Are you a strategic or wishful thinker?/or why you should guard against visioning!

By Patrick Mayoh There is so much to read nowadays; even more to write about. I am just about to finish a newly released master piece by Richard Rumelt, Havard Doctor and Chair at the Anderson School of Management UCLA, on “Good and Bad Strategy[1]”. The book as the titles suggests initiates managers to the art of successful strategising. Richard Rumelt himself has been dubbed the “Strategy’s strategist” by the Mc Kinsey Quarterly. He has...

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Aurevoir L’artiste: A tribute to Steve Jobs

By Patrick Mayoh On my table next to the laptop sits a copy of Richard Rumelt’s acclaimed Good strategy/bad strategy[1]. The book embarks on a journey to explain readers what a good strategy is and is not. It was just released this year but I can tell it has all the potential of a classics in Business and strategy literature. Ok back to my table! I read the first case study about successful turn-around strategies and unsurprisingly Steve Jobs’ turnaround of Apple is the first case. Ominous! Tributes keep pouring in on my facebook page, I click...

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Crisis management made easy

By Patrick Mayoh Whatever the title suggests to you, a crisis is never easy to resolve, actually mishandling one could prove to be fatal to your team and your career as a manager. Recently read through an article from the Wall Street Journal about handling corporate crisis, and although the tips seem to apply only to senior executives, I reckon they could be useful for any manager or team leader. You will surely go through a crisis, no matter...

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Africa needs many Muhammad Yunuses: The need for social entrepreneurs

By Patrick Mayoh I had an epiphany! It sounds a bit strange to begin my post like this, but this is actually how I felt when I turned the last page of Muhammad Yunuses’ book on “creating a world without poverty: social business and the future of Capitalism”. It was undoubtedly a great summer read and I totally espouse the vision of Muhammad Yunus on a world without poverty and on rethinking capitalism. Before we get into that, let me say a...

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N.O.W saga: four things Businesses should never fail to learn about customers

By Patrick Mayoh I have had to take a break from writing and I was thinking about posting again from August. But then everyone is talking about what I call the News of the World saga. To the point that one of my friends actually suggested I should write a post about this. Once I studied Journalism and needless to say from an ethical point of view that the hacking scandal is indeed well...a scandal. It really never got my attention to be honest....

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Time to create your blue ocean: a quick guide to strategic rethinking

By Patrick Mayoh It has been a quite while, I am fully aware of it. I recently went on a shopping spree on my best market place (Amazon) to order books with big hypes in the business community. One of those is “Blue ocean Strategy » of INSEAD BUSINESS SCHOOL’s professors W.Chan Ki and Renee Mauborgne. The book was so applauded that the two authors were duly rewarded with an academic unit within the prestigious business school bearing of course...

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Africa Agriculture’s potential-enough is enough (PART 2)

By Patrick Mayoh Frankly, I was delighted to have so many feedbacks on PART 1 of this post. And I am humbled by the many remarks and criticisms I received from this article. Some feedbacks came as very challenging questions that required very deep and tough answers[1]. Having said that, I would equally like to talk about a video link a friend sent me on Facebook. This was a documentary (je mange donc je suis[2] is the title) about the difficulties...

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