People of Groupon,
After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding – I was fired today. If you’re wondering why… you haven’t been paying attention. From controversial metrics in our S1 to our material weakness to two quarters of missing our own expectations and a stock price that’s hovering around one quarter of our listing price, the events of the last year and a half speak for themselves. As CEO, I am accountable.
You are doing amazing things at Groupon, and you deserve the outside world to give you a second chance. I’m getting in the way of that. A fresh CEO earns you that chance. The board is aligned behind the strategy we’ve shared over the last few months, and I’ve never seen you working together more effectively as a global company – it’s time to give Groupon a relief valve from the public noise.
For those who are concerned about me, please don’t be – I love Groupon, and I’m terribly proud of what we’ve created. I’m OK with having failed at this part of the journey.
If there’s one piece of wisdom that this simple pilgrim would like to impart upon you: have the courage to start with the customer. My biggest regrets are the moments that I let a lack of data override my intuition on what’s best for our customers. This leadership change gives you some breathing room to break bad habits and deliver sustainable customer happiness – don’t waste the opportunity!
I will miss you terribly.
Love,
Andrew

Above is part of the farewell message sent by 32-year-old Andrew Mason, the founder and CEO of Groupon, an Internet based company providing daily deals to consumers on a wide range of products. Andrew founded the company in November 2008 with reported annual revenue of US $800 million by 2010 catching the attention of the Google team which posed a $6 billion acquisition bid for the business in November 2010 that was eventually turned down. Yahoo! Was also rumored to have offered a $3 billion acquisition bid in October 2010.

Andrew Mason’s story cannot fit in this page alone, but it is worthwhile to evaluate his farewell letter to his employees after being fired by his board. First off, there is no latent bitterness or anger towards the board that fired him from the company he created. If anything, he reminds staff that the board is aligned to the company’s strategy which management put together. In saying this, he clearly demonstrates that the board’s decision to fire him was attributable to failure of the company’s financial performance rather than failure of strategy implementation.

Andrew demonstrated maturity and accountability when he reduced his annual salary to $756.72 in 2010 from $180,000 just before the company IPO in 2011. As many private turned public companies will attest, the level of noise surrounding financial performance goes several decibels higher as the number of shareholders increase. It thus becomes tougher for a CEO to explain away missed targets that may be less than 1% on average, but to which the analyst sharks take strong views. According to media, in early November 2012 Groupon reported that they had missed their third quarter revenue estimates, posting revenue of $586.6 million against estimates of $591 million or 0.74% gap in projected earnings. This apparently caused Groupon’s stocks to fall during the trading day and the company is reported to have lost 80% of its value since its 2011 IPO.

Many entrepreneurs shy away from public listing. Having analysts tear apart your performance based on achievement of short term quarterly results rather than taking a long term view on sustainability of the business model, customer loyalty and growth as well as potential for future innovative products and services is not for the faint hearted CEO. While we may never know what happened in the Groupon Board room that warranted the CEO’s firing, his farewell letter demonstrates that he took it on the chin with much dignity and concern for the staff who would remain to finish building his dream. He recognizes that by stepping down he would ease the undue attention and pressure being laid to bear on the company, calling it a “relief valve from the public noise”. He also demonstrated uncharacteristic humility by acknowledging that a change in leadership would give the company room to break bad habits. I have never seen a CEO who publicly acknowledges that perhaps he is the source of a bad company culture. It is alien…it is almost CRIMINAL to admit you are the source of a problem.

I can guarantee one thing: you won’t find CEO’s borrowing a leaf from this young chap. His message, which starts with a humorous beginning and ends with a humble acceptance of his fate, will be attributed by some to his youth and lack of experience on how CEO’s take the fall. On December 18, 2012, Herb Greenberg of the television network CNBC, named Mason as the “Worst CEO of the Year”. Greenberg wrote, in part, “Mason’s goofball antics, which can come off more like a big kid than company leader, almost make a mockery of corporate leadership – especially for a company with a market value of more than $3 billion. It would be excusable, even endearing, if the company were doing well but it’s not. Sales growth is through the floor…”

Goofball antics or not, the Gen Y and Gen Z employees who probably make the bulk of his employee cadre, will probably relate more to his message than the middle aged analysts who think that all companies need to be managed by traditional stiff upper lipped executives who demonstrate “corporate leadership”.

By the way, journalists estimate that Mason will be paid the princely sum of $378.36 – six month’s salary – based on his employment agreement. What an end to an illustrious career!

[email protected]
Twitter: @carolmusyoka

Marissa Mayer, the much talked about new CEO of Yahoo!, is in the press again. This time it is not about going back to work within two weeks of having given birth to her son in October 2012 (working mothers went to town on Marissa’s decision on receiving this news!). It’s all about removing a policy that has become synonymous with working in the technology field which is working from home. Last month she sent an internal memo to staff stating that employees who regularly work from home must now come into the office or quit. Well, now everyone went to town on Marissa’s decision including Richard Branson who wrote a post titled “Give People The Freedom of Where To Work”. In his view, Marissa’s decision was a “backward step in an age when remote working is easier and more effective than ever.”

This is a rather surprising statement coming from someone as successful as Branson. He of all people would know the difficulty of instituting a culture change in an organization that is assailed by the twin misfortunes of dwindling sales and diminishing innovation. One cannot rally one’s troops to a cause via text message, email or Skype (unless of course one is in Kamiti Prison regularly planning kidnappings, extortion and all manner of vices that have gone electronic!)

In July last year, I wrote about the exciting appointment of Marissa to the CEO of Yahoo role. Marissa was a vice president and the first female engineer at Google credited with leading the development of Gmail, Google Maps and the Google search engine. Business Insider reported that the Yahoo board hired her for three reasons: Her product focus and focus on the user experience, secondly: her mentoring talent – Marissa created a program at Google to train product managers on executive leadership which saw a number of those employees leave to head up other internet companies and, thirdly: the board believed that she would be able to recruit very well and re-stock Yahoo with talent. All this because Yahoo was dancing on the precipice of irrelevance in a very dynamic technology industry.

First off, it is incredibly difficult to create a culture change virtually. Institutional culture is formed from behaviours that arise from the human being’s social nature. How those humans socialize in an organization – be it formally, informally, dysfunctionally or marvelously – will form the basis of the organization’s culture. A good example would be Organization X where the managers would never interact with subordinates other than in their offices where subordinates would regularly be “summoned” for a royal dressing down. When a new senior manager tried to introduce a common area for staff to have morning coffee and lunch, the policy was met with stiff resistance from the managers who felt that fraternizing with the subordinates would demystify their demi-god status and equalize them in a manner that was quite distasteful. Assuming that the same managers and subordinates were allowed to work from home, the whole issue of “hallowed offices” would never arise, dressing down sessions would occur in the privacy of a Skype conference call and there would simply be no physical corridors of power within which managers would swagger. That is the positive part of a bad culture being dissipated through remote working. The flip side of this example is that if a new culture of innovation was being introduced, the opportunities for bumping into each other on a corridor or shooting the breeze over lunch in the office canteen while randomly exchanging ideas would not exist. And this is primarily why Marissa’s memo said: “Being in Yahoo isn’t just about your day-to-day job, it is about the interactions and experiences that are only possible in our offices.”
Listen, I’m all about giving staff the opportunity to find a flexible way to work that is convenient to both the employer and the employee. Remote working reduces the physical amount of space that an organization has to provide in order to get its mandate done while increasing staff productivity for those who find that they are at their best outside of the 8 a.m. -5 p.m. constrictive time slots.

As Branson says, if you provide the right technology to keep in touch, maintain regular communication and get the right balance between remote and office working, people will be motivated to work responsibly, quickly and with high quality. But Branson is not the CEO of a company in deep trouble. He’s not the commanding officer of an army unit that is in six different locations and needs to go to battle tomorrow across the river in front of him.

Marissa is not trying to take away work privileges. She is trying to rally the troops together, get the talent in one room singing off the same hymn sheet and building much needed momentum on a train with wagons on different tracks. Proponents against remote working will rub their hands in glee at the precedent that is being set here, “You see, Yahoo tried it and failed, so why should we?”

It would be useful to remember the context within which Yahoo is making this extremely painful decision which is very likely to cost them good employees. They must bring the best brains together under one roof largely to jump start the innovation that is required to rescue the company. This will be a critical leadership test for Marissa, as the board that hired her for her ability to attract and retain talent will not take the exit of talented employees lightly. This will also be a critical test of confidence for the board. Will they stand behind her decision that, on the face of it, will cause significant upheaval in a struggling company? Only time will tell and in the technology field, a year is a lifetime.

[email protected]
Twitter: @carolmusyoka

Sometime last year, I was sitting at a coffee shop in JKIA waiting for my flight to Dar es Salaam. Working on my Dar assignment in typical last minute fashion, I had my laptop on the table open in front of me as the waitress brought my steaming hot cappuccino. Call it fate, call it a bad case of slippery fingers or all of the above, I lifted the coffee cup and it slipped pouring all of its hot contents across my shirt, my jeans and –horror of horrors – my laptop. I let out a very unholy howl that pretty much caught the attention of everyone in the café. But my angst was not coming from my coffee flavored seared skin, but from the fact that my laptop with all my work and presentations had mocha colored stains snaking across its entire surface. While the waitress quickly tried to sponge me dry, I held the laptop upside down in the air trying to feverishly shake off the liquid contents and hyperventilating at the potential disaster in the making.

A tourist who was seated in the next table quickly pulled out some paper towels from her bag and began toweling off my machine (why she would be carrying a whole ream of paper towels in her bag still beats me to this day) as she completely understood where my distress was coming from. Anyway ten frenzied minutes later –with a semi-amused coffee shop clientele openly staring at the fact that my clothes were now completely stuck to my body and I seemed to care nothing about how I looked – I sat down and with much trepidation tapped on the keyboard. It was functioning…somehow. I seemed to have lost the use of the letter “t”, the number “5” and a few other punctuation marks. I shut down the laptop and for those who know the fruit related brand, you realize that it does not lend itself to jua kali interventions such as opening the back so that one can remove the battery. Steve Jobs never intended for untrained hands to muck about with his products. I then resorted to Twitter and sent out a heartfelt plea for anyone who might know the brand’s dealer outlet in Dar. The responses were swift and extremely helpful and by the time I landed in Tanzania two hours later, I had been given the number of and spoken to an outlet manager who happily gave my airport cab driver directions to the service centre located within a quiet suburb of Dar es Salaam where I breathlessly arrived ten minutes before closing time.

I stood at the unmanned reception for five tortously long minutes, dry heaving in a state of catatonic panic, and waited for anyone to catch my eye as I was well aware that at 4:55 p.m. I was very likely to receive the response “Come tomorrow” which was not an option as my assignment started at 8 a.m. the following day. Eventually a stocky, bearded fellow finally caught my eye and proceeded to assist. The interesting fact that caught my attention is that the technician –turned out that stocky beard guy was the main techie at the centre – never uttered more than ten words and five grunts to me the entire time that I nervously peered over his shoulder making inane conversation on the viscosity of cappuccino and is laptop penetrative capacity.

Following a heart wrenching diagnostic test which included opening screws tinier than a baby’s thumbnail and a surgical post mortem of its key body parts, the computer was given the thumbs up for temporary use as I stood by shuffling from foot to foot awaiting the verdict. Now if I was asked to rate the customer service at the centre, I would most likely have scored it a low 3 out of 10 largely due to the fact that the reception was unmanned, the technician was unfriendly and it was only my forthright attention seeking that got me served in the first place. But that would be completely unfair on the service centre. After spending at least half an hour on my computer (and successfully ignoring my non-techie attempts at computer speak) the technician dried out the battery and meticulously ensured that I could use the computer for a short while before returning to Nairobi where I would get the ultimate solution which ended up being a whole keyboard replacement. He then charged me the sum total of…zero.

I was gob-smacked. I at least expected to be charged some labor costs. I was willing to give up all the contents of my handbag for that service and he didn’t charge me an iota. My score after that experience was a high 9 out of 10 for no other reason than the fact that at the end of the day, it wasn’t a smile or a reassuring pat on the back that I needed to get my laptop fixed. It was a professional diagnosis and quick problem resolution that would ensure that I was able to undertake my assignment on time. It wasn’t served on a silver platter with a cherry on top, but it was served gratis and that converted me into an unexpectedly satisfied customer.

I have now redefined what customer satisfaction means to me. It is not the bells and whistles that accompany a fawning employee bending over backward to make me comfortable. Au contraire. When the chips are down, talk less, act more and exceed the customer’s expectations. Oh, and by the way, I have also sworn off making small talk to computer techies. They really couldn’t care less what I think about the price of tea in China and are much happier working in megabytes of silence.

[email protected]
Twitter: @carolmusyoka

A CEO’s Christmas wish list as read out at the Annual Christmas Staff Party

I hate Christmas. I abhor the annoying carol singing and fake Christmas decorations stuck on shop windows. I loathe the ubiquitous Christmas tree that HR insists we must put in the office lobby. Most importantly I absolutely detest the annual staff Christmas party because I know that everyone can’t wait for me to leave so that the real partying can begin. I hope that chap in finance can handle his alcohol better this year than he did last year. If you insist on drinking liquor that you can’t pronounce just because the company is paying for it, at least make sure your body can withstand the onslaught.

Anyway, this is what I wish all the staff would give me for Christmas this year:

1. A deeper understanding of primary school mathematics: I’m sick and tired of explaining why we can’t afford to give salary raises. While Joe Blow might think that an incremental Kshs 5,000/- per month on his salary will not hurt the company, the actual impact is Kes 60,000 per annum and there is are least 100 other members of staff at Joe Blow’s job grade. Total impact on that job grade is Kes 6 million. Now translate that into ten other job grades and suddenly basic mathematics starts to form geometric equations.
2. A broader view of the organization: I’m sick and tired of inter departmental fighting. The only thing that gets hurt are our customers who wait (im)patiently by the sidelines as we try to figure out who to blame for yet another operational botch up. Why can’t we all just get along? Right, I know. It’s because we are all trying to look good at the expense of our colleagues: Peter pours crap over John’s head, makes him look bad, then Peter gets to look better. You all need to understand that the more crap you pour over each other’s heads, the more crap starts to fill the organization and soon the organization starts to look, smell and feel like…..CRAP!! I personally don’t care who is to blame as long as we sort out the customer in a minimum of 12 hours. That is who we are here to serve, the customer and not our own self inflated pathetic little egos.
3. More Work, More Play: Listen, I get it. I get the fact that many of you are young and you work to live. My generation lives to work. Yup! That’s how we were brought up. But I’ve listened to my personal coach who tells me that I am dealing with a different generation that has a different value system. So from next year I will be implementing an output-based work ethic. You will be judged by the work you produce and not by the number of hours you spend sitting at your desk. So if you want to shoot the breeze for four hours surfing on the internet on your phone, no problem. As long as the work that has been allocated to you gets done within the timeframe set and the customer is not impacted, I will not hold it against you if you come to work at 10:00 a.m. and leave at 4:00 p.m. If you want to work in you pyjamas from the comfort of your house go ahead. Follow Nike and “Just Do It!” This does not apply to the folks at the 24-hour Customer Service Centre nor to the sales desk teams who service customers during our official opening hours. I however caution that if you do not get your work delivered on time, follow Johnny Walker and keep on walking out of the door.
4. Innovate or die: Good people: I went up the mountain and had a meeting with God. I came down the mountain carrying two tablets with Ten Commandments that He revealed to me: (i) Innovate or Die (ii) Innovate or Die (iii) Innovate or Die (iv) Innovate or Die. I guess you can figure out what the remaining six commandments were. Our products are boring, bland and banal. We are doing the same thing that we have done since this company was incorporated thirty years ago. Our competitors are doing the same thing since this industry was established forty years ago. No one dares to be different; no one wants to buck the trend. Something deep within the annals of my gut (it must be the pure cold air from God’s mountain) tells me that someone somewhere will come with a product that will be a game changer and will send us into an unremarkable oblivion. Our customers are aging and we need to tap into the youthful future segment that spends its eyeball time and generates great satisfaction while in front of a screen. I haven’t the foggiest idea how we are going to do this, but I know one or three or ten of you have some bright ideas that have probably been shot down before by those boring management seniors who report into me. I want to hear your ideas however outlandish they may seem to be. I will give anyone a half-day off every week if that half-day can be shown to generate product innovation ideas that will change the face of this company. My personal coach told me to leave my door open and put tape over my personal assistant’s mouth to prevent her blocking staff who want to see me (her husband will probably thank me for the tape part, I foresee). Let’s get this innovation show on the road.

I’m not much of a speechwriter so I’ll end this now and ask that you join me and sing:

Jingle Bells Jingle Bells
The kids all yell and scream
To us it sounds like anarchy
But to them it’s harmony-HEY!

Jingle Bells Jingle Bells
The children tipped the tree
Antique ornaments smashed to bits
The kids each say “not me”!

[email protected]
Twitter: @carolmusyoka
The writer will be taking a well-deserved Christmas break until the New Year. Happy holidays!

When a mad man walks naked, it is his kinsmen who feel shame, not himself – Ibo Proverb

Picture this: you are rushing for a job interview with a company that has head hunted you. You’ve worn your best suit and shoes and are pretty confident. As you enter the elevator, you find a man standing inside.

The man gazes hard at you and says,

“your suit looks cheap, that sheepskin rug on your head needs a hair cut and your shoes could do with a decent brushing.” He then steps out of the elevator two floors below yours, turns back and says, “Oh and you have spinach in your teeth.”

Will you walk out of that lift with confidence and swagger? Will you head straight for the interview meeting or will you make a beeline for the rest rooms to give yourself a final head to toe (via teeth) check? Naturally, your confidence will have been given a Greek salad toss. This is what bad managers do to their employees; they constantly chip away at employee confidence, keeping the team in a constant state of flux as the mad man walks naked amongst them.

It is usually the good performers who end up leaving. Bad performers, well, they have nowhere to go and can’t be bothered to put themselves through the ignominy of their poor track record being hung out to dry in an interview process with a potential employer. Bad performers are also pretty unambitious, preferring to hunker down and lie low like the proverbial envelope, hoping that no one will ever uncover the stone under which they slither.

It takes an average leader to recognize that there is something wrong in the organization when good people start to leave. It takes a confident leader to admit that there is something wrong with his or her organization and not something wrong with the departing employees. It takes an authentic leader to admit that the ultimate responsibility for all that is wrong with the organization is entirely up to him: that the buck stops at his carpeted office and rosewood desk. The authentic leader is critical of managers who treat their subordinates in turn badly. The authentic leader views such behavior as a reflection of his own behavior and shudders at the thought that employees can work for an abusive supervisor under his watch.

Take the example of *Linda. Linda is a department head with over a hundred employees in her team. She reports directly to the CEO and knows how to talk the talk so that in his eyes she can do no wrong. Linda’s team hates her. The Human Resources manager became concerned at the high turnover of good employees in her team and coaxed Linda to have a team building event to “break the ice,” “foster amicable relations” and all that mumbo-jumbo that a good human resource intervention entails. Linda arrived an hour late for the session and found the car park at the team building venue full. She proceeded to call one of the employees seated inside the building barking at how disorganized they were not to have reserved a parking for her. The session was then interrupted as some team members went into a tizzy deciding whose car should be moved to give Linda her “authorized space”. Once the session – which had begun despite Linda’s absence – resumed, there was a loud throat clearing noise from the side followed by a sanctimonious “ahem” from very pursed lips. “Don’t you know that it is a career limiting move not to introduce me,” she stage-whispered to one of the team members, who scrambled to the front to ask the facilitator to allow her to introduce Linda – and this is priceless – to her own team members! Less than an hour later, Linda quietly slipped out to go home. The team building was just “not her scene” leaving the rest of the team bitter, angry and completely disillusioned.

You can’t make this stuff up. This is a true story. A brand is defined as an identifiable entity that makes specific promises of value. Linda works in an organization with a very strong external corporate brand. An organization that spends millions to ensure you the consumers are seduced into the brand promise. But you never need to know what the internal brand is. In fact, in your view as the consumer, you are supremely indifferent to the internal brand promise as it will never affect you. Well you are wrong. An internal brand is the set of strategic processes that align and empower employees to deliver the appropriate customer experience in a consistent fashion. In simple words, internal branding is all about how employees are engaged, getting them to buy into as well as live, breath and edify the external brand to deliver an excellent customer experience. But if employees are suffering under the yoke of a bad line manager, hate coming to work and are looking out for any and every opportunity to escape to another organization you can be assured that the brand promise is the last thing they think about. The external brand is bound to suffer as it is inextricably linked to the internal brand. In Linda’s case, her CEO thinks she’s the bee’s knees and has turned a blind eye to her team’s discontent and talent attrition. It is only a matter of time before the external brand starts to feel the impact of the CEO’s indifference. An average leader will fail to connect the dots that a bad manager leads to erosion of the internal brand, leading then to good employee attrition which in turn leads to external brand deterioration. An authentic leader, like the Ibo villagers, knows that the bad supervisor is like a mad man walking naked, feels the shame and tries to cover that nakedness immediately with remedial action. How many naked mad men are walking in your organization today? Only authentic leaders will recognize and eliminate them.

[email protected] Twitter:@carolmusyoka

Jack went to sit for his KCPE science exam. When he got home his mother asked him how the exam was. “The questions were very easy mum,” he began, “but the answers were very hard.”

The government has published the Basic Education Bill, 2012 which has met with the usual hue and cry from all corners of the country due to failure to include stakeholders in its drafting. One can shrug one’s shoulders and say that it has nothing to do with one, but I reckon that every single parent, student and potential employer needs to know what the future portends for the next generation of your progeny or employees. First off, let’s call a spade a spade. Our education system has generated a culture of cutthroat advancement embedded in a sieving system that separates wheat (primary school kids who go onto high school) from the chaff (those who do not qualify to enter high school after the KCPE exams). That wheat is further sorted into premium grade white flour (those who go onto university) from the bran (those who do not qualify to enter the universities). We have socialized ourselves into a country that celebrates the children that successfully squeeze through these educational sieves and provide no respite or soft landing for those who may have had personal challenges at one particular time of their lives (the exam period), which challenges set the destiny of what society dictates their future will hold.

The result is generations of children whose life depends on two major milestones in their lives – Standard Eight and Form Four – and may the devil be damned if they fail. These are not educational milestones. These are career-limiting millstones around the necks of our children. They create generations of rote learners who do not question what is taught but absorb whatever they are told is necessary to pass. Their careers are therefore pre-designated even before they attain puberty.

So let’s apply strategic thinking here. We are planning to be a middle-income country by 2030 which is in the next eighteen years. We expect to have macro-economic stability necessary for long-term development. This presupposes that unemployment rates are in the region of ten percent and below which enables more income to be generated, more taxes to be raised, greater public spending on infrastructure and population welfare such as health, security and education…..you get my drift. Assuming we continue jumping down each other’s political throats, there’s very little that our political godfathers will do for us to grow the economy in the next eighteen years. We therefore have to think backwards from 2030 and say, what can we do to get our students to contribute positively towards our macro-economic stability goal? We have to get them to be generators of income through corporate (formal employment), entrepreneurship, sporting and artistic channels. Which entrepreneurship channel provides the most low hanging fruit? Technology. Which sporting channel provides the most low hanging fruit with the least barriers to entry? Middle and long distance running. Right. Now that we have that figured out, how do we embed this strategic goal into the present, so that it generates an outcome in eighteen years? By designing our educational policies to produce that result. Enter stage left: the Basic Education Bill 2012. In its introductory pages, Clause 4 states its guiding principles for the provision of basic education. The most critical one for Vision 2030 is Clause 4 g, which states: “encouraging independent and critical thinking; and cultivating skills, disciplines and capacities for reconstruction and development”. Trust me, after this political lot is through with all of us Kenyans, we will be in dire need of reconstruction and development. But that’s besides the point.

The drafters of the bill have created a vision here. That the future generations need to have independent and critical thinking, which will cultivate capacity for reconstruction and development. That reconstruction and development does not happen within the whitewashed, wall-to-wall carpet of corporate Kenya only. It occurs in the sun baked, cracked earth carpets of Turkana, the rolling hills and cool valleys of Iten and the wide savannah grasslands of the Athi Kapiti plains. This is where our students come from. The vast breadth of this country’s population and the future giants are to be found both inside and outside the cities. We have to give them the support base that enables them to become value creators within the limits of their inherent talent base that lies in each and every one of them. We have to create the educational system that enables continuous assessment rather than two do or die examination zones. We have to create the educational system that gets our students to keep asking “Why” and ‘Why not” and the safe space within which to receive comprehensive and reliable answers. We have to create the educational system that rewards students who are well rounded with lots of extra curricular activities on their academic records: athletics, music, cookery and drama for instance which demonstrates creativity and healthy sportsmanship. We have to create the educational system that allows students to believe that falling by the wayside after failing a do-or-die exam zone is not an option, and that using the basic skills that one has learnt should enable the student to enter into an income generating activity based on non-academic skills identified and actively encouraged during the school years.

It’s not too late to do this. If we got into this frame of mind today, the children in primary school today could benefit from a system that enables them to discover their innate talent in running, creating technology, music or art and be self employed but critical contributors to Kenya achieving its strategic middle income country goals. Creative and independent thinking is the easy question. Delivering such thinkers is the not-so-hard answer.

[email protected]
Twitter: @carolmusyoka

Essential “netiquette” skills for the office worker

To: This is the person to whom you want to send your message to. You may want to either inform, update, reveal, abuse or do all of the above in your communication. Be ready to validate any facts stated therein, defend or take cover when the email recipient hits the “Reply” button.

CC: Carbon Copy. A misnomer really, as there is no actual “carbon paper” used electronically. Put a name into this section if you want to inform, update or reveal the same information to other interested parties such as your boss. This section is typically used to cover your backside when you are asked why you did or knew something and didn’t keep anyone else informed.

BCC: Blind Carbon Copy. This is the section used to fix the person so named in the ‘To:” section. Use this section to let the “BCC” person know information that you don’t want the “To” person to know that the “BCC” person knows. It is a critical method of covering both your front and backside and an excellent tool of office guerilla warfare. The reason it is called “blind” is simply because the “To” person will never see it coming when he is blindsided by the “BCC” person.

Subject: This is the headline of your sob story. The more dramatic the headline the more likely that the “To” person will open your email before the 99 other missives waiting in her inbox. Imagine yourself as a political editor in a leading Kenyan daily who has to pick a headline that will ensure the newspaper sells. Use of terms such as “death”, “destruction” or “disaster” are more than likely to yield results.

Filter: An object used to strain or sift the bad stuff from the good stuff. It is also an email tool that your boss uses to move your useless emails straight to the trash bin without ever having read them. It is also the principal reason why you never get a response from him despite your numerous attempts to communicate electronically. Often used by the email savvy office worker who realizes that he can ensure that only emails in which his name is in the “To” section appear in his inbox. This worker has realized that where his name appears in the “CC” or “BCC” section of the email, it is typically a pointless email that doesn’t warrant eyeball time and is more likely a cover your backside strategy in the office political game. See “CC” above for further clarification.

Delete: A wonderful email tool to delete useless messages and move them straight into an electronic trash can. Usually used by your boss if she doesn’t know how to turn on the email filter function. A good place to start looking when you have the nerve to tell your boss that you have sent her numerous emails and she pretends to search for them in her inbox with no success.

Forward: An absolutely critical position in the wonderful game of football. Also an absolutely critical email function for letting others know what kinds of idiotic messages are landing into your inbox. This function, if used positively, can elevate one to the revered position of “office informant” or “resident pastor” where the messages are juicy bits of gossip or spiritual nourishment. This function, if used negatively, can land one in amazing hot water accompanied by a warning letter from HR if used to disseminate pornographic or politically volatile messages. One is advised to always let one’s fingers hover over the forward button, count to ten backwards, forwards then backwards again before clicking the same.

Reply: The action of responding to an email in your inbox. An essential function if you want to show that you are responsive, you care and you are on top of your game. Critical button to use if the email is from anyone whose pay grade is higher than yours. The rule of thumb is to always wait at least fifteen minutes before you hit the reply button so that you look like your busy. Anything less than that and you look idle and in need of more work. Anything more than that and you look like you are ignoring it, ensuring that you are entering career limiting territory.

Reply All: The action of responding to an email in your inbox and copying everyone else including the folks in the “CC” section. This button is for losers, idlers and anyone who falls in the general nuisance category. This button needs to be disabled universally as it is subject to gross abuse especially when the content of the message is irrelevant to “all”. Senders of responses such as “OK” or “noted” that are contained in Reply All emails need to be subjected to a public flogging at the office building entrance. Please see “Forward” above about the finger hover rule.

Email signature: A professional way of letting your recipients know how to get in touch with you in case they need to call you or send a package to your physical location. It doesn’t assume that the recipient wants to continue an inane electronic conversation with you, but demonstrates that you are not afraid to take the good fight to a more realistic environment than the cowardly virtual world behind which you hide. You can make yours sexy by putting flashing light bulbs next to your name and save the environment love marks to pretend to the world that your life will be shattered if the recipient prints the message on paper unnecessarily.

Request Read Receipt: An annoying email function used by those annoyingly email savvy colleagues who want to know whether you have opened their annoying email when it lands in your inbox. These cyber stalkers are quick to rush to your desk as soon as they have received the receipts and ask you for feedback without waiting for the 15-minute rule. They are often equal to or slightly below your pay grade and wanton abusers of the “Bcc” function. See “Bcc” above.

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“Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.”
Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and the third President of the United States.

Who keeps you, the leader, honest? Yes, it’s very lonely at the top and all the other sob stories that leaders like to give, but the fact of the matter is that sitting in that carpeted corner office brings with it an inordinate amount of power combined with several flights of fancy real and imagined. Honesty here does not mean integrity. Honesty in this context is the habit of speaking the truth, keeping your word and most importantly keeping it grounded – where “it” means your ego. Honesty means being willing to say “I don’t know” when faced with a question or problem to which you have no answer.

The beauty of having a team around you is that when faced with a difficult question, you can encourage the team to brainstorm the issue until a solution is found. The team gets to feel involved and empowered and you as the leader get to save face as you arrived at a solution that involved everyone. [Please note that if you are so cowardly inclined, were the crap to hit the fan following execution of said solution you can also blame the team for coming up with a useless answer!] I recently observed a CEO of a global multinational bank in Portugal answer that very question: Who keeps you honest?

He didn’t hesitate with his answer. He has three honesty sources: His wife, his executive coach and his team of direct reports. Well, it goes without saying that a good man will have a good wife by his side that brings him down to earth (actually some might say hell) whenever he walks through the hallowed doors of his castle each evening. An executive coach, similarly, is an external confidante who doesn’t have an agenda to take over or fire you from your job. He or she is a great way of getting a professional sounding board that guides the leader through the pitfalls of the leadership obstacle course. The executive coach listens, asks and challenges her client on career choices, business decisions and personal development. The good executive coach keeps their client honest by telling them the truth; the cold, hard truth about biases they many have, weaknesses that they may wallow in or self-images that they may be belabouring under. Enough said: if you haven’t got an executive coach, you should think about getting one and letting your organization pay for it….after all a better leader is for the organization’s own good!

Finally the CEO talked about his direct reports, collectively called EXCO or executive committee. He said that a good EXCO is one that constantly gives you feedback. However they will only give good feedback if a) they are mature b) they have a good relationship with you and c) if you as the leader have created an open culture with no fear. Your EXCO is a reflection of you as a leader. Bad leaders hire bad people. Period. Bad leaders tend to recruit team members who are perceived as non-threatening, less clever than them and with great potential to lick the Bata boots where required. Yes, you will probably argue that they also tick the boxes since a) they will be mature – slightly over fifty years old b) they will have a good (read: boot-licking) relationship with you and c) you will have created the open culture (of boot licking).

You know you have a bad EXCO if they NEVER tell you anything negative about an action you have done or a decision you have made. You know you have a bad EXCO if they nod furiously every time you open your mouth at a meeting, even if it is to yawn. You know you have a bad EXCO when you invite them to watch your son receive his first Holy Communion on a Sunday at 7 a.m. and they all turn up at 6:45 a.m jostling for front row seats. An honest EXCO member would tell you “Boss, I would love to be there but honestly I have great difficulty getting out of bed anytime before noon on a Sunday. Even for you.”

Bad EXCO’s can destroy an organization. They hide bad situations from the leader in an attempt to “shield” her from being the bearer of negative news that would cast them in a bad light. They prevent the leader from making the difficult decisions that need to be made before a situation morphs into crisis proportions. Bad EXCO’s can drag a leader down by not giving him the reality check about the potential outcomes of a decision he is considering to make. All that head bobbing and pasty smiles at meetings are good for the short-term ego but bad for the long-term stability of the organization.

When was the last time your direct report told you that your decision was bad? When was the last time your direct report challenged a directive you made? What was your reaction? Did you curl your hand into a fist and punch his lights out – in your mind? Did you tighten his tie around his thick neck and throttle the very life of him – in your mind? If you have answered yes to any of the reactions, you need to get an executive coach and sign up to anger management classes in that order. We need that voice in the workplace that challenges us within our professional space and allows us to think more holistically about the decisions we make on the people who are impacted the most. That voice that keeps us honest. No, not your spouse’s potential nagging every evening, just that voice at work. If you haven’t strangled it by now, embrace it and get more people in your organization expressing that voice to their managers. It makes a for an honest organization.

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Twitter: @carolmusyoka

I was recently on a conference call with some colleagues in London. Having just returned a few hours before from a week long Asia trip, my toddler daughter was not about to leave my side for any reason. I had chosen to work from home as I was still knackered from the flight and since teleconferences allow you the luxury of participating in pyjamas I took full advantage. I tried as much as possible to muffle her happy gurgling in the background without much success, only to hear my one of my male colleagues CJ on the other side drop his phone after his toddler son had run into his own home office and caused major disruption. There must have been five participants on that teleconference, all of whom laughed off the incident and didn’t hold it against CJ for having his child within the vicinity of a business meeting or for disrupting the call. He later confessed that he had heard my daughter’s noises in the background as well and factored them in as the future generation being present in the here and now of business today.

Now this is by no means a story with a moral at the end of it. If anything it is simply an illustration of the modern father and, more importantly, the concept of physical presence in the office as a prerequisite to career success. CJ is a director in a large multinational firm of consultants and spends a regular amount of his time working from home. His telecommuting work aspect is replicated in many other institutions across the UK. But the key element here is that lack of a physical presence in the office does not in any shape or form dilute his career progression nor does it reflect on his work performance. His organization, like many others has incorporated a result oriented work culture rather than the physical presence culture that so many organizations are celebrating.

A culture of physical presence wrongly or rightly places importance on a person being at their desk pounding away on their computer as a sign of good performance. But a worker whose mind is on his or her sick child, or a maid gone who has gone AWOL will be utterly and completely unproductive for every single minute he or she is made to sit at their desk or face consequences for not tapping up to work. If you have ever taken the time to actually look at what your staff does while seated at their desks you might be surprised to find that in an eight hour work day, actual productivity is just 50% of that excluding a one hour lunch break. The rest of the time is spent shooting the breeze at the water fountain or coffee vending machine, chatting up Tom, Dick and Harry on the phone, trawling the office corridors (with their computers at the desks turned on and papers left in disarray to signify presence) looking for a colleague to catch up on office gossip with or surfing the web on their smart phones (since you – the boss- removed internet access on all office computers except yours).

Now, if you were to give your staff targets to accomplish within a predetermined period, and those staff were not customer facing therefore do not need to be present at your physical place of business, why in heaven’s name would you make it mandatory for them to sit and take up valuable, costly real estate in the name of office space? Yes, yes, I know the argument that team members sharing the same work space build a camaraderie and all that lovey-dovey stuff, but you can build camaraderie with people over the telephone. It’s just a matter of communicating in a not-so-uptight manner over the phone during work discussions. Besides which, there are some instances where organizations simply do away with office space for seniors and convert that space into a hot desk area where tele-commuters can come in to the office at least twice a week to “check-in” or have a work space in case of an office team meeting. Read my typewritten lips: One must not be physically present to get one’s job done.

So who would fall into the potential tele-commuter category? People in accounts, human resources, IT support (if he can log into the system remotely, an IT support guy can give you assistance from sunny Timbuktu), legal and company secretarial as well as procurement. If the role can a) be outsourced or b) is not external customer facing the role holder can tele-commute. Put in service level agreements with regards to turn around times, provide SMART targets, provide reasonable internet and telephone connectivity and there you have it. A leaner work space, a happier workforce and a higher result oriented performance culture. However, don’t get me wrong, tele-commuting is not for everyone and should be given as an option rather than made mandatory. Many people, myself included, need a place to go to every morning that is separate and distinct from the home environment and that does not have the humdrum, suburban existence of maids giving neighborhood gossip across fences and children running between your feet.

Thus the office worker who leaves his suit jacket hanging on the seat and takes off will be encouraged to do more of the same: from the comfort of his house. Manage him by work output and be ready to deal with the consequences for non-performance seeing as you – his boss – have clearly been enabling the lackluster work attitude. Working at home for a few days in the week is refreshing, energizing and a good way to achieve a reasonable work balance. Bums on seats in the office are a good way of wielding power over the serfs in your office fiefdom. Think out of the proverbial box and save the company some office rent.

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Twitter: @carolmusyoka

Last week I left my office for a meeting at the Safari Park Hotel on Thika Highway. Expecting the trip there and back to be an all day affair, I packed my bags [and a cheese sandwich for the trip] and said farewell to all. I was back in an hour flat with an uneaten sandwich beside me. I get it now. I get what they meant about transport infrastructure opening up an economy. It sure opened mine in the following way A) I didn’t have to use as much fuel as I would have done in the past. Those shillings saved were quickly spent on a pair of….ahhh forget it. B) I didn’t have to curse, shake my fist or yell at some insane matatu driver who overlapped me on a non-existent lane missing my fender by inches. The highway is blissfully matatu free…at least of the short distance kind. I therefore saved my positive energy which was spent on….ummm…never mind. C) I had glorious, imaginative, creative and business related thoughts the entire way and back. I contributed in some small way to the Kenyan economy.

Infrastructure: the oil that greases the cogs of development. That makes goods move faster from their point of production to their point of consumption, thus generating cash that is used to purchase more inputs of production for the same to be delivered and consumed faster. Which then gets one wondering out loud as to why the previous Moi regime did little in the form of infrastructure development thereby holding us back in economic growth. Seriously, why? While there’s no point crying over spilt milk, it does beg some consideration that were it not for the stifling, rudimentary political and economic space that our former President put us, we would not be having the human capital flight that happened in the eighties and nineties that has led to diaspora remittances of just about $100 million a month as at May 2012 and climbing. Hence, by creating a negative socio-political climate, the former regime has ended up –inadvertently- creating a positive macroeconomic stabilizer in the form of steady foreign currency remittances. The Central Bank data on remittances indicates that on average 50% of the flows originate in North America, about 28% from Europe and the balance 22% from the rest of the world (read Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa).
Here’s my absolutely pedestrian analysis of Diaspora demographics. Your North American flows are derived from Kenyans who originally went to North America on student visas, completed their studies (or maybe not) and integrated themselves into the working economy, generating positive revenues that allow free cash flow to be remitted back to relatives in Kenya every month. Your European flows consist of Kenyans who took off to the “motherland” the United Kingdom and sprinkling dispersed into its Western European neighbours looking for greener working pastures. Again they integrated themselves into the working economy, some so deep as to form churches that created miracle babies. A recent visit to the United Kingdom left me gob-smacked at the naïveté that continues to afflict a chosen few. Upon seeing my passport identification, the cashier at a retail store on Oxford Street identified herself as a Ugandan. She politely asked about how things were “back home in East Africa.” Then I made a disastrous mistake: I asked her how she liked being in the United Kingdom. I might as well have gone bungee jumping at the Victoria Falls with a rubber band. The lady proceeded to tell me how she was a member of the “miracle baby church” and even though I was a Kenyan, she was going to tell me off anyway. “You Kenyans have punished our leader and his wife, and that is why God cursed you and sent post election violence your way, the devastating drought last year and the floods this year.” I couldn’t do anything; I was frozen to the spot in disbelief at the gall of the woman gall plus she was still holding my passport so I couldn’t make the quick escape that this bizarre scenario warranted.

Well, Uganda is definitely the richer for having such talent working in the diaspora and not at home. When I finally managed to galvanize myself into action, I grabbed my passport and my retail therapy forthwith, and fled from the shop like a bat out of hell. When the receptionist at my hotel later that evening mentioned to me that she was Ugandan, I clammed up and didn’t offer any chitchat thereafter. But that’s Europe for you, it offers great respite to those that may not be able to get jobs at home in East Africa, and creates the enabling environment for creative businesses, sorry miracle churches, that generate revenue that trickles back home in the form of remittances. Back to the pedestrian analysis of diaspora demographics: the rest of the world can safely be assumed to have a large percentage based in the Middle East, and the East Africa Community states. Forget the horrific stories of slave drivers in Saudi Arabia, the Middle East is host to many Kenyans in the retail and hospitality industries. From the airport coffee shops to the hotel lobbies in Dubai or Qatar,
Kenyans stand out amongst their imported colleagues with their relatively good English, polite smiles and genuine warmth. To be fair to the Moi regime, the rest of the world diaspora demographics have increased exponentially over the last ten years since the 500,000 jobs a year promise vanished with Anglo leasing speed, and the respective [Kenyan talent recipient] businesses and economies grew faster than their populations could service. So bless the rest of the world and its economic growth. Bless North America for educating our children and keeping them thereafter in productive jobs. Bless Europe and our colonial master the United Kingdom for absorbing greener pasture seekers. We are poorer for the able bodied productive bodies but the richer for the money they send back.

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Twitter: @carolmusyoka

Writing a résumé is an often unpleasant, head scratching tactical exercise as one tries to capture one’s educational and professional achievements in two to three pages. I found some actual excerpts from résumés that were submitted to employers and pulled out what I believe are the top ten résumé bloopers:
Number 10: Note: Please don’t misconstrue my 14 jobs as ‘job-hopping.’ I have never quit a job. Number 9: The Company made me a scapegoat, just like my three previous employers. Number 8: I am extremely loyal to my present firm, so please don’t let them know of my immediate availability. Number 7: My goal is to be meteorologist. But since I possess no training in Meteorology, I suppose I should try stock brokerage. Number 6: Reason for leaving last job: They insisted that all employees get to work by 8:45 every morning. Could not work under those conditions. Number 5: Wholly responsible for two failed financial institutions. Number 4: Terminated after saying, ‘It would be a blessing to be fired’. Number 3: References: None. I’ve left a path of destruction behind me. Number 2: It’s best for employers that I not work with people. And the Number 1 résumé blooper: Marital status: Often. Children: various.

Look, let’s call a spade a spade. We all have our black and white Times New Roman Font 12 single-spaced living eulogies saved on our respective desk/lap tops and ready to be printed or emailed at the slightest whiff of upward career mobility. [If you don’t have your current résumé saved on your computer and updated at least once every 6 months, you need to get with the program] While undertaking my master’s degree, the university had a special session with the students to go through what an ideal resume should look like. The rule of thumb then was that a resume should not exceed one page as HR managers rarely have time to get to the second page if they are already bored by the first. The focus was on making your resume short, punchy and informative all at one go. Bless the Americans with their less-is-more minimalist mentality. Résumés that went beyond the one page rule were reserved for academics that had to put in their publications as par for the course. Being a non-academic with more than one page was, well, aspiring to a level beyond one’s reasonably educated capacity.

So you can imagine my sheer delight when someone sent me an email with a link to the “14 coolest résumés ever” from the Business Insider website. People from the design and internet industries creatively put their education and professional background in one page that is both an illusionary and informative snapshot of their achievements. The result is that it grabs the attention of the recipients and gets them through the door for a first interview. Some of the creative writers have gotten jobs more senior than what they were pitching for largely due to what interviewers see as potential for thinking out of the box.

Now did this make me go back to the drawing board for my own résumé? Hardly. This is because I’m pretty sure that if I sent one of those creative to a potential employer here it would most likely be met with an “Eh?” emitted by a very puzzled employer. But it did get me thinking about why our Kenyan résumés are staid, boring and completely unreflective of the vibrancy, creativity and energetic capacity of job seekers. The most daring of résumés that I have ever seen had a bit of color where the job seeker’s name was, while the rest of the print was in black type face and went on and on into four pages of unnecessary noise. Truth be told, your work experience need not be broken down into each sordid detail of your thoroughly mundane workday. But our recruitment culture has defined this space. Our recruiters would rather sift through pages and pages of work history to see if the candidates pass muster warranting to be included in the short list. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that someone in the very stiff financial services or insurance industry should put all manner of graphic design on their résumé to capture the attention of an employer. But there should be a level of creativity permitted that would not raise eyebrows and get that document tossed into the nearest garbage can as being “psycho-nonsense”. If the candidate’s information is well articulated, cogent and precise, it merits further investigation through an interview. Something tells me, however, that we will remain in the black font 12 single spaced categories for years to come. Enough said.

In other completely unrelated news, Yahoo has just announced that it has appointed 37 year old Marissa Mayer to be their new CEO. Marissa was a vice president, the company’s 20th employee and the first female engineer at Google credited with leading the development of Gmail, Google Maps and the Google search engine. Business Insider reports that the Yahoo board hired her for three reasons: Her product focus and focus on the user experience, secondly: her mentoring talent – Marissa created a program at Google to train product managers on executive leadership which has seen a number of those employees leave to head up other internet companies and, thirdly: the board believes that she will be able to recruit very well and re-stock Yahoo with talent. How is that for a recruitment policy: product and employee focus. Not numbers, numbers, numbers as is wont with many corporates today. Good products and great employees will produce those numbers that boards are seeking. Not the other way around. Sadly, that is not obvious to everyone. By the way, Yahoo’s last full time CEO, Scott Thompson, was apparently fired after it was revealed that he had lied about his credentials earlier in his career. If you’re going to have a creative résumé, let it be the graphics and not the content that are a figment of your imagination.

[email protected]
Twitter:@carolmusyoka

“In dealing with a man who thinks you are a fool, it is good sometimes to remind him that you know what he knows but have chosen to appear foolish for the sake of peace.” Ibo Proverb
Imagine walking into a luxury car showroom today, looking at the various models on display, test driving one or two, and then end up walking out of the showroom with a mortgage application duly filled and submitted for your dream home instead. Then imagine walking into your supermarket to pick up some grocery items for your house, and then end up walking out of the supermarket with a personal loan tucked into your wallet. BMW Finance in South Africa, the financial services arm of the luxury German car manufacturer, is currently offering home loans at lower costs and with better service than any of South Africa’s big four lenders – Nedbank, ABSA, FNB and Standard Bank – according to Finweek magazine’s May 2012 edition. An investigation by the magazine found that BMW Finance provided better service, a more competitive interest rate and lower administrative costs than any of South Africa’s big four banks.
British supermarket giant Tesco entered into a joint venture with Royal Bank of Scotland in 1997 named Tesco Personal Finance. It was renamed Tesco Bank when the supermarket bought out the 50% RBS stake for a reported £950 million in 2008. What is the key synergy proposition for Tesco? Tesco is able to use its large customer base to cross sell financial services products. The bank has more than 6 million customer accounts across all products with double-digit growth in savings, loans and credit cards. Tesco said it was now the seventh largest credit card issuer in Britain.
What do BMW and Tesco have in common? They are NOT traditional financial institutions. They do not have the strictures that come with the near paralyzing management attitude of “that’s the way things are done around here.” In Tesco’s case (which has also been replicated by the UK food giant Sainsbury’s and the high street retailer Marks and Spencer) they have recognized that they have an enviable primary business requirement: customer footfall. They then strategically take a business decision to deepen the share of wallet of that customer footfall because for as long as that customer is shopping inside their retail outlets, the retailer has another enviable business requirement: a captive marketing audience. Leveraging on the retail outlets as a distribution network, the supermarkets have been able to grow their customer bases primarily through cheaper in store advertising as well as customer loyalty linkages through bonus points. Tesco, for instance, allows customers to accumulate Tesco Clubcard points when they purchase finance products. This strategy is highly effective because it can be combined with in store offers which results in customers spending higher amounts of money, often on non-food items in order to increase sales across all product lines thus causing sustainable yet competitive growth.
In BMW Finance’s case, it didn’t require a rocket scientist to understand their customer demographic. The customer that would walk into a BMW showroom to purchase a luxury automobile using financing would most likely be able to afford a mortgage on the same cash flows (read paycheck) that were being used to seek car financing. The credit application and review process was an already existing internal operation and the only procedural changes required would be to incorporate encumbrance of property and a credible valuation process of the same. Two extremely disparate industries (automobile and supermarket) with one common finding: It doesn’t take a genius to provide loans at a lower cost of production and with better service than the traditional banking industry. Neither does it take a genius to realize the fluidity of the 21st century consumer looking for instant gratification and appreciation for being perceived as a relationship rather than a transaction.
The BMWs and Tescos in our Kenyan space are in the form of the mobile telephone operators. They are the likely future of banking. They provide a virtual space within which to deposit and transfer money and in the case of recent innovation, to even borrow money. As customer needs evolve it is only a matter of time before the evolution becomes one of offering a return on the virtual deposit. That return, which some might call interest, does not necessarily have to be paid in cash, it can be paid in additional air time which for all intents and purposes is treated as currency in this part of the world. It can be a “reward” for keeping your virtual cash intact for certain predetermined periods of time. Your intact cash can then be used to lend to other mobile customers. Of course the traditional bankers will take umbrage. Which regulator in their right mind will allow this? Two things need to be kept within their tunnel vision: First, innovation always runs way ahead of regulation (and bankers hide behind the same regulation where it suits them). Second, the bigger the banks grow, the further away they distance themselves from the very customers that led to that growth in the form of poor service and complete lack of customer value propositions. The regulator’s core mandate is twofold; to protect customer deposits while ensuring that there is financial sector deepening with more access to financial services to the wider citizenry. Regulation therefore will be more focused on how to ring-fence deposit taking risks rather than how to prevent a lower cost access to funds from taking root in an emerging and innovative market like ours.
The traditional financial industry is under a slow but steady siege from the least likely of non-traditional competitors. Competitors that have chosen to appear foolish for the sake of peace, as they won’t be regarded as a threat otherwise. The banking industry has to innovate, and innovate quickly, as the Ibo have a lovely proverb that concludes: “A disease that has never been seen before cannot be cured with every-day herbs.”
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Twitter:@carolmusyoka

Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers

IT Helpdesk: “I need you to right-click on the Open Desktop.” Customer : “Ok.” IT Helpdesk : “Did you get a pop-up menu?”
Customer : “No.” IT Helpdesk: “Ok. Right click again. Do you see a pop-up menu?” Customer : “No.” IT Helpdesk : “Ok, sir. Can you tell me what you have done up until this point?” Customer: “Sure, you told me to write ‘click’ and I wrote ‘click’.”

Customer service is one of the hardest institutional objectives to get right. And customer service, contrary to popular not-for-profit belief is not limited to for-profit companies. It touches on every single organization that is doing any business or providing any service be it in the private or public sector. A friend of mine sent me a very interesting article from the July-August 2010 edition of the Harvard Business Review. The article, “Stop Trying To Delight Your Customers”, turns the whole customer service approach on its head and instead challenges the age old precept that delighted customers remain loyal customers. The article discusses the results of a study using 75,000 people who had interacted over the telephone with contact center representatives or through self-service channels such as web, voice-prompts, chat and email. A critical finding of this research was that delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty; but reducing their effort –the work they must do to get their problems solved – does. You have to read the rest of the fascinating article to learn more about this contrarian thinking, as I have space constraints here on what I really want to get off my heaving chest regarding customer service.

In your lifetime you will probably have to go outside of the country for official or leisure travel. If you are an ordinary mwananchi like me, you will find yourself lining up at some ungodly hour to be first on the queue for service. Now old hands like me have taken it up a notch by carrying our own tea in a thermos cup, layered clothing for warmth that can be cast off in a heartbeat to reveal a young professional underneath the mounds of sweaters and jackets and the ubiquitous brown envelope that is typically clutched by all visa applicants containing one’s most private documents the likes of which Kenya Revenue Authority would like to get their hands on (other people do this, not me of course). I can therefore – with self-proclaimed authority- declare that consular divisions of diplomatic missions in this country are the worst perpetrators of customer service experiences in the world. My uneducated take on the whole visa application process is that it is a very tedious exercise for the processing officers and the sheer volume of applications leads them to the very tempting conclusion of drawing lots on who gets one and who doesn’t. Alright, let me stop pontificating ceaselessly. I’ve never been denied a visa -yet – but I have missed out on a business trip because I submitted my application late; where late is defined as 2 days before the proposed date of travel. Now this is where I need to understand how visa offices are run. Where I am from, customers understand that certain services are provided within certain time frames. They also realize that to fast track service, more resources will have to be allocated to perform the task in a shorter time frame. Hence, paying an extra fee for expedited service is par for the course because time, my friends, is money. The fast paced and high tech global situation that we live in means that business meetings across borders are requested, required and demanded at the drop of a hat. Business is not conducted like an annual family vacation, planned way in advance and carefully timed to coincide with school holidays and work downtime.

It therefore goes without saying that a visa office should not get sanctimonious and high-handed when you innocently state that you need the visa in 24 hours. Customers (visa applicants) should be listened to and their needs met in as painless and expedited manner as possible. One way to meet these needs is by providing a fast track application process that is charged at a higher fee. It’s not a favor to the applicant, neither is it a guarantee that the visa will be granted. It is simply a recognition that not everyone who saunters into the consular office is looking to travel for marriage, Olympics, World Cup, ICC trial, graduation ceremony or whatever other myriad reasons travellers need to visit the hallowed foreign lands that apply all manner of barriers to entry. Lumping everyone together is telling all of us wananchi that really, in the greater scheme of things, we’re all the same. Our needs are the same, our travel objectives are the same and, most importantly, we are all magnificent forward planners who can look through crystal balls and foretell three weeks in advance that business will require us to make sudden trips.

I get it. Embassies do not need to build customer loyalty. There are constantly people beating down their doors clamoring for entry and service. Further, delighting their customers is neither here nor there. After all, the customers are jumping off cliffs in excitement at simply receiving the precious visa stamp on their passports. So here is some advice to embassies. Stop delighting your customers. Oh, I forgot, you are not in that business anyway. But at least try and reduce the customer effort, that is, the work they must do to get their problems solved. Business travel means that there is business to be done. Yes, that thing that requires consideration for exchange of goods or service is called business. Which consideration will remain in and benefit your country. Make it easy for us to do business with you. As you read this I will be at an embassy this Monday morning making a business visa application. I’m hoping I don’t have to right click for help!

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Diary of a parastatal CEO

June
It’s been one month since I was appointed as the CEO of this parastatal. I went through a very rigorous interview process and turns out that I scored the lowest out of the three finalists at 68%. However, the other two finalists were from a tribe viewed as having too many of its members in the public sector so they chose me instead as I come from a “small” tribe. Thank God for “small” mercies. But I will prove to everyone that I can do this job as good as anyone else. Anyway the targets are so low compared to my former private sector employer that this will definitely be a walk in the park.

July

Did I say this job would be a walk in the park? Tsavo National Park more likely! There are hyenas, vultures and all manner of scavengers that hunt in the corridors of this building. Everyone is looking for some action whether it’s in the form of a procurement contract or employment for his or her relatives. I can’t stand it when Lydia my secretary tells me that some random politician is on the phone waiting to speak to me. I’ve now stopped taking their calls. My finance manager tells me that is a career-limiting move. I told him exactly where he could stick his opinion!

August
I should have listened to the finance manager. My name is being bandied about in parliament like a football in the dying minutes of a sudden death match. Apparently some members of parliament are questioning the whole recruitment process saying that I did not even qualify to be on the shortlist of the final three. One MP even had the temerity to say that I was fired from my last job because I failed an audit in my department three years in a row! That chap can’t spell audit even if the words were stapled to his forehead. I should know, he asked me to employ his son in the “marteking deptament”. Those were the exact handwritten words in his barely legible scrawl in his letter. I need to find a godfather. Fast.

September
I found a godfather. Or rather, my godfather found me. He called me two days after the parliamentary maelstrom and said he could make the problem go away. I asked him how. He told me not to worry, we “small tribesmen” have to stick together. He might as well have thrown a floater at a drowning sailor; I grasped that lifeline as if my life depended on it. Actually my life did depend on it. Miraculously, the problem disappeared and suddenly no one was interested in my qualifications or lack thereof anymore. So this is how things work around here! I roll up my sleeves and got to work, there are customers to be served and targets to be met.

October
The Minister under whose ministry my parastatal falls under summoned me to his office. He made me wait for two hours before I was ushered into his red-carpeted office. I had time to observe that he had 3 secretaries in his reception. Clearly separation of duties was a big issue here as I observed one secretary receive letters, pass them to the second one to open the envelopes who then passed them to the third one to stamp “received” with a big office stamp. I felt a twinge of pity for my Lydia, I think she is very overworked. The Minister was not happy with me as I had not paid him a visit ever since I took on the job in June. Four whole months! Who did I think I was, he growled. I had him to thank for my job and I needed to always remember that. I nodded like a marionette, mumbled my sincere apologies and pledged my loyalty as if my life depended on it. Godfather called me as I was being driven back to the office. He told me not to worry, all ministers needed to sabre rattle to show who was in control. How he knew I had just come from seeing the Minister surprised me.

November
I caved in and hired fifty more people who were “recommended” by their parliamentary representatives. I had to forget about those staff to total cost ratios that were ingrained in me in my previous job. Apparently no one ever looks at those kinds of operational efficiency numbers on this side of the street. How is that even possible? I thought my task was to deliver service to our customers but generate a good profit for our shareholder, the government. My godfather set me straight on that misconception as we had lunch the other day. He also told me about a big procurement of some equipment that we needed to do to “improve operational efficiency” in the organization. Somehow the irony was lost on him. He gave me an envelope that had details of the Request for Proposals we needed to publish to tender for the equipment. The steely glint in his eye as his eyes met mine across the table was not caused by the gin and tonics he was knocking back with his lunch. The chickens were coming home to roost.

December
We closed the tendering process for the equipment. The tender requirements were so stringent that only three companies qualified. Godfather was pleased. I didn’t want to ask him what his connection was to the three companies, but they were all registered in a remote island famous for being a tax haven. I’m developing a thick skin, quick wits and an ability to pledge loyalty at the drop of a hat. My former colleagues would be shocked as I was always perceived to have an inflated sense of self-importance and never bowed my head to anyone. It’s a jungle out here, and something tells me even though I am CEO, I’ll always be at the bottom of the food chain.

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Twitter: @carolmusyoka

Nightmare on corporate street.

This guy gets a parrot but it’s got a bad attitude and foul vocabulary. He tries everything to change the bird’s attitude and clean up its talk but nothing works. Finally, in a moment of desperation, he puts the parrot in the freezer. For a few moments he hears the bird squawking, kicking and screaming and then, suddenly, all is quiet. He opens the freezer door. The parrot steps out and says, “I’m sorry that I offended you with my language and actions. I ask for your forgiveness. The guy’s astounded at the bird’s change in attitude and was about to ask what changed him when the parrot continued, “By the way, may I ask – what did the chicken do?”

I hate performance appraisals. I hated undertaking appraisals on my staff and I hated being appraised as well. It is one of the most challenging aspects of management as it requires a fair amount of wisdom, fortitude and a steely resolve to stand by your rating despite the remorseful or downright resentful eyes of your subordinates sitting before you. The organization trains you on the technical part of undertaking a performance appraisal, but no one ever tells you what to do when your staff member completely disagrees with your views, stands up on the table and starts screaming bloody murder. Nor do they tell you what to do when your employee dissolves into a disgusting mess of snot and tears in front of you. One CEO told me the other day that as far as he is concerned he manages by this mantra: “In God we trust, everything else is data.” How true this is, especially when it comes to assessing how our staff perform.

As a matter of course, it is much easier to appraise staff who have quantifiable, measurable targets. Produce X number of widgets every month, open Y number of accounts every week, book Z number of transactions every day. All those are easy to measure as the data is easily available. The harder task is to appraise staff who do not have easily determined quantifiable targets. And most staff fall into this category as they are in the support functions such as customer service, operations, risk management, finance, security. A lot of support functions focus largely on quality of service to the customer through error free expeditious processing and keeping control of the business. The same applies to organizations in the not for profit sector that are more service delivery driven than sales driven. How does one measure what one’s staff does knowing full well that what doesn’t get measured doesn’t get done?

Well, only you as a manager have the answer as your staff have key outputs in their job descriptions – assuming you have given all your staff their job descriptions. Those key outputs have to be translated into key performance indicators (KPI’s) that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely- better known as SMART objectives. This is not rocket science. You cannot give an internal auditor, for example, a customer satisfaction rating of high as a KPI. If the internal auditor is doing her job well, the internal customers will more likely than not want to throttle the very life out of the auditor on any given day for raising red flags in the operations rather than give her favorable ratings. That speaks to relevance. The relevant KPI for the internal auditor therefore would be number of audits undertaken, number of findings resolved and number of process improvements that have resulted from the audit process.

As a manager, you have to prepare well before going into the performance appraisal. You should review the performance contracts well in advance and compare the KPIs to the actual performance you have observed. If the performance has statistical data required then you should have a reliable internal resource produce the management information (MI) data on a monthly basis for monitoring and tracking. The same data, which should be regularly shared with the staff in the team, will then form the basis of the performance appraisal. It means no surprises come the day of the appraisal as the information is not only being regularly tracked and monitored but it is also publicly available and not the secret weapon you unleash from under your shirt. If you stick to the script – which is that the numbers never lie- there really should be no drama. That drama would already have been unleashed on the MI resource’s desk each month when she published the data. [MI resources, by the way, are required to have a very thick rhino skin to go about their business safely]

As for you, the one being appraised, read your performance contract at the beginning of every year and not two days before your scheduled performance appraisal. Undertake an honest self-appraisal, putting your comments against every KPI and try – for the love of God and country, try- to be objective about what you have achieved. Then go to your appraisal meeting with your document in hand and be prepared to have the fight for your life. You see, the numbers never lie and your boss will have the numbers with him. The real numbers and not the massaged version on your self-appraisal where booking a transaction without getting the payment from a client counts. No, actually, it does not. Don’t look like a weakling and for crying out loud don’t weep if the outcome is not what you expected. It’s never that serious. Your appraisal is really a good time for you to determine if you are doing your job wrong, if you hate your job and if you hate your boss. If the answer to all those three is yes, then move on to something else. If you don’t, your boss will put you someplace cold, isolated and where only chicken carcasses survive. You choose.

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Twitter: @carolmusyoka

“No man however great is greater than his people” Ibo Proverb

Kenyan companies love awards. Whether it’s an award for best company amongst SMEs, company of the year, best Chief Executive Officer: you name it, there’s recognition to be achieved in every shape or form. All these awards of course focus on the very reason the company exists: to make money. The awards focus on perceptions of profitability, good management and sound execution of strategy leading to customer growth. But these awards only reflect what companies want us to see, the spit and polish that have buffed the exterior. Rarely do we get a peek at what goes inside and how the most important resource -the employees- regard the very companies that are feted glamorously. Who knows what it takes to get these companies to perform? Are their employees happy to be associated with said companies or do they want to stab their necks with a blunt fork and bail out when the first opportunity presents itself?

Last year, I wrote about the Fortune Magazine’s list of best 100 companies to work for. Fortune Magazine (famous for the Fortune 500 ranking of the largest American corporations) publishes an annual list of the “100 Best Companies To Work For” which provides interesting insights on how other companies not only attract but, more importantly, retain talent. The conclusions are not rocket science. At the end of the day, salaries do not rank highest when employees are assessing their work place. It is having a sense of inclusion, a good work life balance and non-monetary benefits such as day care for children, free lunches, telecommuting (working from home) and 100% health care coverage.
Last week, Deloitte Kenya launched the Best Company To Work For 2012 Kenya. Companies are invited to apply to have the employees give an honest assessment of whether their organization is a good place to work thus offering a unique benchmarking opportunity for organizations to rate their own employee offering within their industry as well as compare themselves to other industries. This of course is far different from the more insular Employee Satisfaction Surveys (ESS) that many companies go through the mechanical motions of undertaking. You know what I’m talking about: the Human Resource Director/manager is given explicit instructions to run a boilerplate survey on whether employees are happy. In good times, when bonuses have been paid, everyone’s happy. In bad times, when the company is cutting costs faster than a River Road barber cuts hair, the surveys churn out venom and bile. Strangely, in many companies ownership, production and execution of the ESS lies squarely in the hands of the human resource department. This is an absolute fallacy. ALL management starting from the CEO to her direct reports to the line managers below the direct reports are responsible for employee satisfaction and their performance contracts must reflect that fact. It takes a very brave CEO to publish negative results of an ESS but an even braver CEO who takes full and personal responsibility for ensuring that the negative indicators are acted upon. Braver CEOs are few and far apart. So it will take the bravest CEO –in my very opinionated opinion- to stand up and say: “Let’s see if we’re the best company to work for. I want to see how our company is rated against our peers. I want to see if our brand can attract talent because our employees say we are the best.” An external survey might actually be what the doctor ordered to disabuse any CEO of the notion that his employees are dying to work for the organization. The survey is also a good measure for company boards to evaluate the CEO’s leadership capabilities, as they only know what the CEO allows his managers to present in the quarterly board packs. Why should such a survey be important for an institution?
According to the Great Place to Work, who run the 100 Best Companies to Work For survey on behalf of Fortune Magazine, 95% of leaders from companies that have appeared on the Best 100 list say that being recognized for their workplace culture positively impacts the bottom line. The Best Companies (primarily in the United States) attract top talent and have a higher retention ratio with turnover being two to four times lower among Best Companies than industry norms. Independent studies have also shown that publicly traded Best Companies consistently outperform major stock indices by a factor of 3. While you may have heard of the saying “happy wife, happy life” at the 19th hole of your last golf game, happy employees translate into better output which conversely translates into higher bottom lines. Like I said before, it’s not rocket science.

But participants at the launch reflected the on going challenge of working with a younger workforce. One participant from a leading technology company shared the fact that their employees are happier to take a lower salary if it meant that their creative product ideas would be implemented and they would be permitted a profit share of those products in their lifetime of use. Inclusion and both monetary and non-monetary recognition is what the relatively young workforce of this, and many other technology companies are demanding. Now imagine that such a profit share mechanism is put into place –which is really not different from a tiered sales commissions structure over the lifetime of a term product – and you begin to see the best creative software brains knocking on your doors to come and work for you. The upside is that you keep your salary costs low and your success fee pegged to your bottom line. The downside – what downside? The Ibo have another proverb: “A man of sense does not go hunting little bush rodents when his age mates are after big game.” An organization that is confident in its leadership capabilities will go for the big game: benchmarking itself against its peers. Employee Satisfaction Surveys are for the small guys!

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Twitter:@carolmusyoka

Our “city fathers” have literally got their knickers in a twist with the latest distraction to their dodgy service delivery. A group of four brave, swashbuckling heroes have launched a brazen attack using cans of spray paint as their weapons and Nairobi building walls as their battleground. I first heard about the “graffiti artists” on Twitter when word spread like wildfire about the thought provoking murals that had suddenly appeared overnight on the Nairobi City Market walls. The Sunday Nation on March 25th carried a more detailed story on the history of the artists as well as the strong motivation and belief in their cause. The four trailblazers have chosen to use art to express their palpable frustration with all things wrong in Kenyan politics and, my word, a picture is worth a thousand words.

The indignant reaction from the City Council of Nairobi and the Police was so predictable it was boring. Cover the pictures! This is illegal! How the **** did this happen and who the **** do these guys think they are? Meanwhile, our city of Nairobi has very little in the form of public art and what these artists have managed to do is provide not only poignant messages for the average Kenyan voter but also provide stimulating visual stories that tantalize our taste buds for more locally inspired and publicly displayed art.

Art is a form of creative expression that enables the viewer to experience different senses that affect both emotional and psychological stimuli. With this background in mind, the city of Philadelphia in the United States decided to launch a counter attack on what was becoming a prolific graffiti problem in the early nineties by embracing the graffiti artists into ‘city employees’ whose job was to beautify the city. I visited Philadelphia – also known as the City of Murals-in the spring of 2010 and found a city with over 3000 murals covering walls of buildings across the Central Business District as well as row houses in low-income neighbourhoods. The murals are beautiful and powerful artistic impressions of American urban culture, giving voice to the artists to express their individual and collective voices.

But it is the origins of the murals that warrants attention. In 1984, the Mayor of Philadelphia, Wilson Goode decided that the best way to eradicate the graffiti crisis plaguing his city was to stop fighting it and start embracing it. A program was started called the Philadelphia Anti-Graffiti Network where a muralist. Jane Golden, was hired to reach out to graffiti writers and redirect their energies from destructive graffiti writing to constructive mural painting. The result was surprising even to the originators of the concept. The mural painting empowered the youth to take an active role in beautifying their own neighborhoods, adding life, beauty and color to an old industrial city. The murals also provide unification in areas of racial tension, with Golden’s team stepping into neighborhoods with a history of violent racial altercations and getting residents to participate in painting murals that celebrate the diversity of residents and healing of racial wounds.

Talking tough and hastily whitewashing the efforts of Uhuru, Swift99, BanksSlave and Smokilla – street names of the four buccaneers who have chosen the Nairobi City walls to tell their story – is very shortsighted. It will only serve to raise their profile absolutely free [something any brand would kill for] and elevate them into urban legends. Ask any spouse, parent, or school administrator: when you try to impose a seemingly pointless, draconian rule the mavericks will always do their damndest to go around, above or below it in an effort not to comply. The four Nairobi street artists have found that vehicle to tell their story and trying to silence those voices will be as good as trying to muzzle a hungry cat in a tight sack. The City Council of Nairobi’s energies are much better spent finding ways to engage more artists to make our capital city a reflection of our national character. Find those mavericks, put them in the Mayor’s Mercedes Benz rather than those awful city council cattle trucks for ferrying prisoners and fete their artistic prowess. This could be a way of getting the City beautified in the lowest cost and most authentic manner possible. Oh and to the local authorities: while you’re at it, please take note that the Neanderthals painting silly messages with names of contenders for Governor, Senate and whatever other political seat is available on sections of Thika Highway in Nairobi and Makupa Causeway in Mombasa are not artists by any definition. They should collectively be thrown into a sack with a very hungry cat in the back of a City Council cattle truck.

In other completely unrelated news, the CEO of Telkom Kenya, Mickael Ghossein was last week widely quoted by the press as saying: “We are in a position to meet all our financial obligations to banks and if we don’t, then there is no reason for them to worry because there are penalties.” This was in response to published reports that the company’s financials were, quite simply, in dire straits. I read the quote and two words came to mind: Train Smash. Telling banks not to worry about being repaid because there are penalties is as good as waving a red flag in front of a Spanish bull. Penalties for late loan payments are meant to act as a deterrent for default. What matters to banks most is whether the borrower will have the cash to repay the loan and not whether the bank will make money from penalties. I have no doubt that the CEO’s words may have caused massive “bankstipation” (an ailment of “constipatory ” origins occasionally suffered by those in the banking industry) amongst Telkom’s bankers. Those words may come to paint a very unattractive mural for the company’s future financial fortunes.

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Twitter:@carolmusyoka

A Greek, an Irishman and a Portuguese go into a bar and order a drink. Who picks up the bill?
A German. If you have not been following the unraveling of the Eurozone crisis that joke will mean nothing to you. But there are two reasons why East Africans should pay some attention to what’s going on in the Eurozone. Firstly, the crisis was cited as one of the reasons for our currencies misbehaving in the second half of 2011. Secondly, our East African governments are signing up to a Monetary Union protocol that is eventually supposed to lead us to a single currency in the East African Community.

Let’s take a historical step back. The European Union (EU) established the euro in Maastricht, Netherlands in 1992. To join the currency, member states had to qualify by meeting the terms of the treaty in terms of budget deficits, inflation, interest rates and other monetary requirements. The currency came into official existence on 1st January 1999. As countries joined the currency union, Spain, France and Italy now entered into a lower interest rate regime that fuelled a borrowing frenzy by both private sector companies and mortgage borrowers in the respective countries. Naturally, the higher appetite for debt led to a higher appetite for things imported and the current account deficit (exports versus imports) began to grow.
Meanwhile back at the German ranch, the Germans grew their exports steadily and ended up selling goods to their southern European counterparts thereby building up huge cash surpluses as well as positive trade balances. This is just one of the reasons why Germany was instrumental in the financial bailout packages that the European Union was forced to provide to the errant members of the Eurozone. The Greeks on the other hand used financial maneuverings to hide their actual borrowing statistics as it prepared to enter the Eurozone in 2001. By 2009, the total Greek private and public sector debt was an astonishing Euro 300 billion or 113% of GDP, which was almost twice the Eurozone limit of 60%. Furthermore, in 2010 EU auditors uncovered the financial shenanigans finding that the Greek budget deficit was at 13.6% of GDP and not the published 3.7% against a Eurozone limit of 3%. The Greek government was clearly spending far more than it was receiving as Greek civil servants had generous salaries and pensions (there was even a holiday bonus of one or two month’s salary) while there was massive tax evasion amongst the citizenry. There are several other macroeconomic factors that led to the Eurozone crisis and there is not enough space to cover them here. However what is of grave import is that fiscal mismanagement of one country (government spending more than it receives in taxes – Greece being a case in point!) can have a significant bearing on the overall performance of a single unit currency zone as it becomes difficult to get investors to buy government issued paper (used to plug in government budget deficits) if there is even a whiff of default from a member country. The offending country creates a “contagion”, a morbid fear that its cousins can also catch the “potential debt default flu”.
So at last month’s EAC Monetary Union summit in Arusha, Paul Collier, director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford, said that economic imbalances among EAC member countries could create regional instability similar to the current crisis facing the Eurozone according to the Business Daily on February 27th, 2012. He warned the delegates who included regional finance ministers and central bank governors to tread with some caution saying that the Eurozone experience had shown that it is difficult to enforce spending limits among members of a monetary union such as the one proposed by the EAC. I am actually not sure what the whole excitement is around getting us to have a common currency when we are struggling with our very own budget deficit in Kenya. We the taxpayers are paying the brunt of a government that struggles to rope in more citizens into paying taxes that can help the government meet its spending targets. Our government constantly comes to the domestic (and lately the international) market to raise cash to plug the deficit. Add to that the fact that we have a trade imbalance caused by our rabid love for things imported and you see why we struggle to maintain our domestic currency and interest rates steady. Now throw in Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania’s fiscal and monetary issues into the pot and you have a potential powder keg of social unrest across the whole EAC as citizens start to wonder why they are spending hundreds more shillings to purchase goods just because they have a single currency being affected by budget deficits and trade imbalances of one member country.
The Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Finance, Joseph Kinyua summarized it succinctly at the Arusha summit: “A strong fiscal policy of the kind that would support a monetary union would require politicians to “bite the bullet” and guarantee independence of institutions such as the Central Bank.”
Judging from the last Parliamentary Committee report on the depreciating shilling, I doubt that politicians are anywhere near giving the Central Bank autonomy. That said, if the EAC shilling starts to tumble for whatever reason, the Kenyan Parliament will form yet another committee to investigate the depreciating EAC shilling. After four months of trying to understand fiscal and monetary policies of not one but four countries, it will likely come to the conclusion that there is NO conclusion citing the following reasons: 1: Hotels in Dar es Salaam and Mombasa were fully booked so they couldn’t write their report. 2: There was no beach in Uganda to write their report 3: They have requested the Speaker of the East African Legislative Council to form a committee to investigate the EAC shilling depreciation and they are waiting for that report. God help the EAC monetary union!
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Twitter: @carolmusyoka

New Year Resolutions from a CEO

Crap! It’s the New Year. Again. Rather than make useless resolutions, I think I will just review the ones I wrote in January 2012 and undertake a self-appraisal.

New Year Resolution 1:
WHAT I SAID IN JANUARY 2012: Walk the shop floor more and have a weekly breakfast with randomly chosen staff members so that I can get a good feel of what’s going on with the employees.

WHAT I DID IN 2012: I held a breakfast in the last week of January and another in the middle of March. I almost gagged when I saw the table manners of a few of the staff, one had the temerity to pick his nose and his teeth in random order throughout the meal. Another one chose the March session to break down in tears since his wife had left him the week before and his pregnant girlfriend had moved in thereafter. Awkward. That brought my “bonding” sessions to a screeching halt.

WHAT I WILL DO IN 2013: Walk on the second floor. I never did get past the ground and first floor last year.

New Year Resolution 2:
WHAT I SAID IN JANUARY 2012: I will stop using the Chief Financial Officer’s mug shot for target practice at the shooting range every Saturday morning.

WHAT I DID IN 2012: I diversified my target practice board by putting a collage of 12” BY 12” pictures of the worst people in my professional life. I put in pictures of the Chief Human Resource Officer, the idiotic octogenarian board director, the wife of the Board Chairman (boy, is she a piece of work!) and, last but definitely not least, the Chief Financial Officer whose face is now a mass of shredded paper following repeated shots over the year.

WHAT I WILL DO IN 2013: Attend anger management classes. I need to find a healthier outlet for the rage I feel towards certain people. I guess that means I need to cancel the order for the 10 additional mug shot collages that I put in just before Christmas. Or maybe not. If the anger management classes don’t work I need to have a plan B.

New Year Resolution 3:
WHAT I SAID IN JANUARY 2012: I will delegate more at work.

WHAT I DID IN 2012: Refer to New Year Resolution Number 4.

New Year Resolution 4:
WHAT I SAID IN JANUARY 2012: Scratch New Year Resolution 3, I don’t trust anyone to get the job done properly.

WHAT I DID IN 2012: I didn’t trust anyone to get the job done properly.

WHAT I WILL DO IN 2013: I still don’t trust anyone to get the job done properly. Tough.

New Year Resolution 5:
WHAT I SAID IN JANUARY 2012: I will learn to trust more. Starting next year.

WHAT I DID IN 2012: I maintained my capacity to trust -which is next to zero- and promised myself that 2013 would be a better year.

WHAT I WILL DO IN 2013: I will learn to trust more. Starting next year.

New Year Resolution 6:
WHAT I SAID IN JANUARY 2012: I will spend more time with my wife and kids.

WHAT I DID IN 2012: I am very proud of myself. I took the wife and kids for a holiday in Dubai and she managed to dent a bigger hole on my credit card than those b****s who skimmed my card while I was in South Africa last year. The kids bought even more electronic gadgets, which totally occupied their time during the “holiday” and the rest of the year. I have to admit the Christmas break was hard as I spent more time at home and realized that we have nothing to talk about with the kids except how much pocket money they could bum off me and what time they would be getting back home in the evening. I also got the sense that my wife couldn’t wait for me to get back to the office as my hanging around the house was getting quite awkward.

WHAT I WILL DO IN 2013: I’m thinking of setting up a virtual dinner table so that I can sit and have dinner with the family while I am sitting in the office. At least I’ll get to see them before they sleep. As for my wife, I think if I get her a platinum credit card this year it might make for a better relationship.

New Year Resolution 7:
WHAT I SAID IN JANUARY 2012: I will endeavor to have more women in senior management.

WHAT I DID IN 2012: I hired a female Chief Human Resources Officer. What’s not to like? She was beautiful, had nice legs and seemed to quote a few correct human resource terminologies at the interview that made it look like she knew the job. The female board members didn’t like her when they met at the first board meeting. They said she was all hair and air, with nothing in between. I thought they were jealous. I was wrong. I don’t know what to do with her. I wish she would go away. She DOESN’T KNOW the first thing about managing people in her own department let alone the rest of her organization and I am constantly fire fighting on her behalf.
WHAT I WILL DO IN 2013
I will never hire a woman in senior management again. Ever. Alright, alright. I might hire one in 2014 and interview her on the phone first before I see what she looks like physically so that I don’t get distracted.

New Year Resolution 8:
WHAT I SAID IN JANUARY 2012: I will add value to the company’s pensioners by convincing the trustees to reduce dead property assets in the pension fund.

WHAT I DID IN 2012: I got a couple of friends and we created a company that bought off most of the “dead property assets” in the pension fund. We are in the process of selling the same to some Chinese developers for a price 50% more than we bought them for.

WHAT I WILL DO IN 2013: I need to find (or make) some more “obsolete” company assets. Quickly.

My Life Coach will be still be proud of me as my resolutions are career, company and family oriented, just as he keeps telling me. 2013 here I come!

[email protected] Twitter: @carolmusyoka