and reputation and availability, not just on price. We have remarkable advantages in location and human capital, but we are yet to use them for maximum gain.

If we fail to focus on competitiveness as a concept and a strategy, we will have to rely on a declining currency as a corrective. But that will be bitter economic dawa, one that will cause many new pains in the body Kenyan.

The Peculiar Kenyan is now available on Amazon Kindle

Posted: October 25, 2011, 11:57 am by Sunny Bindra

The book is finally on sale as a Kindle e-book, for just $10. Download it here

Should your next CEO be an insider or an outsider?

Posted: October 24, 2011, 11:29 am by Sunny Bindra

“On the face of it, scouring the world for a superstar makes perfect sense. Surely a great manager can make all the difference to an ailing firm? Jack Welch boosted General Electric’s market capitalisation by 4,500% at a time when its old rival, Westinghouse, was disintegrating. Surely management skills are portable? What other justification is there for the giant MBA and executive-education businesses? And surely it is sensible to cast your net as widely as possible in search of the world’s fizziest talent? In the 1970s only about 15% of all CEO vacancies in Forbes 1,000 firms were filled by outsiders. By the early 2000s the share had climbed to 33%. It is even higher in the high-tech industry.”

SCHUMPETER, The Economist (1 October 2011)

The highly regarded ‘Schumpeter’ column in The Economist covered a very important leadership question recently: which CEOs are better, those hired from within, or ‘superstars’ brought in from other companies?

As the excerpt shows, bringing in the renowned outsider is a rising trend: a third or more of high-end CEO vacancies in the US are now filled by outsiders. What’s wrong with that? Surely management skills are portable and relocatable? Surely a great leader is a great leader wherever you place him or her? Would a Kenyan company not want a Steve Jobs or Jack Welch at its helm?

Think again. Business school academics studying the facts rather than the froth have usually found the opposite to be true. The announcement of a ‘rock-star’ appointment may cause a media flurry and a brief boost to the share price, but the long-term impact is usually less impressive. Indeed, a recent study by the University of Texas suggests that “the pay premium (given to renowned outsiders) is negatively correlated with the future performance of the firm that does the hiring. In other words: the more dazzling the outside recruit, the worse he performs in his new role.”

Why should this be the case? I can think of several reasons. First, while generic management skill is important, it is often overshadowed by the specific, contextual knowledge necessary to succeed. Countries have specific contexts, for example, which is why the expatriate leader is a dying trend around these parts. Savvy companies have figured out that the better approach is to develop a cadre of managers steeped in local knowledge.

It’s the same with companies. Something called corporate culture often trumps star power. Companies have ways of doing things, subtle norms and nuances, that an outsider will undoubtedly struggle to master in a short space of time. And when that outsider tries to dismantle the culture and singlehandedly impose a new one, trouble will usually ensue. Corporate success comes more from the ability to create superb teams with specific knowledge than from individual charisma.

A second reason is to do with the effect on the morale of insiders. What message do you give when you say a company has not developed any worthwhile internal candidates for leadership? HP’s last 4 CEO recruits have been outsiders. The rest is history. Companies that are always unable to find successors from within their ranks have been doing something very wrong.

Certainly there are times when a company must look outside, particularly when the need to inject a fresh approach and new ideas is acute. But the best companies generally do succession from within. They maintain a talent gene pool that covers the spectrum, and when the time for a transition is upon them, have a wide choice of candidates, all schooled in the subtleties of their particular business. This requires systematic leadership grooming and talent management, and repeated exposure of top talent to the board of directors.

Do you imagine that Steve Jobs’ successor at Apple could have been anyone other than an Apple insider?

To fix the shilling, fix the fundamentals

Posted: October 22, 2011, 6:26 am by Sunny Bindra

The Kenya shilling is at record lows; interest rates are rising to crippling levels; inflation is bedevilling the common mwananchi; the IMF are back in town; everyone’s pricing in dollars. Did I just wake up in the Nyayo Nineties?

We are supposed to be done with the voodoo economics of our past. The post-Kanu era is supposed to be one of prudent economic management, fiscal responsibility and self-reliance. So what happened?

The shilling is amongst the world’s worst performing currencies this year. It is the talking point on everyone’s lips. Kenyans are not short of reasons for the shilling’s collapse, and you can take them with as many pinches of salt as you like. One school of thought, fronted by our leaders, is that this is a purely external phenomenon: that global oil prices, Eurozone woes and the like are the primary causes. “It-ain’t-our-fault-honest”, in other words. That reasoning does not explain why we should beat pretty much every other country in collapsing our currency.

Another school of thought comes from conspiracy theorists, who in Kenya tend to be peculiarly common. On this reckoning, we have need look no further than our avaricious big banks who will declare bumper profits from currency speculation, sorry dealing. And because next year is an election year, who knows who is in cahoots with whom to raise campaign funds…

Because our theories are rather infantile, we are also coming up with some jejune remedies. Tame the big banks! Let government buy and sell currency directly! Ban electronic trading! Create parallel currency markets! Send an SOS to the IMF! Be patriotic, buy Kenyan! Now that set of measures would really take us back to the nightmarish nineties – and we know how that era ended.

Deeper thinking is needed. Why does a currency weaken? Because demand for it is weaker than its supply. The price of a currency is driven by trade and investment flows. For years, Kenya has failed to export more than it imports. It is woefully dependent on oil, vehicles, machinery, equipment and consumer items from abroad. And it has abjectly failed to expand its export base beyond agri-products and tourism – same old, same old.

As things stand, our exports can barely cover our imported oil bill. So we are left dependent on capital inflows – remittances, foreign investment, aid flows and the like – which are notoriously fickle. It is no wonder that the currency is unstable.

Add to that the following: we are a country unable to curb astonishing fiscal excesses (like convoys of vehicles and palatial homes for leaders); we lose billions every year to one corruption scam after another (and our anti-corruption efforts are comically inept); we have a chronically unstable northern neighbour that exports terrorism; and our political campaigns cost untold billions more than they need to because votes must be bought and funds raised by any means. Where will stability come from, with all that in the mix?

If we want sanity in the shilling, we must fix the fundamentals. Our exporters have to start having the ambition to think like innovative world-beaters, not tired old home-boys; our successive governments have to give us world-class infrastructure and connectivity; and our people have to finally excise the cancer of corruption from the body Kenyan, whatever it takes.

Life as a nation in the globalized 21st century is all about competitiveness. That comes from our people, their knowledge and their productivity. We are great at raising a hue and cry about all and sundry, but awful at addressing fundamentals. Those fundamentals concern our ability to be compete on cost and compete on innovation. We have to be a nation that has the leaders, infrastructure and ideas to stand with the best.

Otherwise we are condemned to continue the economics of boom and bust.

5 warning signs of a horrible boss in the making

Posted: October 17, 2011, 10:23 am by Sunny Bindra

1. Kisses-up and kicks-down: “How does the prospective boss respond to feedback from people higher in rank and lower in rank?”
2. Can’t take it: “Does the prospective boss accept criticism or blame when the going gets tough?” Be wary of people who constantly dish out criticism but can’t take a healthy dose themselves.
3. Short fuse: “In what situations have you seen the prospective boss lose his temper?”
4. Flamer: ”What kind of email sender is the prospective boss?”
5. Card shark: “Does the prospective boss share information for everyone’s benefit?”
BOB SUTTON, www.bobsutton.typepad.com (7 July 2011)

Many forests have been felled in praising the works of great business leaders. But what about the bad ones? Bob Sutton, professor at Stanford, is building up an impressive body of work pointing out that most leaders on this planet are not just bad, they are terrible at leading.

In a recent blog post, Sutton gave 10 pointers that should signal to us whether we are looking at a horrible boss in the making. After all, leaders are not normally appointed overnight with no prior experience of their traits and behaviour patterns. Many bosses rise from within, and provide years of clues on whether they will ever understand the nature of leadership. I have selected five such pointers in the excerpt shown.

The first one says a lot about character. You know those types who snarl at juniors and then are charm personified when someone of higher authority walks into the room? Don’t ever promote them. They will cause widespread grief the higher they go. To treat underlings with disdain whilst buttering up superiors may be commonplace, but it shows character deficiency.

The second pointer is to observe people when they are criticized. If they react angrily or defensively, or immediately pass the blame, they should go no higher in your organization. A great leader says sorry and accepts responsibility without much hesitation.

The third and fourth traits cover temperament. Is this leadership candidate a frequent temper-loser? In what circumstances, and how frequently? There is always a place for occasional, well-directed anger in human affairs, but serial top-blowers are just a pain in the neck who will create widespread demotivation. Who will want to work with them? And these days, you can tell a lot about a person from their e-mail etiquette. Do they “flame” people without much thought, copying all and sundry? Or do they stop to reflect, and then have a quiet and civil word with the person they wish to admonish?

The fifth signal is around sharing and collaboration. These days you must have leaders who share readily and co-operate easily. The days of whispers behind closed doors and “need-to-know-basis” thinking are well behind us. Anyone who hoards information and never shows all his cards is never going to ascend to greatness. He is more likely to become a political manipulator who views all colleagues as competitors who must be kept away from vital information.

Would you impose a hot-tempered, intolerant, ill-mannered, secretive egomaniac on anyone you care about? I hope not. We should be similarly circumspect when it comes to giving people leadership positions. No matter how good the qualifications and results record of a candidate, character matters. In leadership, it matters more than pretty much anything else. If you are given the responsibility of choosing future leaders of teams, projects or even whole enterprises, look beyond the CV and pay a lot of attention to behaviour.

We can never get leadership selection perfectly right, and we are all going to have our share of making bad promotions that we later regret. But there are always warning signs, and we should all keep our antennae raised when assessing people we think should lead in the future.

Make the deaths of these greats matter

Posted: October 16, 2011, 8:54 am by Sunny Bindra

So many good people are dying in quick succession. First, it was Wangari Maathai, our very own iron lady of legendary courage. Next Steve Jobs passed on, leaving an army of bereft customers in his wake. And now another man goes leaving a gaping hole in so many lives: Jagjit Singh, India’s renowned singer and composer.

I have taken all three losses very personally, as all featured very strongly in my life. Wangari was the protector of our environment, the lady who understood the gifts of nature and the need to protect them. She saved our trees and parks from evil developers and politicians. Who will save them now?

Steve Jobs is perhaps the only CEO to be mourned by presidents, by hundreds of millions of his customers – and even by the competitors whose businesses he flayed. Do you know any CEOs who can pull that off? I have written many times on this page of the importance of bringing art and artistry into business. Steve Jobs was the one man who believed in that ideal, and made it a reality in everything he did. Who will I talk about now?

Jagjit Singh is perhaps less well known in these parts, but to his many followers his loss is equally difficult to bear. He excelled in the “ghazal” – a lyrical rendering of traditional Urdu poetry. But, unlike his forebears, he did not practise his art behind closed doors in rarefied company; he threw open the doors to this lovely art form to the common people. He is the reason I can speak and understand Urdu – I learned it by own efforts simply to gain a deeper understanding of his songs. And those songs have stayed with me in every phase of my life in a veritable sound affair. Who will I listen to now?

It is when people leave that their impact and legacy becomes clear, and I have spent many hours pondering on the loss of these three forces in my life. One thing is very clear: when great people pass on, others must take over their mission. That is the current of life; one wave fades, others come in to take its place.

It seems impossible to replace these greats, but replace them we must. Do we not, after all, want to protect the natural beauty of this land? Then we must have many Wangaris stepping forward to do it. Do we not want products that give us joy and utility in equal measure? Then many students of Steve must assume the mantle. Do we not want music that has lyrical depth and soaring melody? Then the singers who value that purity must be nurtured to excel and create those echoes.

If we fail in this legacy, we will have a city that is denuded and an ecosystem that is fatally damaged. If we fail, we will have to endure tedious shelves of bland, grey, uninspiring indistinguishable products. If we fail, we will have to listen to tuneless, superficial and hyper-commercialized noise masquerading as music for the rest of our lives.

I don’t want that, and will fight to prevent it happening. Will you? The message in the unwritten wills of Wangari, Steve and Jagjit to every human is this: do you want to make a difference or not? Do you want to just consume in this life, or produce something bigger than yourself? Do you want to lie down while things corrupt and degrade and diminish around you, or stand up and stand for something?

The world around us is only as good as we make it. It is not enough to follow others and hope someone somewhere does something. There is a time when you and I have to stand up to be counted. When the icons of your life start to go, that time is now.

Thinking like a customer could have saved Kodak

Posted: October 10, 2011, 11:06 am by Sunny Bindra

“In the mid-1990s I paid several visits to Kodak’s headquarters in Rochester, New York, and the cultural mindset was – with hindsight – on full display. Various executives told me how wonderful silver halide was.
Professional photographers could not do without it, nor could Hollywood. Digital was for amateurs. And even they would always want prints for the family album and home movies to send to distant relatives.
Kodak’s then chairman, George Fisher, was in an excellent position to know better. A technologist to his fingertips, he had recently moved from running Motorola. But faced with the stubborn Kodak reality, he took an awkward halfway position.”

TONY JACKSON, Financial Times (2 October 2011)

Another giant is on its knees. Which of us did not grow up with Kodak? The name was synonymous with photography for as long as most of us can remember.

Not anymore, though. Last weeks rumours swirled that Kodak was seeking advice that could lead to a bankruptcy application. The company’s share price plunged to less than a dollar. Note that it peaked at $94.25 in 1997. Few giants have tumbled this hard.

What happened? You know the answer. When was the last time you bought photographic film, inserted it into a camera, took snaps, removed the film, took it to a photo lab, and waited for the the film to be developed and prints made on special paper? Modern mass-market photography is just not like that, is it? These days we take snaps on our smartphones, upload the photos to “cloud” sites, and print only the exceptional results, if that.

So photographs are being taken differently, and displayed differently. For Kodak, which made most of its money from selling film and paper and lab materials, this is bad news. But here’s the thing: digital photography did not arrive overnight. It’s been growing in importance for a decade or two. So why did Kodak not see this change coming?

Tony Jackson provided some insights in the FT last week. He revealed that when he talked to top Kodak people in the 1990s (see excerpt), he encountered a team in denial; downplaying the likely impact of digital, and promoting the lasting relevance of traditional silver halide film.

And so Kodak was very, very slow to notice that digital cameras were getting better and cheaper; and slow to notice that paper prints and albums were being blown away by photo websites and digital display frames. It was no longer at the cutting edge of technology, and could no longer achieve quality or price leadership.

Kodak has been a slow puncture for quite a while now. Its sales have halved over the past decade, and it has not made a profit since 2007.

The lesson for the rest of us bears thinking about. It is not just that technology changes, stuff happens, etc. There was nothing inevitable about Kodak’s decline. Jackson points out that Fuji, the other traditional film photography giant of yesteryear, has not suffered anything like Kodak’s decline. Its sales have also fallen, but only by 8 per cent over the past decade. And Fuji still has positive cash flow.

Kodak, like most giants who come crashing down, undid itself. Its leaders trapped themselves in a cocoon of complacency, deluding themselves that their technology was still relevant when even a cursory examination of the customer value proposition should have revealed that it was not.

Who would not want a system where you can take as many shots as you like without worrying about the cost; delete all the bad and repetitive results; and then send the best snaps to friends and relatives anywhere in the world at the click of a button? That’s what the convergence of digital photography and mobile connectivity offered; the only question was when it would become cheap enough for mass conversion.

Well, when the tipping point came, Kodak was nowhere ready to lead the market. All because of entrenched management positions and protection of the dying status quo. Thinking like a customer could have saved the company.

Is any leader serious about honouring Wangari Maathai?

Posted: October 9, 2011, 10:22 am by Sunny Bindra

Wangari Maathai deservedly got a state funeral, the first ever for a woman in these parts. She warranted it, for rarely has a Kenyan received such global acclaim. But here’s the thing: once the funeral is over, and we have stopped shedding the requisite tears, how are we going to honour her memory?

The fact is, we Peculiar Kenyans have the attention span of butterflies on steroids. We experience heightened emotional peaks after every tragedy and every loss and every disaster – and then promptly go back to business-as-awfully-usual within minutes.

If anyone is interested in honouring Wangari, I suggest that we must honour her most important legacy: her love of trees.

Here’s the irony: while we mourn the passing of our great icon, we are simultaneously busy chopping down vast tracts of trees in Nairobi, in the name of ‘progress’. We must have new roads, you see, and new buildings, and footpaths, and…

Certainly we must. But who has ever told you that the trees must go in order to gain progress? Only the rapacious developers and the inept civil servants who fail to regulate them.

During a recent visit to Singapore, my first surprise was walking out of the airport terminal and seeing before me a car park. An open-air car park, shaded by lovely old trees. And my first drive through this prosperous city-state confirmed what I had least expected: Singapore is green all over, and fully deserves its tag of “garden city.”

Is Singapore underdeveloped? No, it’s one of the world’s top 10 richest countries in terms of income per capita. Has Singapore sacrificed its trees in its breathtaking drive for progress? Not a bit of it: it has in fact become more and more protective of its green heritage the more built-up it becomes. Trees are protected by law, ruthlessly, in typical Singaporean fashion. Even huge flyovers have vines and creepers hanging off them – they are a requirement.

Contrast that with our approach, which is: “Just chop ‘em down, think later.” That kind of laxity when it comes to trees is unforgivable. If you still don’t know this, trees are the lungs of the planet. They cleanse the pollution we exude, and bring the rain we so desperately need. To bring them down willy-nilly in the name of progress is to be acutely short-sighted. Many a civilization has exploited its environment to the point of collapse. Must we join the pantheon?

It is eminently possible to build without decimating the foliage of a city. All that is needed is a little imagination. A walk down the main streets of many a mature metropolis should convince you that trees can thrive in heavily built-up areas. And that trees are the jewels of a great city, lending it splendour and dignity.

Such was the heritage of Nairobi, whose forebears had the wisdom to plant acres of trees everywhere. Now, we seem to be hell-bent to become as denuded as Lagos. All because no one in charge is enforcing the protection of trees; nor is anyone insisting that Nairobi must have a certain amount of tree cover – if trees are brought down, other trees must be planted and maintained to maturity.

Is that really so difficult to pull off, leaders? If it is, then I suggest you had no place at the funeral of Wangari Maathai, and you should have had the decency to stay away. That lady had the gumption to protect trees with her own body. She had the courage to take on an awful regime that was intent on ruining both Uhuru Park and Karura Forest in the name of political patronage. The next time you pass by those two landmarks, stop to reflect for a moment. They only remain in existence because of Wangari.

Ugly boardroom battles are killing great companies

Posted: October 3, 2011, 11:25 am by Sunny Bindra

“Really, Hewlett-Packard? This is what’s become of the company of Bill and Dave — not just the founders of HP, but the founding fathers of Silicon Valley? Three CEOs in six years. Two of those CEOs who embarrassed themselves with inept campaigns for elective office. The other CEO who managed to get tossed out of his job by virtue of his (still largely unexplained) fascination with a B-level (and that’s grading generously) actress. Not to mention boardroom soap operas, front-page ethics scandals, and more changes of direction than a surfer in a hurricane.”

WILLIAM C TAYLOR, blogs.hbr.org (23 September 2011)

What on earth happened to HP? Once a dominant force in computing and printing, it is now a running soap opera. Let every successful company look, learn and be afraid.

At the time Hewlett-Packard bought Compaq a decade ago, HP was a confident corporate icon, part of the new technology wave, run by a rock-star CEO, Carly Fiorina, and with money to burn. It not only wanted to become the world’s dominant computer company, it was also making ambitious forays into services – witness its attempt to buy PwC Consulting around that time, and its later capture of EDS. HP was one of the world’s most valuable brands, and a star entry on the Fortune 500.

Well, that was then. As Bill Taylor pointed out in HBR recently, since then the company has gone from one leadership fiasco to another. First, a series of boardroom leaks created huge internal ructions and saw the exit of Fiorina. Next, new chair Patricia Dunn, seeking to stamp out the leaks culture, stepped across the line of legality and authorized illegal access of the phone records of her own board members.

She, too, paid the price – she was charged with misdemeanours and stepped down. A period of brief stability ensued with Mark Hurd taking the reins – until he had to go amidst amazing, unresolved allegations of impropriety. A new CEO, Léo Apotheker, was appointed. He lasted less than one year. And it is now revealed that the full board did not even meet Apotheker – his appointment was sealed by the board’s search committee. Really – other board members did not wish to meet their future CEO?

The explanation, as revealed by James B. Stewart in the New York Times recently, was that board members “were just too exhausted from all the infighting.” Stewart concluded that the HP board, “while composed of many accomplished individuals, as a group was rife with animosities, suspicion, distrust, personal ambitions and jockeying for power that rendered it nearly dysfunctional.”

Wow, perhaps we should not be too astonished at the boardroom shenanigans currently bedeviling our own CMC Motors…

Bill Taylor has a deeper explanation, beyond the boardroom dysfunction. He relates HP’s woes to a loss of values: “HP hasn’t just lost its way in the marketplace. It has lost the “HP Way” — the values and behaviors and principles and commitments that made it more than just another company, but a beloved icon and institution.”

As things stand, HP is in a leadership vacuum. Most damningly, Taylor asks: “Why can’t a company with more than 325,000 people find its new CEO from within its ranks — especially when it’s had three opportunities to do so in the last decade?”

We are now told that ex-CEO Apotheker will receive something like $13m in compensation. For being fired. For failing. For working for less than a year. When boards have designed systems that reward failure, is it any surprise that big companies keep failing? What would be fitting now would be for the HP board to fire its selection committee immediately. And then fire itself.

People sometimes ask me why I keep banging on about values in business. HP tells you why. Values are the glue that hold you together, and the lamp that shines light on what you must do. If you let values go, you will soon be exchanging blows in the dark, and lack the unity to make any meaningful strategic decision.

Once-proud HP now needs rebooting. This ridiculous board must be re-formed from scratch, and huge efforts made to rediscover the HP way. Its shareholders and customers must demand it.

To succeed tomorrow, say these 3 words today

Posted: October 2, 2011, 10:15 am by Sunny Bindra

There are three words you need to be able to say often if you are to have any success in today’s world. Those three words are: I DON’T KNOW.

Those are in fact the three words most people of accomplishment are least likely to say. We are conditioned by our education, and indeed by early success, to never utter such heresies. I don’t know? Of course I know. That’s why I’m where I am – because I know things.

Maybe in the more stable world of yesteryear, you could get away with saying “I know” all the time. Now, you have to look around you and ask yourself what you really know.

Did the bosses of HP, Research in Motion, Microsoft and Nokia, accomplished people all, know just a couple of years ago that their dominant companies would hit major roadblocks and would require reinvention in order to proceed?

Did anyone think it possible to depose Muammar Gaddafi or Hosni Mubarak this time last year?

Did any expert analyst tell you after September 2001 that Osama bin Laden would live for another 10 years, and would finally meet his end on the orders of a black man called Obama – and that we would view it all on our mobile phones on something called Al Jazeera? If such a prophet exists I should like to meet him.

The pace of change in business and organizations, and the uptake of new technology, is breathtaking these days. To tell yourself you know what’s coming, and you know what to do, is to delude yourself. And in that delusion will lie failure.

Pundits from Tom Peters to Dan Ariely to Tim Harford are telling us: we don’t know. It’s too complicated. Too many variables are interacting to create the futures of individuals and companies for anyone to know what’s coming. Sure, we can make educated guesses and generate conjectures and consider scenarios. But knowing with certainty? Not really.

The problem with saying “I know” is that it sows the seeds of future failure. If you think you know, you will not make any effort to find out anything further. You will proceed unchecked, confident in your knowledge and ability, and you will be blind to the forces that will soon surround and destroy you.

Saying “I don’t know” is the beginning of success, because the next steps are to find out whatever you can, and to minimize your uncertainty. You will consult widely, and gather insights from unusual sources. Most importantly, you will try many things out. You will design multiple experiments, and make many bets rather a single large one. The insights you will develop from this trial-and-error process are what will drive your success, and that is why thinkers like Harford and Ariely recommend this approach.

Sadly, the reverse is true in many aspects of life. People who have had even limited success seem to develop “God-complexes” very quickly, and start imagining they can see it all and know it all and that their way is the right way, or else it’s the highway.

People like those have climbed to the top of many a corporate and political tree, and are now busy issuing cast-iron edicts and crafting me-me-me strategies. These people will undo many others. We should learn from the current tribulations of the formerly certain; no one knows, and those who think they do, will soon be denuded.

The worst part of “I know” is that it kills curiosity. Curiosity, contrary to the popular saying, does not kill cats. That was an aphorism invented by lords and masters in days of yore to keep serfs in their place. Curiosity keeps you alive and in a state of productive wonder. It makes the next step necessary.

Sunny Bindra’s new book, ‘The Peculiar Kenyan’ is now on sale

Steve Jobs’ real secret? He was Customer Number 1

Posted: September 26, 2011, 11:44 am by Sunny Bindra

“Steve Jobs is above all an Apple customer. He and Steve Wozniak built devices that both of them wanted to use themselves. Wozniak brought exceptional engineering chops. Even more important, Jobs (who can’t program) brought the perspective of a passionate and non-technical customer into the design, the look and feel, and the excitement of Apple products. What made and still makes Apple products great — and what other tech firms can’t seem to grasp — is that Jobs and Wozniak didn’t apply their talents to make money or demonstrate engineering prowess. They applied their talents, fiercely, in the service of creating something that would excite them as customers — which they could do because they were passionate customers, as are the employees of the organization they built.”

BILL LEE, blogs.hbr.org (30 August 2011)

Everyone and their uncle is writing about Steve Jobs since he stepped down from his role as Apple’s CEO recently. Suddenly everyone has an opinion on Apple’s meteoric recent success – including all those who ridiculed Jobs and his company not so long ago. Mr Jobs will no doubt become the most analyzed and studied CEO in history.

Needless to say, much of this analysis is going to be long on rhetoric and short on genuine insight. Steve Jobs is Steve Jobs, and none of us is going to become him. But as we sift through the history of this man and his astonishingly successful company, we do find some genuine nuggets of wisdom that stop and make us think.

Bill Lee unearthed one recently, in the HBR blog site. It is captured in the excerpt shown. Bill Lee is pointing out something that was “hidden in plain sight” all along: the fact that Steve Jobs was Apple’s most passionate customer, not just its chief executive.

So obvious, isn’t it? Study all those videos of Jobs launching his iconic products: the various iMacs, iPods, iPhones and iPads of recent times. One thing stands out: this man loves his products as a consumer, not just as a producer. He loves handling them, feeling them, working with them. He is Customer Numero Uno.

That simple fact explains so much: why they are so sleek, artistic, easy to use and beautifully designed. As a business leader you can’t pull that off as a concept – the final product has to matter in YOUR life as much as it does in the lives of your customers. Steve Jobs’ great achievement was to think like a customer. He intuitively understood what consumers would want, and what type of simplicity would blow them away.

Bill Lee tells us of a time when an Apple team had been tasked with developing DVD-burning software. “When Jobs walked into the meeting, he didn’t so much as look at any of the plans. He picked up a marker, went to a whiteboard and drew a rectangle, representing the application. He then told them what he wanted the new application to do. The user would drag the video into the window, a button would appear that said “burn,” and the user would click it. “That’s it, that’s what we’re going to make,” he said.”

Now that is called working from the customer backwards. And it helps greatly when your top customer also happens to be your CEO.

How many times is that true? Most CEOs are professional managers who may NEVER consume their own product. The only passion they feel for it is in analyzing its sales and contribution to bottom line. Often, CEOs are so detached from their products that their target customer is a mysterious figure to them, even viewed with derision.

Look around you. You may discover that the best CEOs are often the ones most connected with their products. They are the ones who can turn mere baubles and mundane offerings into objects of beauty and desire.

Why the standard CV hides what we really need to know

Posted: September 25, 2011, 8:40 am by Sunny Bindra

Microblogger @oshinity3 tweeted an arresting thought recently. To paraphrase, she asked people whether they still stated on their curricula vitae the fact that they were skilled in MS Word/Excel/PowerPoint, etc. Most people do. Why, asked @oshinity3, does this still matter?

What she’s pointing out is that people have an ingrained tendency to freeze into one position and then stay that way for years, oblivious of the changes in the world around them. Back in the 1990s, it made sense for people to point out that they were proficient in standard software packages; most people weren’t in those days, and it added an element of distinction to one’s resumé.

These days, you aren’t going to get any job higher than shelf-stacker if you can’t operate a computer. It’s a given, a minimum requirement, a standard skill. It doesn’t help you land any kind of job higher than clerical level. Yet I have seen it mentioned even in the CVs of chief executives…

This is a symptom of a larger malaise, one that I cover increasingly often in my interactions with management teams. The way we recruit is out of date, misplaced and redundant. Yet the recruitment process has not changed since those days long ago when I drafted my first-ever CV.

A CV is just an arrangement of pre-set boxes into which people insert their life to date. These days, anyone can write a good CV. There are professionals who do it for you; and you can even get an automated one off the Web merely by inserting your personal bio-data. A CV no longer differentiates anyone. And it can have the reverse effect: an unusual, different-thinking, fresh candidate can end up looking like everyone else in the pile of resumés. The CV’s sterile format forces uniformity and homogeneity.

The world has moved on. These days, we understand that success comes more from character and attitude, than it does from skill-sets. These days, we understand that great organizations are built around highly motivated, highly driven individuals, not around armies of clone workers. These days, we understand that the things we are really looking for are actually very difficult to gauge from a piece of paper, or even from a standard-format interview.

The search for talent should be a thoughtful, intuitive and empathetic process. It requires flexibility, ingenuity and tailoring. If you need to get a certain minimum set of skills ticked – by all means, deploy an online electronic data entry system. After that, be different. Have interactions with your candidates that unearth what you really want to know, not what your tired old selection process will tell you.

Talented individuals, too, should rethink. If you’re a maverick, do you really want to hide your light under a bushel? Do you wish to negate all your differences and become indistinguishable from the crowd around you? Why? Organizations with outmoded thinking and fossilized processes aren’t really for you.

Connecting talent with organizations needs fundamental retooling. The companies that really matter today don’t have that CV/covering letter/two dull interviews/references box-ticking scheme. They look for people who will matter, and who will help their organization to be outstanding, at all levels. In many ways, what we need is to uncover the real person hiding behind the staid CV and suit and scripted responses.

My advice to organizations as well as to individuals is the same: don’t get suckered into brainless conformity. The future belongs to those who can stand out, not those who do things exactly the same way. We need fewer people who slot into pre-arranged holes, and more who can think for themselves and imagine alternative futures. How will you find them in that pile of CVs?

Sunny Bindra’s new book, ‘The Peculiar Kenyan’ is now on sale

Here’s a little secret about sustained product success

Posted: September 19, 2011, 11:04 am by Sunny Bindra

“We’re always searching for that secret formula, that magic pixie dust to sprinkle over our products, services, books, causes, brands, blogs to bring them to life and make them Super Successful. Most marketing-related buzzwords gain traction by promising pixie dust results if applied to whatever it is we make, do, sell. “Add more Social!”. “Just need a Viral Video!” “It’s about the Storytelling!”. “Be Authentic!”
The rise of social networking and media opened up a world of new possibilities, yet most Marketing 2.0 is basically:
“If you cannot out-spend the competition, you can out-friend them!” He who has the most Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and blog commenters Wins! It’s all about Social Capital now!
Sure, you can try that.”

KATHY SIERRA, www.gapingvoid.com (7 June 2011)

Kathy Sierra is pointing out an important truth in the blog excerpt shown. There are no shortcuts to success with any product, of any type. It’s not about the advertising spend, nor the PR exposure, nor the “share of mind” that your product generates. It’s not about whether you can make your product “go viral” or not. It’s about something else together.

Before I tell you what it is, consider the advent of social media. These days, we have consultants tripping over advisors ready to tell you that you need a “social media strategy” for your product or organization. That you must be on Facebook and Twitter, and you must do many clever and manipulative things that help you generate ‘”friends” or “followers”. And the more, the merrier. If you have 100,000, that’s better than having 10,000. Stands to reason, doesn’t it?

Really? Think it through. What use are even a million superficially bonded, vaguely connected, vaguely interested so-called “friends” to you? Nearly all of those are only following or befriending you (in digital terms) because of the herd syndrome: because lots of other people do. In other words, this “popularity” is because you are fashionable, or because something about you went ‘viral’ in the cybersphere.

If you are interested in popularity for its own sake, so be it. Enjoy the throng apparently in your thrall. But if you are someone who stops to think about success for more than a split second, you may observe a few things. One, that the ‘attention’ you get is momentary and fragmented in the extreme (you may be one of hundreds, probably thousands of people being similarly befriended); and second, that apart from basking in the glow of faddish popularity, there is no other benefit to this following. Try monetizing it to see. Will these people buy your products or services? Will they pay to follow you? Will they queue up to buy your book or gizmo or whatever?

The real path to sustained selling success remains the same in the era of Twitter as it was in the era of the steam engine. If you want to really matter, you have to offer something that adds something to your USER, not to your own ego. In other words, your offering has to be useful in the life of your follower or customer.

In Sierra’s words: “If you have little else to compete on, then out-friending/out-viraling/out-gamifying can work.
At least until your competition out-hires a good social media strategist or compelling extroverted social media star and out-friends you.”

In other words, the true nature of advantage has not changed in the digital era. It is still about helping your customers to become better, to improve their lives in some way. If you or your product genuinely do that, nothing can stand in your way. If your product is mediocre at best, then you need all the wily, articial boosts you can get.

Which would you rather be: the one that’s genuinely valuable and useful, or the one superficially and momentarily popular?

Leadership is about preventing disasters, not reacting to them

Posted: September 18, 2011, 9:39 am by Sunny Bindra

I am so very tired of writing about disasters. And I am sure you are so very tired of reading about them.

It was a bad week. First a ferry sank off Zanzibar. Several hundred people, including little children, were thrown into the sea. More than two hundred are believed to have died.

Next, fuel spilled out of a pipeline in Nairobi, flowed into storm drains, ignited and blew up a slum. A hundred-odd people were burned to death, and many others are still in hospital with horrific injuries.

Disasters happen all over the globe, and will continue to do so. What makes thinking people most angry about these ones is one simple fact: they were easily preventable. They were neither caused by human error, nor acts of nature. They were caused by a lethal combination of corruption and regulation failure. And that is why we must stay angry until something is done.

The Tanzanian ferry was grossly overloaded. They always are. At least a couple of hundred people more than the ferry could carry piled in. They were unregistered. This was not a freak occurrence; the last capsizing off Zanzibar was as recent as 2009.

The Nairobi slum fire was not a bolt from the blue. The Sinai slum was built right on a major pipeline. It was flagged as a huge danger years ago, by journalists as well as environmentalists. Nothing was done. Everyone looked away. So now, let’s all look away from those charred skeletons and deformed bodies.

Many people carry responsibility for this. The common people of that slum were scooping fuel out of drains, knowing what has happened to others who have tried this in the past. Ordinary slum-dwellers resolutely refused to vacate for years past until they were compensated.

The Kenya Pipeline Company tells us this the spill was simply caused by high pressure in the pipeline. High pressure? Yes, so what? If you don’t have a system that manages high pressure for such a volatile product, what do you have? And environmental regulator NEMA lays the blame at the feet of the pipeline operator. Do tell, NEMA, where were you before the event?

Our leaders rushed to lament and wail with the bereaved, and to call the events “unimaginable.” They looked sombre and declared days of mourning. Now I have to ask: is there going to be a time when they act BEFORE a disaster, rather than offer empty condolences after? Leaders drive past dangerous slums, overloaded buses and ferries, and people failing to follow rules and regulations, every single day. When are they ever going to stop and do something?

Why did that slum continue in that place? Because of all the vested interests involved. There are local politicians who masquerade as saviours of the poor, while counting the votes. There are landlords who make big money out of land that should rightly belong to the state.

There are always vested interests that want to propagate bad situations. That is why we have something called a state – which regulates and enforces. Around these parts, that state is on perpetual holiday. Those who ought to be regulating are captive, and no one is stepping in to end this shame.

Are drowned and burned bodies not enough to shame you into action, leaders? Will you now do the thing we appoint you to do – which is to lead, rather than to campaign and manipulate? We are reducing large swathes of people to living like rats, and now they are dying like them.

More than mere mourning, we need immediate action. Arrests, overhauls, reviews and enforcements. Someone needs to take charge. Leaders, you owe it to the dead you failed to lead.

Or will that slum still be there next year?

Sunny Bindra’s new book, ‘The Peculiar Kenyan’ is now on sale

These days, strategy is about placing a series of small bets

Posted: September 12, 2011, 11:42 am by Sunny Bindra

“When you look at something like, go back in time when we started working on Kindle almost seven years ago. … There you just have to place a bet. If you place enough of those bets, and if you place them early enough, none of them are ever betting the company. By the time you are betting the company, it means you haven’t invented for too long.
If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company.

JEFF BEZOS, quoted in Business Insider (7 June 2011)

I’ve always liked Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, and regular readers of this column will know he features here often. He has revolutionized web commerce in his time, and come up with one dramatic innovation after another. His company was dismissed by analysts as “Amazon.toast” soon after its inception in the 1990s. Well, it has been raising toast after toast celebrating its successes ever since.

Bezos is at the heart of this success. He comes across as plain-talking and likable, with an infectious laugh. I often show video clips of him talking at my seminars and teaching events, simply so that other CEOs can see authenticity in action.

Bezos was in full flow recently, in one of his trademark unscripted spiels. He referred to Amazon’s very successful Kindle e-reader product – see excerpt shown. The thing strategists should note is this: Kindle was not a ‘bet-the-company’ product. Even though it has been transformational for Amazon and the book trade (e-books are gradually taking over from traditional printed books), it was not conceived as such.

Bezos advises that systematic innovation is about inventing frequently and continuously, and being willing to fail. Kindle was one of many, many bets the company placed on its future some years ago. Some succeeded, others failed. Kindle ended up in the ‘success’ group, and is now lauded as a breakthrough innovation.

The point is this: the modern strategic landscape is so unpredictable, so prone to disruption, that everyone is guessing at the future. No one can work it out precisely. In strategy terms, what is needed is the willingness to weigh the chances and make some bets. Not one bet, note: you can’t risk the entire company at this casino. Instead, 21st-century strategy is about intelligent assessment of probabilities and scenarios, and developing the appetite for many small risks.

Not sure what the future holds? No one is. Make some guesses, and try stuff out. Some of your innovation projects will pan out; most won’t. And maybe, just maybe, one project may lead to a game-changing new product like the Kindle. Note that the Kindle itself is already under attack from other, more sexy e-readers like Barnes & Noble’s Nook and Apple’s iPad. Amazon is now about to launch a new version that is more ‘tablet-like’ anytime soon.

That kind of continuous bet-placing requires a willingness to tolerate failures. Bezos puts the experience of giving up on an idea nicely: “On the day you decide to give up on it, what happens? Your operating margins go up because you stopped investing in something that wasn’t working. Is that really such a bad day?”

Most CEOs, unfortunately, are not able to think like that. They cultivate the false image of their own infallibility, and try to hide failures or seek scapegoats for them. Those managers who preside over projects that were shuttered are often marked as failures. That is precisely the wrong way to do it.

By the way, where was Jeff Bezos giving this insightful off-the-cuff speech? At an AGM, in response to a shareholder’s question. Would that EVER happen at our own tedious, over-scripted shareholders’ meetings?

People who enjoy their work are truly the blessed of the earth

Posted: September 10, 2011, 6:35 am by Sunny Bindra

Regular readers will know this column often likes to identify ordinary individuals who are fighting the good fight when it comes to personal excellence. This week, it has found another one to highlight.

The lady in question is called Ioana. She is a flight attendant. I have encountered many flight attendants in my time, mostly mediocre, some good. Ioana belongs in the ‘outstanding’ category. Long flights are often a good chance to catch up with one’s reading. In a recent flight, however, I abandoned my valuable hoard of reading material simply to watch Ioana in action.

This lady was phenomenally engaged with her work. Being a flight attendant, please note, is way less glamorous a job than most people think it is. You are basically a glorified maid, usher and waiter combined: heating and serving food; cleaning up after people; herding them; listening to incessant requests and complaints. And that experience is repeated day after day. It is very difficult to keep smiling through it all.

Not so with Ioana. She was a dynamo radiating positive energy in everything she did. She fetched and carried; she served and cleared up; she played with children; she responded to every query. Most importantly, she seemed to be exactly the same with every type of customer: every race, every background, every social class.

I found myself making notes and wondering: what makes this lady so special? What makes her so able to do this job with such distinction, when most of her peers in other airlines are so poor at it?

The first answer to this question is personal. People like Ioana are indeed special. They set high individual standards for themselves, and they do things well for their own pleasure and satisfaction – not because they are made to by someone else.

I am always telling chief executives and recruiters: people like this are like gold-dust – look out for them and hire them without too many questions when you encounter them. The person with a positive outlook and inner drive and high standards can only do good for your organization – especially when placed in front of customers.

The second part is about organizational culture. People like Ioana thrive when they are in the right environment. Ioana works for the Emirates airline – and it is no surprise that that carrier features regularly in the world’s top 10 for passenger-service excellence. Ioana was undoubtedly outstanding – but she was surrounded by very able colleagues, mostly displaying similar energy and engagement.

Great customer experience happens when great individuals and great organizational cultures come together. The quality of the person certainly matters – but so do the standards and norms set by the organization. A remarkable organization aims to find and develop many, many Ioanas, not just one. It spots them, encourages them, rewards them, and uses them to set the tone.

Highly engaged employees are very rare across the globe. Surveys suggest fewer than one in five enjoy their work or are willing to do anything extra for their employer or customer. Meeting such employees is invariably heartwarming. They will usually go far and create great net positive value in the world.

People who enjoy their work are truly the blessed of the earth. They get up every day buzzing with energy and feel they are in the right place doing the right thing. How many of us can claim to be like that?

This places a great responsibility on us: to find the work we will love doing; and to simultaneously love the idea of work. Most people are imprisoned by their own bad attitudes, festering in dead-end jobs with bad organizations.

There is a better way to live and work. Seek out an Ioana around you, and you will see it for yourself.

Sunny Bindra’s new book, ‘The Peculiar Kenyan’ is now on sale

Kissing at work? Leave me out, please…

Posted: September 5, 2011, 3:14 pm by Sunny Bindra

“When I was your age I disliked being kissed by people at work so intensely that I developed a special anti-kissing strategy. Whenever someone approached me with intent, I would look panic-stricken and take a step backwards to discourage a lunge. This was generally effective in conveying that I didn’t wish to be kissed, but it was also successful in making me seem uptight, awkward or unfriendly – or all three.”

LUCY KELLAWAY Financial Times (31 August 2011)

I was delighted to see this question put to the FT’s Lucy Kellaway last week by a 29-year-old female researcher: what does one do about this kissing epidemic in the workplace?

I was reassured to see that Ms Kellaway, like me, hates the idea of kissing or being kissed by strangers. In the West, it is de rigueur to offer up one’s cheek to members of the opposite sex as a social greeting. In much of South America, men kiss each other on both cheeks as a hearty greeting. In medieval times, Christian knights kissed each other before battle to forgive any wrongs that might occur.

Unfortunately, kissing has now entered the workplace. Not just kissing itself, but even the pretence of doing it. I found this definition in Wikipedia of the “air kiss”: “The air kiss is a ritual or social gesture whose meaning is basically the same as that of many forms of kissing. The air kiss is a pretence of kissing: the lips are pursed as if kissing, but without actually touching the other person’s body. Sometimes, the air kiss includes touching cheek-to-cheek. Also, the gesture may be accompanied by the mwah sound. The onomatopoeic word mwah has already entered the Webster’s dictionary.”

Mwah? What has this, I ask, got to do with us? So people in other cultures want to kiss ritually and pointlessly – so what? What has this practice got to do with African and Asian cultures? Kissing strangers just because it is the done thing thousands of miles away? And do you even know what to do? One kiss? Which cheek? Two kisses – or three? Do you make contact or just pretend to? Who is kissed, and who is left out?

It’s a free world, and you can do what you like in social situations – but I do wonder about this practice in work-related ones. Workplaces require professional relationships, and a degree of social distance is necessary. If men and women are going to kiss before every meeting begins, then we are bringing an unnecessary intimacy into our work relationships. And if these kisses are meaningless – then why do them in the first place?

The reason we do them is the more worrying thing. It is just another example of our abject willingness to accept every Western norm and practice without question or analysis. Judges’ wigs, tight neckties, stiletto heels – all things we just ape because we think they come from a more ‘advanced’ culture.

And in our businesses, we cease to think for ourselves. We import foreign theories into our brains; mimic ‘best’ practices from places completely unlike ours; adopt every new management fad that hits us simply because ‘they’ are doing it. And ‘they’ know best.

What nonsense. Note that the kissing epidemic is gathering pace in Kenyan companies, and note who is driving it: those Kenyans who want to appear well-travelled, cosmopolitan, suave and sophisticated. Those same Kenyans will rise high in our organizations and start taking important decisions. And watch and see, those decisions will be just as empty, just as Mwah Mwah as the kisses…

So, when you next approach me and I offer a firm handshake instead of a willing cheek, don’t take it personally. Like Lucy Kellaway, I’m not uptight, unfriendly or awkward. I’m just being the real me.

Lessons in traffic management from a small island

Posted: September 4, 2011, 9:25 am by Sunny Bindra

I was fortunate enough to sit atop the Singapore Flyer recently – the world’s biggest observation wheel. At its apex, the Flyer is as high as a 42-storey building, and offers unparalleled views of the famous Singapore skyline, its busy port – even of neighbouring Indonesia, across the water.

Being a Peculiar Kenyan, however, I chose to look at…the traffic.

It was 7.00 pm on a Friday, the busiest rush hour in any city. And as I watched long lines of headlights, I could see Singapore has plenty of traffic. It packs, after all, five million people into a small island. But here’s the thing: that traffic kept moving. There were no logjams, no gridlocks, no unmoving lines anywhere. From my privileged perch, I wondered: how can this be? Singapore has a huge population density, one of the highest per capita incomes in the world – but no traffic jams?

A few days later I had worked out why. And perhaps I can share the insights into traffic management with my fellow Nairobians who have probably forgotten what smooth-flowing traffic looks like.

The first thing is something Singapore is famous for: rules. People behave on Singapore’s roads. If they don’t, they face punitive fines. Just tossing litter out of your car can lead to a fine of 1,000 Singapore dollars (nearly Shs 80,000). Repeat offences are punished with compulsory, humiliating road-cleaning community service, and even imprisonment. So the traffic moves because people don’t jump red lights, mount pavements, overlap, or do any of the idiotic things Kenyan drivers regard as routine.

The second reason is this: Singapore limits car ownership. I was astonished to see adverts for small Suzuki compact cars for the equivalent of Shs 7 million – believe it or not! This is because Singapore has something called a Certificate of Entitlement (CoE) – a document that allows you to own a car for 10 years, but which will cost you between Shs 2 and 4 million. This is a deliberate recognition that a small island cannot allow unfettered car ownership.

Most people cannot therefore afford their own car. But this is not a problem, because Singapore also provides world-beating public transport: modern buses, mass-transit trains, trams, reasonably priced (and regulated) taxis – even cable cars! The majority of the people use these fast, efficient and cheap means every day. And those CoEs pay much of the bill.

A third reason: Singapore is one of the pioneers of road pricing. In 1992, I was a consultant in London helping London Transport devise a road pricing scheme – and we were studying Singapore’s very advanced electronic system as an exemplar even then. Today, gadgets installed in every vehicle automatically log your entry onto priced roads and calculate your bill. Intelligent use of peak/off-peak tariffs further aids traffic management.

That’s it. Singapore’s leaders clearly understand many things. They understand the economic concept of externalities – that private road usage imposes costs on society in the form of congestion and pollution, and that the user must pay most of that true cost. They understand that investing in proper public transport is much more efficient than allowing unregulated private chaos fueled by cheap, ramshackle cars. And they understand that roads must have strict rules attached, and that enforcement of those rules must be ruthless and done without exception.

So there you are. If we are serious about fixing our traffic problem, we have to go beyond just building more roads. Only a proper car pricing and road pricing scheme will work, done in tandem with a new mass-transit public transport system and very strict behaviour enforcement.

But who is going to do that for us, Kenyans? Sit in your 24/7 jam and think about it.

Sunny Bindra’s new book, ‘The Peculiar Kenyan’ is now on sale

Are all your leaders from one ‘tribe?’ Trouble will soon follow…

Posted: August 29, 2011, 11:02 am by Sunny Bindra

“(Research in Motion) is run by a ‘good ole’ boy’ network from Southern Ontario. Though I actually believe there can be advantages in this close-knit, trust-based social ecosystem, it is unacceptable in this day and age that a global brand should have the vast majority of its citizens derived from a section of a small province, of a small, somewhat provincial and less important country (Canada)… (I say this as a proud Canadian who believes that Southern Ontario businessmen are amongst the best in the world – but that no group of localites are prepared to take on such global challenges). If Apple were to be based in Wisconsin, and drew most of their talent from the state area, I’m sure Wall St. would wonder what is going on.

Business Insider (17 June 2011)

A senior former employee recently spilled the beans regarding what might REALLY be wrong with Research in Motion – the company that gave the world the fabled BlackBerry phone.

BlackBerry is still the dominant corporate phone in Kenya and many emerging markets, but it is taking a real hammering in its more mature markets. Once peerless, it is these days completely unable to cope with the onslaught from Apple’s iPhone and various Android-powered offerings from HTC and Samsung. Its recent, much heralded foray into the new tablet-computer market has also been judged, by most analysts, as a real dud.

What’s going on? RIM sat on its laurels for too long, believing it had an unassailable position in the corporate segment. Two standout features: push e-mail from corporate servers, and class-leading security features, gave it this dominance. But as I pointed out on this page last week, those features didn’t remain unique or distinctive for too long. Other products not only matched them, but also released features that gave an entirely fresh experience to the consumer segment: great internet usability and a whole new universe of fun and useful ‘apps’. Soon, even corporate executives were clamouring for these features – and found that even new models of their BlackBerry phones lagged woefully behind.

The employee who gave businessinsider.com the scoop had this to say: “Despite the deep respect I have for the co-CEO’s of RIM, and their world-class strength in some areas – they are very weak in others. The problem is that they brim with hubris regarding their success in the corporate market and are culturally blind to the gaping holes in their armour regarding consumer. They honestly think they understand consumer product, business, mentality, marketing – but they really don’t.”

So the RIM bosses not only got it wrong, they didn’t even KNOW they got it wrong. How come? A strong clue can be found in the excerpt highlighted above. All the key bosses come from one small part of Canada. In other words, they come from one ‘tribe’ – they share cultural affiliations, and have been socialized in similar settings. What’s so wrong with that? Well, can you imagine key competitors like Apple or Google being similarly insular and provincial?

So, who runs your company? If there is a governing ‘tribe’ of some sort – a family, an ethnic group, or just a group of too-comfortable insiders – trouble will follow at some point. Once an organization has grown beyond its narrow home base, and is trying to make a living in a diverse global setting, it must grow up and shed tribal origins. Even Japanese and Korean companies are learning that ethnic homogeneity is no longer serving them well in modern markets.

Let us learn this lesson well in East Africa. Inbred, hidebound companies don’t give you the challenge and creativity you need to thrive in modern global markets. You must seed your leadership team with people of diverse backgound, exposure and experience. Or stay small and meaningless. Your call.

Why do corporate executives talk like parrots?

Posted: August 27, 2011, 6:37 am by Sunny Bindra

Corporate executives must really hate their work.

I only say this because they seem to need a different language to describe what they do, liven up their meetings, dress up their mundane lives in metaphor. How else do you explain the modern disease known as corporate jargon?

A recent Forbes magazine article defined jargon as “a heinous amalgamation of terms with unknown origins and delivered with no explanation, irony or even a crumb of guilt.”

Businesspeople are stealing language from movies, from the military, from medicine, from art, from engineering – from pretty much everywhere except business itself! Is the occupation that boring, people, that you need to appropriate language intended for other things?

Karen Friedman has written a hard-hitting book on the subject, and tells us: “People use jargon because they want to sound smart and credible when in fact they sound profoundly dim-witted and typically can’t be understood, which defeats the purpose of speaking in the first place…”

Ouch. I hope you felt that. And just in case you think you’re a corporate animal who’s exempt from the jargon disease, let me summarize for you my most frequently heard inanities in Kenya.

“Think outside the box.” Do you say that? Of course you do. But why? It might have sounded impressive in the 1980s, but it is the most overworked and tired phrase around these days. If you want people to be more creative, find a different phrase. That one is not cool.

“Let’s cut to the chase.” A very tired way of saying let’s get to the conclusion. But you’re not fighting in the Wild West, folks. Your daily life is way more boring than shooting gunslingers or chasing after Apaches. Using script language won’t help liven up business life. Livening it up by making it more meaningful would liven it up.

“Giving 110 per cent.” You can’t give 110 per cent. If you give everything you can, with absolutely nothing left over, you’ll be giving 100 per cent. Which is pretty much impossible in the first place, so finding another 10 per cent from somewhere is both physically inconceivable and mathematically silly. As for people who give 200 per cent…

“Let’s break down the silos.” What are silos? Do you even know? Towers that house grain. Or missiles. Why would you want to break them down? This expression also has a long history, originating from the time when organizations operated in long vertical enclosures that separated accountants from marketers. These ‘silos’ needed to be broken down so that people could mingle and solve things together. But here’s the thing: people who say they need to break down silos, never do. They just talk about it. Those who don’t work that way don’t know what a silo is.

Jokes aside, the way we talk matters. If we are perpetually seeking metaphors to describe what we do, rather than describing what we do, then what we do must be very boring indeed.

After a while, everyone hears this babble, everyone repeats it, and pretty much no-one understands what it really means. Which means we are not communicating, just mouthing. Parroting the same phrases endlessly is not cool. Saying what you mean, and saying it simply, is very cool. Not to mention productive.

Business should be way more interesting than that. It worries me when executives are forced to rely on glib hand-me-down phrases to communicate. No wonder hardly anyone produces a genuinely unique product or provides refreshingly distinctive service. When we are all trapped in the prison of mediocre language, how can we be bold or different?

OK, I’ll let you go. Tomorrow is Monday, and you’ll no doubt have to drill down and manage expectations, offer solutions and leverage some synergies, and take everything to the next level.

Sunny Bindra’s new book, ‘The Peculiar Kenyan’ is now on sale

Why are tech companies falling like flies?

Posted: August 22, 2011, 11:00 am by Sunny Bindra

“Things move quickly in technology, which is why technology companies are fascinating to strategists the way fruit flies are for biologists — you can see an entire life cycle in a very short span of time.”

RITA McGRATH, blogs.hbr.org (5 June 2011)

Columbia professor Rita McGrath points out that technology companies are these days proving very valuable to business academics – because they come and go like fruit flies! Like biologists, strategy students are now able to study an entire company life cycle in just a few years, as opposed to watching a steady decline that takes decades.

And quite startling it is. Upstarts like Palm, Research in Motion, MySpace and Flip – who arrived on the scene just the other day, are in various stages of demise. Meanwhile, long-standing tech giants like Nokia and Microsoft are also desperately scrabbling around for a strategy.

What’s really going on here?

The main thing to note is that the nature of competitive advantage is changing dramatically. What makes you successful rarely keeps you successful. Consider some examples.

Palm became famous a few years back because it was the first phone-cum-personal organizer – managing contacts and calendars in synch with your computer. But so what? Others like the iPhone and various Android devices soon did that better – and did more besides.

Flip provided the first pocket-sized video camera that combined portability with decent video quality and affordability. But so what? Smartphone cameras soon provided built-in high definition video – and went further. The iPhone provided the ability to upload content directly from the device, and film editing – things the Flip never did. The Flip, you may have noticed, is no more.

RIM’s BlackBerry was the first push email device, which was a real ‘wow’ for the corporate world. While it lasted, that is. Push e-mail is now a commodity feature – everyone can do it, even cheap devices. Once its key selling proposition is not so unique, the BlackBerry looks rather lame, with its outmoded phone design, clumsy internet capability, and limited applications universe. Its share price is down 50% this year.

Spot the trend? The big thing that gives you your early success is often the cause of your demise. Dr McGrath explains it thus: “The core business, which is…generating wads of cash, is run by powerful people (if they weren’t powerful, they wouldn’t be running the core business!). To them, changing strategy to pick up new customer sets, new routes to market, new core features all look threatening. Unless someone in the company has the foresight to yank resources out of that previous business and nurture the next one, the core basically squeezes all the oxygen out of the new businesses.”

In other words, powerful forces inside successful companies can kill off new innovations and fresh thinking – but they can’t do the same with competitors. So Apple stole a march on all phone incumbents with its breakthrough touchscreen technology and ‘apps’ ecosystem. But Apple, too, cannot afford to sit back; Android phones have caught up fast, and have a price advantage. And out there lurks, no doubt, someone with the next big thing…

The lesson for business leaders is to never let complacency breed in these testing times. In certain markets, you may have no more than 2-3 years of enjoying the fruits of your competitive advantage. You have to have the nerve and gumption, amidst the success of the present, to relentlessly pursue the future. That requires a lot of leadership foresight, the type that most companies just don’t have.

That’s why we will continue to see tech companies falling like flies. If your industry is also characterized by rapid technological change, unpredictable competition and fickle customers, then you too are in danger. There is a company waiting to disrupt you – and it’s better if that company is you.

Success comes from daily habits, not natural talent

Posted: August 20, 2011, 6:28 am by Sunny Bindra

Haruki Murakami is widely regarded as one of the world’s most interesting, original writers. His novels frequently combine elements of the bizarre and the mundane, the surreal and the banal in such odd measure that the reader is left baffled, rattled, disturbed – but always interested.

Murakami has won numerous awards and accolades, and has been lauded as one of the world’s greatest living writers. So you might be forgiven for thinking this is a man blessed with unique talents and naturally bestowed skills.

Not a bit of it. In his memoir, What I Think About When I Think About Running, Murakami compares his two great passions: writing and long-distance running. He points out that both pastimes require the same disciplines: dedication and repeated practice.

This may come as a surprise to some readers, who probably imagine very creative artists produce their unusual output with some mystical flourishes of genius. But it rings true to me. As Aristotle put it centuries ago, excellence in anything is a habit, not a one-off event. We are what we repeatedly do.

Murakami tells us that running was intensely difficult when he started. But because he persisted and made it a daily habit, his body gradually adjusted to the pain. His breathing and pulse regularized, and muscles began building in the right places. The point was not how far or how fast he ran, but that he did it every day without fail.

He finds the process of writing quite similar. Of course he has a degree of latent talent in that area – few people would even contemplate a life of writing if they did not have a love of words and some skill with language in the first place. But that is not really the point. The point is to do the damn thing every day, until…you’ve got it, your pulse and breathing regularize, and muscles appear in the right places.

Murakami tells us that he does not think he has any great spring of innate writing talent. What he does have, however, is the willingness to chip away every day. “I have to pound away at a rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of my creativity. Every time I begin a new novel, I have to dredge out another hole. But, as I’ve sustained this kind of life over many years, I’ve become quite efficient, both technically and physically, at opening those holes in the rock and locating new water veins. As soon as I notice one source drying up, I move on to another.”

In that little paragraph you have hidden one of the great secrets of success. Success does not come in dramatic twirls and grand flourishes; it is born of daily, determined application. Even creative success. Genius is less about ‘a-ha’ breakthrough moments, and more a willingness to persevere, to put on the shoes and get out into the cold, or to sit before the keyboard and start pounding something out.

I don’t know any better advice to give to young people wanting to achieve something significant. If you really want to do something, you also have to really want to do it every day and get better and better at it. Build your endurance, your ability, your rhythm. Then, the breakthrough moments will come more easily and regularly. The world may view you as a natural creative, but you will know that your achievements, like Murakami’s, are the child of a persistent daily rhythm.

Whether you are learning a craft, mastering a profession, running a business or just enjoying a hobby: the point is the same. Keep at it, keep learning, keep trying new things out. But first, just keep at it.

Sunny Bindra’s new book, ‘The Peculiar Kenyan’ is now on sale

Why are some industries so persistently bad with customers?

Posted: August 15, 2011, 11:44 am by Sunny Bindra

“Bruce Temkin, managing partner of Temkin Group, says, “The overall story was not very good. Nearly half of the companies received ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’ ratings. The bottom of the list was dominated by health plans, TV service providers and Internet service providers. In these industries, it appears as if bad customer experience is contagious. And, worse yet, no one seems to recognize that they are infected.”

Forbes (19 April 2011)

The article excerpted caught my eye in Forbes recently. It was discussing a strange phenomenon – that certain industries and types of business are consistently bad at delivering good customer experience and building customer loyalty.

The study quoted is by Temkin Group, which analyzes how American companies interact with customers on a regular basis. The results do not make good reading overall – half of ALL companies are either poor or very poor! That’s bad enough, but the persistent offenders also stand out clearly: health insurance providers; TV companies; internet-service providers; banks and insurance companies.

Surprise, surprise! Or rather, no surprise at all. It’s a shame these surveys are not (yet) run in Kenya, but I am willing to make an unscientific (though educated) guess at what we would find. First, the vast majority of organizations would get a very poor rating; and second, the persistent offenders would be exactly the same every year, just like in the US: health insurance providers; TV companies; internet-service providers; banks and insurance companies. The only category we would add in these parts would be utility companies and government service providers.

Why is this? Why do some industries behave so badly – and keep doing so? Why don’t they change, pull up their socks, realize their bad ways?

This is a mystery, but it can be resolved. For a clue, look at the companies at the TOP of Temkin’s customer loyalty ratings: 9 of the top 10 are retailers. What’s distinctive about retailers? Forbes tells us that retailers know they have to win every customer anew every time that customer shops. In other words, in the very competitive US retail market, every customer must be fought for, and every customer can be lost.

Let’s look again at the serial offenders list: notice something now? This is what Bruce Temkin points out: “Rather than earn loyalty on an ongoing basis, they often try and lock in customers through contracts. This allows them to ignore the underlying discontent with their customers.”

It’s the lock-in factor that is causing this problem. All of the industries mentioned have this feature – they try to ensure you won’t go anywhere else (for a while, at least). ISPs, phone and TV providers try to do this through long-term contracts; insurers through long-horizon policies; banks through high switching costs; airlines through air miles; government monopolies through maintaining their compulsory arrangements. Once you’re a customer of these people, they make sure you won’t go anywhere for quite a while.

There are big lessons all round in this observation. If you’re a regulator who wants to ensure companies think hard about their customers, you have to discourage the practice of lock-in. If you’re a customer, you have to resist organizations that try to lock you in for long periods – it’s a recipe for indifferent service.

If you’re a company boss, you should pay special attention to this problem. If your organization operates on lock-in, you will never see the underlying problem. Customer numbers will look good for quite a while, and discontent will not immediately translate into bottom-line impact. You will miss the signals, and so will your staff. Because you won’t have to fight for customers every day, you won’t learn to fight at all. You will be more insular than customer-focused, and will mostly live at the bottom of the true (underlying) customer loyalty pile.

Another famine caused by people, not nature

Posted: August 13, 2011, 6:25 am by Sunny Bindra

I have been trying to avoid mentioning our current famine, as I thought I had written all I could about famines in the past. Clearly not, though, judging by the actions and utterances of those who ought to know better.

Seven years ago, I wrote some articles on this page about famines and the right and wrong ways to fight them. Sadly, those articles remain utterly relevant to today’s situation – because nothing has changed in those seven years. So allow me to repeat an essential point about famines.

Famines are not caused by lack of rainfall. Really, they are not. How can they be, when we know of countries that receive very little precipitation but never experience famines? Famines are not caused by lack of food. How can they be, when many countries hardly produce any food – but never experience famines?

I have forgotten most of the economics lectures I attended as a young man, but the ones by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen stayed with me. In modern economies, famines are caused by a lack of ENTITLEMENT to food. Famines are man-made. It is the failures of men that make famines, not the heartlessness of God. Hunger and deprivation are not immutable.

A famine is a transient event, a sudden eruption of deprivation for a considerable section of the population. It may be precipitated by a rainfall failure, but that is only the superficial cause. The underlying cause is the failure to create an ongoing entitlement to food. That is why no minister, MP, councillor, bureaucrat, CEO or manager will ever face famine. Their entitlements are assured, through income.

The best way to do this for more people is to provide people with income streams that are not wholly dependent on the weather. That is where our failure lies: in our people, who persist in dangerously vulnerable activities; and in our leaders, who have singularly failed to date to create alternative, diversified streams of income. NTV recently pointed out that this is a drought of leadership, not just rainfall. You should have nodded vigorously.

As I wrote in 2004: “A fall in the supply of rain or food is not, in itself, a reason to have a famine. Food can be imported. A drastic fall in the income of key sections of the population is the true underlying factor. Those who grow cash crops are faced with failed harvests. Those who depend on livestock are faced with falling prices for their impoverished animals. Those who provide basic services in drought-stricken areas (such as barbers, tailors, carpenters) are faced with a sudden collapse in the demand for their offerings. All are faced with the spiralling costs of basic foodstuffs.”

So we have another famine in 2011. What should we do? Kenyans are very commendably again digging deep into their pockets to help. A significant sum has been raised by corporate and private do-gooders. But to imagine this alone is enough is to make a catastrophic error, one that will see us back here soon, wailing and donating again.

Use this philanthropic energy to push, finally, for long-term answers to famine. Those answers lie in: education; awareness; rural infrastructure and connectivity; income diversification schemes; irrigation and modern farming. Those projects need collective public and private effort. And they need the very thing that is in shortest supply: leadership.

In a modern economy, a famine is a moral and intellectual disgrace. It is yet another blot on the tattered CVs of our leaders, national and local. It records our failure to modernize our rural economy, prioritize our spending, rationalize our planning. As I write this, we are busy jerking our collective knee again. It’s now time to jerk some collective brain cells into action.

Sunny Bindra’s new book, ‘The Peculiar Kenyan’ is now on sale

The very subtle job of leading the board

Posted: August 8, 2011, 11:28 am by Sunny Bindra

“Today, greater professionalism is expected of a Chairman. S/he must possess a range of ‘soft skills’ and have the ability to coach new board members (especially executive directors); handle debates with skill; tease out concerns; orchestrate and unite an often disparate group; recruit the right people; and effect behavioural change where necessary. The chairman needs to make sure that certain topics are raised and put on the agenda at board meetings and that he has frequent contact with the non-executives to hear their concerns. In addition, the Chairman must act as a bridge between executives and non-executives despite the tendency for governance to push them apart; avoid the temptation to interfere; be familiar with the current issues; and be widely accessible to the board members and the shareholder community. On the whole, the Chairman’s role should be played in the background.”

DR DEBORAH SWALLOW, The Role of the Chairman (2005 White Paper)

I recently ran a programme for board chairpersons at Strathmore Business School. We were fortunate to have gathered an excellent group of chairs from leading regional institutions, to examine that very complicated question: what does a chairman actually do?

The paragraph shown summarizes the result of research into UK FTSE companies, and is quite revealing. It captures the unique role of the person who leads the board of directors. Take another look: it requires chairpersons to coach people; moderate debates; create unity; focus discussion on the right issues; manage change; counsel and advise; hire and fire – AND do all of that primarily in the background!

Strange as this sounds, it is correct.

The (non-executive) chairman of the board is very particular type of leader, and the peculiar nature of the role is not yet widely understood. Chairmen are leaders, yes – but they are first amongst equals. The chair is not, as is widely misconstrued in these parts, the ultimate commander-in-chief. The chair’s job is simply to chair the board – guide it in all its decisions, and articulate them.

Across East Africa we still suffer from the “do-you-know-who-I-am” kind of chairman – the one who thinks he is above the chief executive and the board and therefore calls all the ultimate shots. We see this often – the very aggressive chairman who treats the CEO like a flunkey, imagining a non-existent chain of command that allows him to bark orders and imagine that people serve at his pleasure. This is fallacious.

The board chair has a much more subtle role, which is to guide and manage the highest decision-making organ of the entity – the board of directors. The chair’s primary role is not to lead – it is to create the conditions for leadership. It is be an enabler, a fixer, someone who smooths the way and allows good leadership and decisions to happen where they are needed.

That is a very different animal from the one who shouts commands from the front of the field.

Chairing a board is a highly nuanced undertaking. It requires someone who understands people and their motivations, and can draw out the best from them. Someone who can see the big picture, and not allow directors to spend all their time on trivia. Someone who can coach a team into functioning well. Someone who can create unity and harmony rather than camps and divisions.

On top of all that, a chair must only step into the spotlight when needed – not hog all the airtime.

That is why boards must select their chairs with great care and wisdom. This is clearly not a job for everyone, and must not be based on seniority and rotation. The set of skills it requires is not widely available, and boards must groom and select chairs with great discernment. A bad chair can cause great disruption, as many a board has found to its cost.

To succeed in today’s world, you must dare to matter

Posted: August 6, 2011, 6:25 am by Sunny Bindra

“We are surrounded by Bureaucrats, Note Takers, Literalists, Manual Readers, TGIF Labourers, Map Followers, and Fearful Employees.”

That’s Seth Godin describing what most people in the world do. Last week, I asked you all whether you are “Godfreys” – just a random name I chose for all the people described above.

So look at the list and answer: isn’t that what you do? Exercise brainless bureaucracy created by others? Take notes while others tell you the answers? Take everything literally as you see it on the page? Read manuals to work out what to do in your world? Follow maps, rather than strike out into uncharted territory? Sit in fear at your workplace, because you know you could be laid off on someone’s whim?

It’s a frightening list, and unfortunately it covers most of us. Even high-powered lawyers, marketers, doctors, accountants, engineers, and architects are not spared. If you are generally following someone else’s instructions; doing brainless cut-and-paste work; following the rules laid down by long-dead people; just living for your weekends and your holidays – then you are in some trouble.

As Seth pointed out when he was in Nairobi, that world is over. The old contract, where you did what you were told and the system looked after you by giving you job security, health care and a pension is irredeemably broken. Ask the 30,000 bankers that global banking giant HSBC has just announced it will be laying off (while declaring bumper profits). Those are all ‘Godfreys’ who followed orders – until they were ordered out of the door.

For a while, the contract worked. If you obeyed, you were looked after. That’s gone, and it’s been blown away by technology, connectivity, and ferocious competition. Now, if you (or your child) are planning to just play the game, you are in for some serious shocks.

So what are you going to do? The answer, dear reader, is to become a ‘linchpin’ – someone who can’t just be tossed casually out of something. Whether you have a job or run your own business, you must become indispensable. The people around you – employers, colleagues, customers – must value you greatly. You must bring something unusual, something original, something valuable to the party. You must MATTER. If you’re just a face in the crowd, you might be dispersed along with that crowd anytime.

Now this has always been true. It’s just that it became a whole lot more true in recent years. The challenge for us all is HOW to matter. And that requires a whole new mindset. Instead of looking to blend in, we need to stand out. Instead of being part of the conventional wisdom, we need to be part of the uncommon sagacity. As I have written here before, the future is about artists, not artisans. Step one is to believe it. Do you dare to matter?

Step two is to make concrete steps to stand out. If you are in a job, give it an extra shot of enthusiasm. Do your work better than anyone else. Step back and rethink – why is it done this way? What would make it better? Solve and resolve things, don’t just complain about them. Give everything your best shot. What do you have to lose? Either you’ll become indispensable to your current organization; or you’ll get the hell out and do your unusual thing somewhere else, where you can be allowed to matter. Either way, you win.

You lose if you don’t try something different, it’s as simple as that.

Look at your own work-life, and ask yourself how distinctive and meaningful it is. And look afresh at your children and their education – are they being trained to think for themselves, or just take notes and wait for Friday?

Sunny Bindra’s new book, ‘The Peculiar Kenyan’ is now on sale

Long-serving CEOs, learn from the fall of Arab dictators

Posted: August 1, 2011, 3:48 pm by Sunny Bindra

“Some CEOs of long tenure must have gotten a slightly queasy feeling as they watched the recent events in the Arab world. Even if they bear no resemblance at all to Hosni Mubarak or Muammar Qaddafi—even if they are the most competent and benevolent of leaders—they may well feel horror at how rapidly the fortunes of a comfortable autocrat can disintegrate. They may wonder at the frightening human tendency, when the writing is on the wall, to resort to the denial, delusions, anger, and antics we’ve seen from these despots.”

ROBERT SUTTON, Harvard Business Review (June 2011)

So you’re a long-standing CEO with an enviable track record. Bob Sutton aimed a question squarely at you recently: did the serial Arab uprisings of this year make you wriggle in your well-worn seat? Just a little?

Sure, you’re no dictator – your tenure is marked by great results for the company and acclamation by the markets and your own staff. Even so, you should pay attention here. For even the best of us, the time to step down inevitably comes. The truly wise leader will ensure two things: first, that he/she is the first to recognize this, and relinquish the throne willingly; and second, that the last few months in power are handled very gracefully and magnanimously.

As Sutton points out: “How you handle yourself during your final months and weeks in power will have a big impact on how you are remembered.”

This is because of something called the “peak-end-rule”, first brought to our attention by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate: people’s memories of experiences are shaped by peak moments, whether good or bad, and by how those experiences ended.

Sutton translates thus: “Since it will be too late when you’re on the way out the door to change the peaks of your tenure, your only remaining shot at affecting how you’ll be judged by history is to create a favorable impression with your exit.”

Look at the impression created by the likes of Qaddafi, Mubarak, Ben Ali, Mugabe and company. These leaders may well have had good moments in their early careers, and were certainly well regarded for achievements in the past. But their place in history is now irrevocably stamped with the manner of their going. In their twilight period, they all turned ugly and turned on their own people. The “peak-end” is bad, and so, therefore, will perceptions of their entire tenure be.

Like it or not, your final years and months will colour your entire stint in the hot seat. So, if your final transit period is characterized by bragging about your achievements; undermining your successor; scheming to delay your departure; or other silliness – then that is what the world is likely to remember about you. If, on the other hand, you are generous in your praise of your team; ensure you’ve left strong systems and institutional frameworks behind you; and leave on time and in good spirit – the applause will only increase.

The last thing you want to do is to go kicking and screaming, politicking and scheming. Because the tone of your departure will become the tone of your tenure.

This applies to every single one of us. When it’s time to step down and step away, we must all hope we can do so with dignity and grace. Look at the much applauded leaders of history: a Nelson Mandela in politics; or an A.G. Lafley (of Procter and Gamble fame) in business. Both went unexpectedly early, of their own volition, and did so with style and goodwill. Their place in the leadership hall of fame is therefore assured. Contrast that with those leaders who hang on for too long, and who leave badly when they finally do. Now make your choice on what you want your legacy to be.

Do you stand out from the crowd? Unlikely…

Posted: July 31, 2011, 10:52 am by Sunny Bindra

Have you ever read a book where you want to stand up on your bed (that’s where I read) and clap on every other page?

Seth Godin’s Linchpin is just that book for me. It is a manifesto, a call to action, a drumroll. So you can imagine how fortunate I felt to meet the writer himself right here in Kenya recently. And not just meet him, but have a very valuable hour in his company before introducing him to a local audience.

Unfortunately it was a closed audience, as Seth was on a private visit with Acumen Fund – where he is a key advisor. But allow me to take up a couple of columns to transmit to the rest of you the gist of Seth’s message.

To do that, I want you to imagine a chap called Godfrey. Godfrey is a construction site worker. You will often see him huddled outside construction sites at the crack of dawn, along with dozens of others. Godfrey and his brethren await, every morning, the chance to work in a construction site at a measly wage.

Every morning, the site foreman comes out briefly, looks around, and quickly identifies a few extra workers that he needs for that day. Sometimes Godfrey is chosen, and sometimes he is not. He doesn’t really know why. Godfrey’s fellow work-seekers all look the same: desperate to work for a minimum wage.

Seth tells us that Godfrey is fungible, a non-choice. The foreman does not expend any effort in his choice because it doesn’t really matter. He needs cheap, obedient workers to do physical work.

As you can imagine, none of us want to be a Godfrey. But here’s the thing: most of us are. Even those who get full-time construction work are still Godfreys: expendable and interchangeable on a whim. Even those who shed the blue collar for a white one are still Godfreys. Even seasoned professionals are usually Godfreys – lawyers, accountants, doctors, marketers – despite appearances.

Those of you who run your own businesses might be emitting a self-satisfied snigger at this point – you have, of course, left the Godfrey brigade. Or have you? Most businesses, unfortunately, are also Godfreys: they do nothing distinctive; they stand next to dozens of near-identical businesses, all waiting for the customer to choose them. When businesses are all pretty much identical, what does the customer do? Choose the cheapest one, of course.

Is your business a Godfrey? Probably. Chances are, it does things pretty much exactly the same way as its competitors – maybe a little different, but not by much. This is why, for example, traditional computer makers are in so much trouble. Whether you bought a Toshiba, a Dell or an HP – they all looked the same, they all ran Windows, and they were all powered by Intel chips. Is it any wonder the savvy customer bought the cheapest me-too offering, and killed the industry’s margins?

One company was different, though – Apple. It looked different, felt different, was sold differently. For a while, Apple suffered because it didn’t conform with industry standards. It wasn’t part of the norms club. But eventually, Apple’s difference won through. It is now on course to become the most valuable company – not just in its industry, but in the world.

What about you – are you a Godfrey? Does your CV sit in a stack next to dozens of others? Is your cubicle identical to all adjacent ones? Is your MBA just like the next person’s? Thought so.

The Godfreys of this world (apologies to all the people named Godfrey!) are doomed to be subject to the whims of others. If you, or your business, is a Godfrey, you need to rethink. See you here next week to consider how you might do that.

Sunny Bindra’s new book, ‘The Peculiar Kenyan’ is now on sale

When the founder becomes the problem in the business

Posted: July 25, 2011, 11:31 am by Sunny Bindra

“In the US they call it the “Murdoch discount”.
This is the amount by which US analysts reckon shares in News Corporation are depressed because of the controlling stake held by the Murdoch family; about 40 per cent of the B voting shares, although only 13 per cent of the share capital. Analysts never like powerful shareholders, mainly because their impact can be so profound. And in Rupert Murdoch’s case it’s because they can’t predict what a media tycoon with megalomaniacal tendencies will do next.
In recent years, Wall Street has watched as he has bought some pretty strange and very expensive businesses: he paid $500m for Myspace and sold it for $35m and then earlier this year paid $615m for his daughter Elisabeth’s Shine production company. But the purchase they really didn’t like was of Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal newspaper group, for which he paid $5.7bn and has written off $2.8bn.”

MARGARETA PAGANO, The Independent (17 July 2011)

As scandal and disgrace swirls around Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation empire, many a shareholder and analyst is asking the hitherto heretical question: could the problem be the great man himself?

How can this be? Rupert Murdoch is, after all, the world’s most powerful media baron. The buccaneering Australian who took on the world’s hidebound media mandarins in four continents, laid waste to established practice, and put together an enviable global empire. How can this visionary founder be the problem?

He can be, and is. Rupert Murdoch, at 80 years of age, now presides over a media conglomerate so vast it cannot be run like a family enterprise. And yet it still is. Murdoch’s hands-on leadership style, his appetite for risk, his linking of his business brand to his own persona – these were very valuable attributes in the early days. They are no longer so.

Murdoch has kept his family members in key positions around News Corporation. He has retained powerful control of shareholding rights. He has ensured that he is the all-powerful chairman AND CEO of the corporation. He personally selects and appoints both executive and non-executive directors. All those issues are now problematic, and other major shareholders are beginning to rebel.

When a corporation has become a certain size and span, having an all-powerful founder as its unchallenged leader is no longer an asset – it’s a liability. Take the phone-hacking scandal that has so engulfed News Corporation. The scandal happened at the News of the World newspaper in the UK – which made up less than 1% of the group’s revenues. Yet its toxicity is poisoning the entire global organization.

What was needed was independent challenge to Murdoch, whose laissez-faire attitude towards journalistic ethics is now coming back to haunt the corporation. This issue should have been addressed and eliminated years ago – but who was going to take on the grand old man? If he didn’t see the problem, who, in his stable of family members, old loyalists, cronies and sycophants was going to see one?

This issue is very pertinent to us in Kenya, with our tradition of all-powerful founder CEOs. The wiser ones in that group, as their businesses grow beyond their grasp, may wish to consider the following lessons from the Murdoch situation. First, let go sooner rather than later – and have another life to retire into. Second, take your family off centre-stage, and professionalize management at all levels. Third, allow many voices to enter the fray in key decision-making as you yourself fade gently into the background.

Big-man leadership only pays off at the earlier stages of business evolution. Later on, it becomes a liability. Single-source decision-making has no place in large, complex enterprises. I hope many of our visionary founders learn that lesson early enough.

How many of your employees take it personally?

Posted: July 24, 2011, 9:27 am by Sunny Bindra

Every once in a while, this column looks for ordinary people who exemplify the attitudes that Kenya needs. This week again, it has found one to name.

Clement Githinji is a restaurant manager who runs one of Nairobi’s finer eating establishments. My wife and I are often there, and recently had an interesting encounter.

After our meal, my wife asked for a cup of hot chocolate. This is perhaps not a frequent request at this place, but one was duly served. I looked at it and thought: Hmm…rather a dull and uninspiring offering from a restaurant that upholds such high standards. I called Clement over and told him so.

So far, this is a rather uninteresting story for a Sunday morning, I know. But bear with me – what’s interesting is what happened next.

In response to this rather minor complaint, Clement’s face fell, almost as though I had just slapped him. He stared at the cup of chocolate in mortification. When he finally found his voice, he apologized profusely. He left me feeling startled, almost wishing I had not brought up something so trivial. The hot chocolate was, after all, perfectly acceptable. It just had no ‘wow’ factor.

A few weeks later Mr and Mrs B returned to the restaurant, having forgotten the matter. At the end of our meal, Clement walked up and asked my wife if she would like a hot chocolate again. And then proceeded to serve up a beautiful beverage in a flamboyant cup, the froth whipped expertly into a signature flourish, with flakes of homemade chocolate as a garnish. A serving, in other words, that befitted the quality of the restaurant.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what a ‘wow’ experience is all about.

It hinges on the smallest or largest of things, but it always requires a single driving force behind it: someone who gives a damn.

Clement certainly gives a damn, and he sets the standard and the tone for his restaurant. The reason this restaurant flourishes is that it is headed by someone who takes the issue of its standards very, very personally. When a complaint is made, no matter how trifling, this leader feels it very poignantly, and personally. And so makes amends, urgently and comprehensively.

That is what it’s all about. Excellence comes not just from great systems, processes, procedures – it comes from a few people who first set the standard and then turn excellence into a daily habit. And this is not about highly paid jobs in high-end organizations – it is needed at all levels.

It is people like Clement we need to look out for in our teams, those who quietly but doggedly keep the standard high – because it matters to them. They don’t need much training, brainwashing, conditioning – they come with the right set of attitudes in the first place.

These days, I pretty much only employ or deploy people with that same set of attitudes: a personal standard in work that’s high, simply because it is; a willingness to accept fault and take responsibility; and that elusive desire to correct something that’s wrong.

Look around you: at the highest levels in our organizations and institutions, those attitudes are patently lacking. The reverse is commonplace: people who laugh off complaints; who take evasive action and seek to divert blame; and who think the business of the organization is not their personal business.

In the public sector, that is why we have, in the 21st century, unstable power, an international airport that routinely goes missing in action, a demoralized police force, and no enforcement of traffic discipline. In the private sector, that’s why we have bored receptionists, blasé customer reps and relentlessly poor service.

In all those places, no one is taking it personally.

Sunny Bindra’s new book, ‘The Peculiar Kenyan’ is now on sale

When do these business leaders spend any time in their OWN businesses?

Posted: July 18, 2011, 11:34 am by Sunny Bindra

“Timothy Post (@timothypost):
#tcdisrupt I’m beginning to think that “startups” are what entrepreneurs do when they’re NOT jetting to all the tech conferences each month.”

TWITTER (24 May 2011)

This column has been quoting and analyzing interesting stuff from books, journals, magazines and newspapers for years now. It’s time to move with the times and occasionally quote…tweets.

The little gem selected above from blogger Timothy Post caught my eye a couple of months ago. His sharp (and on Twitter, necessarily pithy) observation cuts to the bone. Modern entrepreneurs, when exactly do your attend to your own businesses? For you give the impression you do nothing but attend one techie conference after another…

The world of oldies, let us admit, has always been prone to this problem. I have railed on this page and elsewhere against business leaders who flit from one external jamboree to another. You will find them everywhere: sitting around waiting for presidents to arrive at Very Important Gatherings; shaking a hip with the young in a doomed attempt to look groovy; doling out cheques to orphans and refugees while looking pained and mournful; or just shooting the breeze and lining the throat with fellow idlers at endless cocktail jaunts.

When, I have often asked, do these CEOs do that very difficult thing of actually running their businesses?

Now, it pains me to observe this same trait manifesting itself in many a twenty- or thirty-something high-tech startup CEO. Having held high hopes for this new generation, I find myself wondering whether anyone is ever going to do this business thing properly.

Timothy Post is right: how do people running fledgling businesses that have yet to take off properly find the time to be at every conference, forum, launch, and networking event?

There is a misconception that these young people are feeding on. This is the belief that future business success is going to come principally from making connections. That in a hyper-connected world, your ability to plug yourself into the global buzz is what will make you relevant and important. That you must keep abreast of ever-changing technology by attending every conference. That success comes from the osmosis of being present amongst the movers and shakers at global jamborees.

Reality-check time, people. Business success still comes, as it has always done, from doing something different, meaningful and deep. That cannot be done playing with your iPad sitting in planes and stadia pretending to learn something from others; it requires you to be present at your business to make it robust enough to soar. It means working on the distinctiveness and meaningfulness of your product; on the spirit and joint endeavour of your people; and on giving your customers a service experience that others cannot match.

Last time I checked, that can’t be done while watching one presentation after another in yet another world-changing gathering of brilliant minds; it can’t be done while listening to a riveting speaker regale you with mind-blowing anecdotes; and it certainly can’t be done frittering away your entire day exchanging inanities with your fellow Tweeters.

Go and rub shoulders, by all means; but first have a top-notch business! Too many young techies are considering themselves global gurus after incubating one semi-original idea, or spawning a stream of half-baked businesses that come and go like fruit flies. Enduring success takes great practice; great application; great engagement. It always has. There is no option but to spend endless, tedious, repetitive hours on the same damn thing – product features, company culture, customer experience – until you make it amazing.

When you have created a great, sustained, world-beating business, I, too, will attend the conference where you tell us about it. But until then, some silent endeavour may be what is needed most.

Murdoch’s media morality tale

Posted: July 16, 2011, 6:35 am by Sunny Bindra

Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, so long a global behemoth, is in serious trouble. Commentators are scrambling to make sense of the events that led to the closure of a 168-year-old newspaper, the News of the World (NOTW) – until last Sunday Britain’s most popular newspaper.

It won’t end there. The shenanigans at NOTW threaten to infect and damage the rest of Murdoch’s News Corporation empire. They threaten the reputation of one of the world’s oldest police forces, London’s Metropolitan. And they are even threatening the UK’s prime minister himself, who employed a tainted NOTW editor in his top team.

The nature of media power, its influence on politics and politicians, the limits of press freedom – all these dimensions of the issue are under renewed, intense scrutiny. All very interesting, I’m sure, but to me this is a morality tale, pure and simple.

When Murdoch took over The Sun and its Sunday cousin NOTW, he immediately created a circulation-at-all-costs culture. He shrewdly played to the lowest common denominator – giving Britain’s working classes a salacious mix of sex, nudity, gossip, celebrity-worship and dumb, mindless, trivia.

The formula worked. Millions joined those newspapers’ circulation lists. Advertisers, eyeing the eyeballs, streamed in. Other newspapers, panicked by loss of numbers, began playing the same game. The tabloid culture took serious root in Britain. And Murdoch began playing political broker, influencing the votes of millions and placing leaders into 10 Downing Street.

So far, so bad. But it got worse. The Murdoch papers, in their burning desire to get even more people reading their rags, began stretching the rules. They began paying for stories. They began following people around and invading their privacy. They began bugging hotel rooms. And we now know they also began hacking into voicemails, searching for clues and hints of anything they could use.

The reason Britain is so disgusted now is that the invasion of privacy breached all barriers of decency. It has now been revealed that hacking was done of the voicemails of a murdered schoolgirl, and of grieving relatives of dead soldiers. Even former British prime minister Gordon Brown may not have been spared.

I ran a seminar for chairpersons of boards this week, and pointed out there that the ethics of an organization lies in the hands of its chair. An organization with a chair and board of integrity can withstand the effects of a dodgy CEO – but when the topmost decision-maker has a flawed sense of ethics, things can only disintegrate.

Murdoch’s tactics led to great business success. The man is a shrewd business brain and remarkable risk-taker who did much good for Britain’s media, breaking the grip of print unions and hidebound old-world mandarins. But that is not going to be his final legacy. He will be remembered not for the good he did, but for the final unravelling.

And what an unravelling it is. At the time of writing, British leaders have united in opposing News International’s bid for British broadcaster BSkyB. Murdoch has been forced to abandon the deal. Advertisers are pulling out of all his media companies. Minority shareholders are finding their voice, calling his sprawling corporation a “family candy jar” – and suddenly noticing the unabashed nepotism at the heart of it. All his brands are now being seen as toxic. His share price is plummeting. The man himself has signed a written apology to Britain – perhaps the first time in his career he has had to say sorry for anything.

All because, all those years ago, Rupert Murdoch failed to draw an ethical line in the sand. He allowed his people to chase the story at any cost and by any means. He winked and looked away. He looks set, in his final years, to pay a heavy price.

It’s never worth it, people. When the temptation to take the low road comes, know that a reckoning will come. It may take a while, but it will come.

Sunny Bindra’s new book, ‘The Peculiar Kenyan’ is now on sale

What can we learn from these century-old businesses?

Posted: July 11, 2011, 11:07 am by Sunny Bindra

“If Tom Watson Sr. were to visit IBM today, he would hardly recognize what we make or the services we provide—analytics, clouds, the Jeopardy!-winning computer named in his honor, solutions for a smarter planet. But he would very much recognize why IBM is pioneering these spaces—to make the world work better through information and the tools of thinking.
If Tom Watson Jr, our second CEO, were to return, he would not recognize the structure or global footprint of IBM. But he’d instantly recognize the IBMer—the women and men who still very much believe that a company can, and must, change everything about itself … except its beliefs.”

IBM CENTENNIAL Wall Street Journal (16 June 2011)

This column almost never quotes from a company’s own literature, but every once in a while an exception has to be made. The excerpt is from a rather well-written insert in the WSJ recently, to commemorate IBM’s 100-year milestone.

Very few companies make it to the 100-year mark. Most die long before that birthday, brought down by changing technology, evolving customer preferences – but mostly by their own mistakes. In the US, Only 62 companies have appeared on the Fortune 500 list every year since1955. Another 1,952 have come and gone.

In Kenya, if you’re middle-aged or older, think back to the brands and products and companies that were big in your childhood. How many of them are around today?

That’s why centenaries are important. IBM’s isn’t the only one. Standard Chartered Bank opened its doors in Kenya in 1911, and is our oldest-established foreign bank. Magadi Soda is also 100 years old this year. So what should we learn from these long-lived titans?

Consider IBM again. It operates in a tumultuous industry – high technology – that has claimed most of its participants. The company started off making crude tabulating machines, moved to typewriters, before making its name as a dominant manufacturer of mainframe computers, mostly in America. It then moved into personal computing, before selling that business and focusing all its efforts on services. These days it is primarily a ‘cloud-based’ provider of ‘analytics’ services, operating all over the globe. It is unrecognizable from its original form.

So is that the secret – to be nimble and flexible, able to change with the times and adjust to technological upheavals? That’s the simple answer, but doesn’t address what needs to stay the same. IBM offers one constant: its value system. The company explains: it’s not referring to ethics or morals, which are a given. IBM’s values are those very particular things that make IBM, IBM.

The Economist unearthed one such value for us in its assessment of IBM’s longevity: “From the beginning, as a maker of complex machines IBM had no choice but to explain its products to its customers and thus to develop a strong understanding of their business requirements. From that followed close relationships between customers and supplier. Over time these relationships became IBM’s most important platform—and the main reason for its longevity.”

So IBM’s ability to survive is driven less by being ahead of an ever-changing curve, and more by its ability to stay bonded with its customers in its role as their trusted advisor. Put that one in your pot, good people, and cook it to your own specification. It’s less about your business genius, and more about your ability to stay true to some enduring beliefs and practices. Mostly, it’s about building a unique culture inside the company, and very strong loyalties outside. Magadi Soda and SCB have not had to change their product bases as dramatically as IBM – but they too have had to remain in a strong strategic position with their employees, shareholders and customers, mainly by staying indispensable.

So mull that over, and perhaps we’ll drink to YOUR centenary one day…

Why don’t more of us enter high-end businesses?

Posted: July 9, 2011, 6:04 am by Sunny Bindra

“Bottom of the pyramid” is all the rage these days. To make money in emerging economies, you have to find a mass-market product, says the conventional wisdom.

M-Pesa, Equity Bank, Senator beer – these are all great examples of bold innovations that captured the bottom end of the market in unprecedented ways. We take great pride in the fact that these path-breakers emerged from Kenya and the rest of the world sat up and took notice. These businesses have great social significance in addition to generating large profits.

But there is another part of the business spectrum that receives scant attention in this part of the world, and I want to focus the attention of some of you on it this Sunday.

Imagine a business where you don’t have to engage in mass-marketing – the product sells itself through self-propagated word-of-mouth. A business where a high price is not a problem – it’s a prerequisite. A business with such brand power that competitors find it very hard to breach your walls. A business in which margins can be astonishingly large.

I have just described the successful high-end, premium-brand business. Is there a local high-end market? There certainly is. Have you seen the queues going to the newly expanded Junction mall during the weekend peaks? Have you observed top Kenyans’ propensity for foreign travel? Have you seen the allure this land holds on rich foreigners? Have you studied the money-is-no-object segment?

Across all sectors, there is a viable high-end market. But there are precious few Kenyan businesses rushing in to fill it. Now some of you may think you’re a premium business, but in most cases that is a delusion. Mid-market is not premium. And I can think of only a handful of Kenyan top-end brands that have sustained their excellence.

That is because it is a particularly difficult business to get started. The clientele is picky, and always has other options. You are often up against extremely well-established brands. Business volumes can be painfully thin until you get visible and established. There is no easy way to scale up, or crank up the marketing effort.

Once you establish yourself in a luxury-brand business, however, the rest of the ride can be pure gravy. So here are some tips for the brave-hearts who might want to give it a go.

First and foremost, your product has to be of the highest quality. Your benchmarks cannot be Kenyan brands in this segment – your well-travelled customer base will compare you against the best in the world. Good enough is just not good enough in premium products – you have to produce something amazing. Whatever your offering – aliment, advice, artifact – it had better be unique. Artistry and flair is needed.

Second, the customer experience you create needs to be equally world-beating. Luxury-end customers do not tolerate surly attendants, missed deadlines, slapdash service, uncouth encounters. You have to create an ambience of polished sophistication around your product, and you have to employ the best people to deliver the customer experience.

Premium products are not for faint hearts and casual minds. They demand a combination of genuine passion and high standards. That is why so many don’t make the grade. Of course, mass-market businesses also demand those things. But premium business is art first, business second.

So are you cut out for the high-end market? Do you have enormous passion for your product, whatever it is? Are your personal standards high enough? Can you design a unique product, and make it visible to the target market? Can you deliver a flawless customer experience?

Then go for it. You’ll have to be patient, but the ultimate rewards may be unmatched.

Sunny Bindra’s new book, ‘The Peculiar Kenyan’ is now on sale

Your brand is not your logo – it’s your whole business

Posted: July 4, 2011, 11:31 am by Sunny Bindra

“A great brand deserves a great logo and great graphic design and visuals. It can make the difference when the customer is choosing between two great brands. But these alone cannot make your brand great.
Ultimately, brand is about caring about your business at every level and in every detail, from the big things like mission and vision, to your people, your customers, and every interaction anyone is ever going to have with you, no matter how small.
Whether you know it or not, whether you have a swanky logo or not, you do have a brand. The question is whether or not it’s the brand you really want.”

DAN PALLOTTA blogs.hbr.org (15 June 2011)

Watching Kenya Power & Lighting’s recent ‘rebranding’ reminded me Dan Pallotta’s forceful blog on HBR online last month.

Pallotta pointed out that a logo and signage are the smallest part of a brand. They are just a visual depiction, an aspect of communication. A brand is THE WHOLE BUSINESS. I really wonder whether Kenyan organizations, with their emphasis on periodic showy visual overhauls, get this point.

Take KPLC, which decided to call itself ‘Kenya Power’ and introduce a brand new logo and a rewritten set of noble words to describe its aims and ideals. The company undoubtedly spent a large amount of money on this effort, but Kenya as a whole noticeably and vociferously shouted “SO WHAT?”

This must have been a bitter pill for the company, but what did it really expect? For several months now, Kenyans have been subjected to unplanned, regular power outages, often on a daily basis, often for hours at a time. Indeed, last week’s much-publicised rebranding event presaged some of the worst power cuts to date, when the whole capital city seemed to be in darkness.

In my opinion, thinking of a visual rebranding at a time like this is entirely self-defeating. It causes more anger than appreciation. Kenya Power has only one brand promise: to provide reliable, affordable power to as many Kenyans as possible. That’s it. When that promise is patently not being kept, a new logo and new set of values means nothing. A swish, patriotic TV advert means nothing. Full-page newspaper displays evoke only anger, as people question why the money is not used to just provide power. The reaction on social media was vehement – Kenyans alternated between heartfelt anger and mocking criticism.

If you’re going to rebrand, you have to fix everything. Your systems, your processes, your strategy, your people, your style, your message, your essence. A brand is not what you PORTRAY, it’s what you DELIVER.

All businesses should take note. Brand is everything – every manifestation of your organization that is felt by people in its ecosystem. For Kenya Power, unanswered customer telephone lines are its brand. Sudden power cuts in the middle of important work or a favourite TV programme are its brand. Long, snaking queues at its payment points are its brand.

For the rest of you the same applies. That surly, indifferent receptionist is your brand. That vehicle overlapping with your logo on proud display is your brand. That convoluted refunds process is your brand. That unfriendly, out-of-date website is your brand. That tatty, crumpled billboard is your brand. That torn sofa in your reception is your brand. And no logo, no advert can help those of you who ignore any of those things.

The best part of the Kenya Power rebranding? The company is learning to apologize. Its CEO acknowledged having let Kenyans down. Sensing massive public anger, it put off a planned tariff review. That’s a start, but there is so much left to do. The only thing Kenyans want from the company is reliable power. That is the only thing it should seek to deliver. The rest of the brand will take care of itself.

Beware the automation trap in customer service

Posted: July 3, 2011, 4:05 pm by Sunny Bindra

I have been a customer of a large global bank for a couple of decades. Recently, however, I closed all my accounts in despair. Why? Because after years of halfway decent service, this bank fell victim to the modern business malaise of automating all its customer interfaces.

I began fearing the worst some years ago when I visited a flagship branch of this bank in central London. There were NO tellers present – just machines. When I explained to the single attendant on duty that my issue required a discussion with a human being, I was directed to a telephone. I picked it up and found myself speaking to a call-centre representative – in India!

This bank’s service has been plunging since. It is next to impossible to speak to a knowledgeable human on any issue – you merely go through loops of automated telephone responses or descend into various levels of online hell. Hence my decision to quit. That, too, was no easy thing to pull off: my instructions were rendered incorrectly and I received threatening messages to regularize my account for months before I was able to detach myself from the madness.

Another example: last week, I became fed up with the spam-marketing phone calls I kept receiving from another international bank’s marketing staff overseas. I asked my local relationship manager to put and end to this. The reply? You have to fill out a form for that…

Even the best are messing it up. I have long admired Amazon.com’s ability to render good customer service online. I have even taught it as a model in my programmes. Yet, as Amazon grows and tries to scale up the automated service-delivery model, it too is hitting the buffers. Registering a non-standard complaint has become a journey through a labyrinth of indifferent and asinine online chat conversations.

I am writing about this so that Kenyan companies exercise caution as they rush down this route of automated customer experience. Let’s be clear: as a business advisor I understand very clearly the economics of automation. Companies can save massive amounts of money by moving transactions, complaints and queries online or to offshore call centres.

The economic saving is not in question; the emotional cost is. One of the few enduring sources of sustained competitive advantage in any business is an emotional bond with its customer base – a bond that creates brand affinity and enduring loyalty. That bond is precisely what too many large organizations are taking an axe to. In their rush to improve short-term bottom line, they harm their ability to create and protect longer-term loyalty.

Automation can also create the illusion of customer-friendliness. My wife told me how she rang a large local company and listened to their automated call waiting message – a silky, friendly, posh recorded voice promising all sorts of things. The message was then interrupted by a real person shouting “Hallo!” in a crude and harassed tone. Back to reality, sharpish.

A warm and friendly customer experience is one of the two or three cornerstones of business. Damage it and the whole edifice can tumble someday. As they hasten to embrace relationship-management software and machine-heavy customer interfaces, business leaders should stop and think. Do not inflict automated indifference on your customers. Do not break your brand essence in your wish to improve your balance sheets. The unseen balance sheet that captures the intangible emotional brand asset may suffer irreversible harm.

A thoughtful combination of investment in efficiency-boosting technology, and in human warmth, is needed. The former is easy, the latter very difficult. Most businesses take the undemanding, me-too route. If you’re leading a business, pay more attention to the feeling you provide, not just the process.

Sunny Bindra’s new book, ‘The Peculiar Kenyan’ is now on sale

A golden rule to help you evaluate the worth of your policies

Posted: June 27, 2011, 11:29 am by Sunny Bindra

“The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups”

HENRY HAZLITT Economics in One Lesson (1946)

When I was a young lad barely into long trousers, a greenhorn studying A-level economics for the first time, a most formidable gentleman used to intimidate us with his prowess. His name was Professor Terry Ryan, and he was (and is) Kenya’s renowned economist and policy guru. These days, I am honoured to sit on an advisory board alongside Prof Ryan, who is still going great guns – but that’s a story for another day.

I thought of the good professor when I picked up a book by another economics guru. Prof Ryan used to tell us he could summarize all of economics on a single page – which was mind-blowing when we struggled with all the huge textbooks in our curriculum. Henry Hazlitt, however, went one further. In 1946 he wrote the landmark book Economics in One Lesson. When I read the first chapter recently, I saw that Hazlitt, a member of the venerable Austrian school of economic thought, is actually boiling economics down to a single PARAGRAPH.

That paragraph is shown in the box. Look at it again. It gives us a simple rule for deciding whether an economic policy or act is worthwhile: does it impact positively on as many groups as possible in the economy (not just one group); and will its effects stay positive in the long term (not just immediately).

You may applaud now. If only leaders and policymakers thought that clearly (and nobly), perhaps this world would not be in quite the mess it is.

Take a recent example: the global credit crunch of 2008, which triggered a worldwide recession many countries are yet to emerge from. It is now evident that the policy measures that led to this crash broke Hazlitt’s golden rule. Credit rules were relaxed, to promote home ownership in certain countries. Unusual financial instruments were designed, to give the delusion of risk reduction and promote the obscene enrichment of a few bankers. Regulation was lax, in a misguided wish not to get in the way of a short-term boom. The results we all know: global financial meltdown; massive loss of homes, savings and jobs; and collapse of many seemingly robust institutions.

Had Hazlitt been around a few years before the crash, perhaps he would have told us: don’t do this, folks, because it enriches just a few people; and its long-term consequences will be catastrophic. It is not a phenomenon for the greater good for the greater period of time. It is a short-lived con game. And today, taxpayers around the world carry the can for the actions of a reckless cabal.

Certainly, the Government of Kenya would be well advised to apply Hazlitt’s lesson to its policies. Perhaps then we would evaluate more clearly what certain types of infrastructure projects mean for the greater, longer-term good of ALL the people of Kenya.

It also strikes me that organizational leaders would do well to apply Hazlitt’s rule within their entities. How many of us do this: enact only those measures that benefit all members of the organization (or wider ecosystem); and that keep being beneficial for a prolonged period?

In fact we see the opposite all too often: share ownership schemes that enrich a few while deluding the many; brutal layoffs that harm long-term morale; short-lived price cuts and promotions that give the illusion of value; senior executive teams that hoard all the perks and rewards while preaching austerity to everyone else.

So give this long-dead economist some time this week. His rule may help you lead more wisely.

No, Kenyans, don’t be numb to these outrages

Posted: June 26, 2011, 9:29 am by Sunny Bindra

Whatever became of moral outrage in Kenya?

“Nothing changes, no lessons are learned. Kenyans move on, and forget about the whole thing. And so buildings will continue to fall, and bombs will keep being planted. Ferries will keep sinking, and trains will be derailed. Buses will continue crashing in exactly the same places for decades. Planes will keep falling out of the sky. Famines will occur annually with complete predictability. The makers of toxic brews will carry on apace. When the death toll is high enough, we will call in our friends, the Israelis, Americans and Britons. And then we will shake our heads in dismay and carry on.”

No, I didn’t write that paragraph last week. I wrote it five years ago. Sadly, absurdly, inexplicably, it remains valid.

Take the Peculiar Kenyan phenomenon of collapsing buildings. Where’s the moral outrage? People are being killed and maimed on a regular basis. Read that sentence again: it said PEOPLE, not insects. Rogue property developers and contractors are responsible for these deaths, in cahoots with corrupt officials. They pad their bank accounts, and are carried away in lustrous limousines. Innocent construction workers, meanwhile, are carried away in coffins.

But here’s the astonishing thing: nobody pays the penalty. How many buildings have come crashing down on human heads since I wrote that paragraph? I stopped counting. How many more people have died in order to enrich the rogues? I stopped counting. On the other side of the equation: how many culprits have been jailed? How many unfit structures have been pulled down? How many overhauls have been done of the regulatory departments and processes? Those we can all count.

Is there a law against unlawful killing in Kenya or not?

Take the other Peculiar Kenyan phenomenon of grand scams. The latest one is the foul stench emanating from the Education ministry. Where’s the moral outrage, people? Did you understand what happened? Money was stolen from the pockets of this country’s poorest children, in the name of free education. Some people have apparently padded their bank accounts, by taking desks, chalk, books and classrooms away from the hands of YOUR children.

We have responded in the usual way. Some people have asked other people to resign. Other people have refused to do so, and have said there is no evidence against them. Other people have blamed their predecessors. Other people have said that nothing was in fact stolen. Other people have whipped up their tribespeople to protect them.

What about you, reader? Your answer is…what? Shake your head and say “Oh dear, not again?” Have another drink? Wait for the new constitution to fix everything? Wait for the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission to bite as well as bark? Let our donor partners raise a hullabaloo on our behalf? Hope that those pesky activists will chain themselves to railings in protest?

People, this is OUR country, OUR money, OUR issue. The cancer of corruption is eating away at our very core. We are becoming numb to the pain of these repeated scams. We just look away. We must demand that an end is put to these outrages. We must demand that those who abuse our trust pay a heavy price. We must demand that no one can enrich himself at our children’s expense.

Let me repeat for the umpteenth time on this page (and prepare you for umpteen more repetitions to come): these problems are not visited upon us from outside. They are our own doing. We have constructed this sick society that steals from orphans and refugees, and treats the lives of poor people no better than that of dogs. We must heal ourselves. At the very least, let us not forget to feel the outrage. It’s not OK.

Sunny Bindra’s new book, ‘The Peculiar Kenyan’ is now on sale

My 200th BD column: To improve your offsite meetings, switch off the projector!

Posted: June 20, 2011, 11:32 am by Sunny Bindra

PowerPoint presentations inevitably end up as monologues. They focus on answers, and everyone faces the screen. But meetings should be conversations. They should focus on questions, not answers, and people should face each other. I know it sounds crazy, but I’ve found that even the hum of the projector discourages dialogue.
Meetings are exorbitantly expensive when you add up the number of highly paid people in the room at the same time. They should be used as a time to engage deeply in issues, not to update each other on progress.”

PETER BREGMAN blogs.hbr.com (14 April 2011)

Peter Bregman, strategy advisor, was dissing slideshows recently. He was referring to the tendency to reduce our offsite strategic discussions to mere successions of PowerPoint presentations.

This, says, Bregman, cripples meaningful discussion and turns these vital meetings into ‘show and tell’ sessions. People sit down and face a projector screen for most of the day. They doze off and zone out, they check their email surreptitiously (or, these days, openly and blatantly). If they engage at all it is to poke holes in every proposal or offer gratuitous resistance to anything, as a form of entertainment. Nothing really productive happens.

I can relate to this, having conducted hundreds of offsite discussions in my time. Let’s understand first what we are there to achieve when we go away to talk about something meaningful. A great strategy meeting is a dialogue, a conversation, a cut-and-thrust session. It is a time to reexamine critical assumptions and revisit the competitive landscape. It is a time to design a new future, NOT a time to derange ourselves with a mind-numbing audit of the past.

If that is the purpose, then you can see Bregman’s point: slideshows don’t add anything. They, too, have become a mindless management ritual. We do them because we do them. We do them because everyone does them. But if you are there to evaluate, rethink – then a candid discussion, not brainless spectatorship, is the key design element. Even the fact that people face a screen rather than each other inhibits discourse.

Bregman tells us: “…following the “no PowerPoint rule” has the greatest impact because it keeps the energy where it should be: solving problems together.”

I run Socratic dialogues: small groups of people sit around a circular table and look one another in the eye. The only thing on the screen is a single question. They then spend the next hour discussing that question, uncovering hidden complexity, thrashing out the difficult implications of the question. Both the learning and outputs are immeasurably better.

The problem is not necessarily with PowerPoint and other presentation programs. It is with their repeated misuse. Most managers just don’t ‘get’ communication by presentation. They overload their decks with every possible statistic and endless lists of bullet points. They make little attempt to connect with their audience and keep them interested. They don’t construct a storyline because they don’t understand the power of narrative. The result is usually the kind of soporific presentation we have all lived through (and died a little in).

Here’s Bregman’s parting advice: “Save at least an hour or two at the end of the meeting to develop communication plans to disseminate the decisions. I’m always a little surprised at how many inconsistencies and disagreements are surfaced only when it comes time to commit to precisely what is going to be communicated.”

Less is more, people. Think about your most important 2-3 messages. Amplify those. Forget the rest. Make it humorous, make it lively, make it memorable.

Before I sign off, this is my 200th contribution in the ‘Thought Leadership’ slot in Business Daily. It’s been fun. Here’s to the next 200, hopefully.

Why things may get worse before they get better

Posted: June 18, 2011, 6:26 am by Sunny Bindra

What on earth has happened to India? That country, one of the huge economic success stories of recent times, is resembling a banana republic again.

Witness the astonishing spectacle of “saints” and “godmen” holding “hunger fasts,” supposedly to end corruption. At first I wanted to applaud, thinking: now there’s a way to make a stand and create popular pressure against an entrenched problem.

Subsequent events led me to hold my head. One of the “godmen” in question, Baba Ramdev (a gentleman with a following numbering tens of millions) embarked on an astonishing series of antics, first trying to cut a deal with the Indian government to not hold his fast, then backtracking. Furious politicians sent in riot police to disperse Ramdev’s huge gathering. Mayhem ensued, in which Ramdev, rather than give himself up with dignity, tried to escape dressed as a woman…

He subsequently issued threats to form a private armed force to take on the government…before going to hospital weak from his hunger fast. You couldn’t make this stuff up. Sadly, officials in the Congress Party-led government behaved no better, tear-gassing innocents and making belligerent statements about political manoeuvres by opposition politicians, in the language of street fighters.

This, by the way, is a country aspiring to sit on the elite UN Security Council.

Why am I telling you all this about another country this fine Sunday? Because I fear we too are going to get worse before we get better.

Like us, India has great potential, but also some serious issues. It is struggling to translate runaway economic growth into betterment for the mass of its people. Most Indians are still hidebound by poor education, ignorance and superstition – making them ideal cannon-fodder for both politicos and padres. And India’s corrupt traditions in business and politics are deeply embedded. Sound familiar?

So we, too, should expect to descend into comic disarray before we get serious. We are also going to encounter absurd resistance to change. Once our new constitution is implemented, this country will change forever. We will look back and laugh at the dark days. But meanwhile, the darkness is all around and the joke is on us.

Take the new public vetting processes that we have observed for the first time in recent weeks. The questions put to aspirants to high office verged on the asinine – were they ever questioned on matters of substance? Nevertheless, the new public scrutiny is a fine thing. It will cause a genuine sea-change in the quality of the people steering the good ship Kenya. Of course, we need to strengthen the process and improve the quality of the questioners – but we must give it time.

Meanwhile, Old Kenya, like Old India, will bite back. Those who benefit from decades of patronage will not give up without a fight. Malevolent politicians will assemble ignorant hordes to win numerical battles. Misguided souls will dress up in tribal regalia to mutter warnings about their favoured sons. None of that is going away any time soon.

This is a slow-burn war. We will make small, uncertain steps – but we will keep going. The combination of constitutional change, economic upheaval and demographic shifts will ensure that we get to a better Kenya. A younger, more educated, more irreverent, more open-minded population will eventually deliver a different country. Already, the outrage over scrutiny of public funds and the performance of state agencies is building. Kenyans are finally beginning to say: we won’t take it any more. Stop all the posturing, deliver results.

The final act of this play will have a happy ending. We may have to put with both tragedy and farce before we get there, however.

Sunny Bindra’s new book, ‘The Peculiar Kenyan’ is now on sale

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Posted: December 10, 2011, 5:03 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: December 5, 2011, 10:01 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: December 3, 2011, 4:58 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: November 27, 2011, 4:38 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: November 27, 2011, 9:23 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: November 21, 2011, 10:28 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: November 19, 2011, 5:25 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: November 14, 2011, 2:59 pm by Sunny Bindra

Posted: November 12, 2011, 5:23 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: November 7, 2011, 10:29 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: November 5, 2011, 5:24 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: October 31, 2011, 1:11 pm by Sunny Bindra

Posted: October 30, 2011, 10:40 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: October 25, 2011, 11:57 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: October 24, 2011, 11:29 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: October 22, 2011, 6:26 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: October 17, 2011, 10:23 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: October 16, 2011, 8:54 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: October 10, 2011, 11:06 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: October 9, 2011, 10:22 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: October 3, 2011, 11:25 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: October 2, 2011, 10:15 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: September 26, 2011, 11:44 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: September 25, 2011, 8:40 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: September 19, 2011, 11:04 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: September 18, 2011, 9:39 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: September 12, 2011, 11:42 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: September 10, 2011, 6:35 am by Sunny Bindra

Posted: September 5, 2011, 3:14 pm by Sunny Bindra

Posted: September 4, 2011, 9:25 am by Sunny Bindra