Gichohu

A few days ago, somewhere between a construction site, a few phone calls and the usual pressure of getting things done, I was reminded of something rather inconvenient. My body does not read the project programme. It does not care about the handover date. It has no interest in the client's deadline. And it certainly does not attend progress meetings. Yet, somehow, I keep expecting it to cooperate as though it were another subcontractor. Construction teaches you very quickly that everything has a limit. Concrete has a curing period. Steel has a load capacity. A crane has a lifting limit. Even a contractor eventually reaches the point where you can no longer ask for "just one more thing." But human beings are surprisingly good at pretending that we have no such limits. We decide when we will sleep. We decide when we will rest. We tell ourselves that we can push a little harder because the project is almost finished. Then another problem appears. So we push a little more. I ...

There are projects that finish according to the programme. Then there are projects where the programme, the budget and reality eventually sit down and agree to stop fighting. Ndagani Modern Market belongs firmly in the second category. We have finally handed over the market to the wonderful people of Tharaka-Nithi. A few finishing touches remain, including the creche and some civil works, but the important part is done. The traders and vendors are already in the market, their stalls occupied and their wares on display. That feels good. The last few days were anything but easy. We had a very clear deadline. Chuka University was about to open for a new session, and we needed the market substantially ready before the town got even busier. So we crashed the programme. In construction language, project crashing is the polite way of saying, "We have run out of time, so everybody needs to move faster." Money was tight. Time was tighter. And, as construction sites tend to do, proble...

There is a particular kind of man who wakes up in the morning with a perfectly sensible plan. Today, I will concentrate on one thing. I will finish the report. Review the construction budget. Call the contractor. Check the farm. Perhaps spend an hour thinking about strategy, leadership and the future. A reasonable day. Then the phone rings. By 10:00 a.m., I am discussing a bridge. By 11:00, I am calculating the cost per square metre of a market. By noon, I am wondering whether granite should be replaced with silica-free stone. At 1:00 p.m., somebody needs a concrete mixer. At 2:00, I am thinking about cows. At 3:00, someone mentions IFMIS. By 4:00, I am contemplating human behaviour, faith, relationships and the peculiar things people do to one another. By evening, I have somehow arrived at St Francis of Assisi, the Serenity Prayer, DNA testing in Kenya and the psychological consequences of telling people to "just be yourself." This is not multitasking. This is the controlled...

Over the weekend, I spent most of my time at the farm. I had plenty to do, but as often happens when I am there, I also ended up spending a lot of time simply watching the animals. There is something about farm life that makes you slow down. You begin to notice things you would probably miss if you were rushing from one meeting to another. This weekend, the bulls caught my attention. I have several Sahiwal bulls. Most of them came to the farm as little calves, some less than six months old. A few were born there. They have grown up together, eating the same food, drinking from the same troughs and grazing in the same fields. There is no shortage of space. There is enough grass. Nobody is going hungry. So I was rather surprised to see them fighting. And I don't mean the occasional disagreement. These boys were having serious arguments. They were pushing, locking horns and trying to establish who was the boss. At one point, one of them was badly injured. I stood there wondering what ...

There is a strange irony in trying to finish a construction project on time. The closer you get to handover, the more everything seems to happen at once. That is where we are with the Ndagani Modern Market. We are in what project managers call project crashing: adding resources, working longer hours and pushing activities harder because the original programme is no longer good enough. The handover date is getting close, and suddenly every unfinished item looks like it has a personal relationship with the deadline. Then I caught a common cold. Nothing dramatic. No hospital admission. No medical emergency. Just the ordinary misery of a blocked nose, a sore throat, a little coughing and that general feeling that your body has decided to reduce your productivity by 60 percent. But it reminded me of something I should probably have known already. A project can crash for the same reason a human being can. You can keep pushing. You can add more people. You can work longer hours. You can deman...

There is a particular kind of person you meet in business who makes you realise that good intentions and good company are not always the same thing. I have one such person. Let's call him James. James is a genuinely good man. He means well. He is honest, hardworking and, as far as I can tell, genuinely wants to help. If you have a problem, he will try to solve it. Sometimes, unfortunately, he will try to solve it ten times. James has a remarkable ability to turn a simple matter into a small administrative project. You agree on something at 9:00 a.m. By 9:15, he has called to confirm it. At 9:27, he calls again because he is wondering whether you really meant what you said. At 9:43, there is another call. By lunchtime, I am beginning to question whether we ever had the original conversation. And then there are the journeys. James can travel an impressive distance to deliver something that could probably have been sourced five kilometres from where we are working. You look at what he...

 The older I get, the more I understand people who quietly disappear from the noise. Not because they have failed. Not because they have given up. And certainly not because they have nothing to say. Perhaps they have simply discovered that peace is sometimes more valuable than being seen. I have spent many years moving around. Work, construction sites, meetings, projects, business, travel, farms, conversations with interesting people and the occasional conversation with people who were considerably less interesting but somehow lasted much longer. Life has a way of keeping you busy. For a long time, I thought being busy was a sign that things were going well. There was always somewhere to go. Someone to call. Something to fix. Another project. Another opportunity. Another problem waiting patiently for my attention. Then, somewhere along the way, I began to appreciate something different. Quiet . There is something wonderful about waking up and not immediately feeling that the world ...

A few years ago, I was involved in a dam construction project that taught me a lesson I have remembered ever since. We had an engineer on the project who arrived with considerable confidence. He spoke loudly, gave instructions freely and seemed to have an answer for almost everything. He carried himself like a man who had personally designed every dam from here to Timbuktu. At first, I thought perhaps I had simply met one of those naturally confident engineers. Then the problems started. There were questionable decisions, unnecessary disputes, strange requisitions and an increasing sense that the project was costing more than it should. There were also incidents of theft and what I would describe as rent-seeking behaviour. Materials seemed to disappear with surprising creativity, and some people appeared to have discovered that a construction project could be treated as a small personal economy. The engineer was always confident. Unfortunately, the results were less convincing. He even...

A few weeks ago, I was driving back to Nairobi with my Copilot, Leah. We had spent the better part of the day visiting project sites. Like most of my road trips, the conversation wandered without any particular destination. We discussed construction, family, politics, business, the price of cement which seems to have developed ambitions of becoming a luxury item and just about everything in between. Somewhere after Naivasha, Leah looked at the navigation screen. "Only thirty-five kilometres to go," she said. I smiled. It should have been encouraging. Instead, it somehow made the journey feel longer. I have noticed something peculiar about road trips. The first two hundred kilometres often disappear almost unnoticed. You settle into the rhythm of the road. The scenery changes. Music plays. Conversations come and go. Then something strange happens. The last twenty or thirty kilometres begin to feel like two hundred. You start checking the distance every few minutes. "Surel...

A few years ago, I was involved in a construction project where we urgently needed a particular piece of heavy equipment. We made a few calls and were told it would be available soon. Soon became tomorrow. Tomorrow became next week. Next week became, “We are still waiting for confirmation.” Eventually, someone asked a very simple question: “Why don't we find another one?” We did. Within a few hours, the equipment was on its way. The funny thing was that the equipment had been available all along. We had simply been waiting for one particular person to make things happen. That experience has stayed with me because I have seen the same thing happen in business and in life. Sometimes waiting looks remarkably like doing nothing. There is nothing wrong with patience. Some things genuinely take time. The problem begins when patience becomes an excuse for inaction. Opportunity Has a Short Attention Span Opportunities can be surprisingly impatient. A contract comes up and somebody else sub...

 A few days ago, I was having one of those conversations at work that begins with something completely ordinary and somehow ends up somewhere you did not expect. We were talking about siblings and family relationships. My colleague told me about her older brother. Let us call him John. John had recently arrived at a family gathering with a new girlfriend. Ordinarily, this would not have been particularly newsworthy. Except that the family was not exactly celebrating. The new girlfriend has three children. And John already has three children from an earlier relationship. There was another relationship before that, which produced a child, and the mother eventually left with the baby. Then came another relationship, three children, and another separation. More recently, he had been involved with a much younger woman. That relationship also ended, and he eventually went back to live with his parents. And now, here he was again. New girlfriend. Three more children. You could almost hear...

There is something about driving I-35 from Kansas City towards Wichita that gives you plenty of time to think. The Kansas countryside rolls past, the road stretches endlessly ahead, and after a while you settle into that familiar rhythm where the road does most of the talking and you are left alone with your thoughts. I remember one particular drive. I was heading to Wichita to visit family at Lakepoint. A few miles past Emporia, I pulled into one of the service stations on the Turnpike. Nothing extraordinary happened. I stretched my legs, bought something to drink, probably used the facilities, and got back into the car. Yet, for some reason, I still remember that little stop. Perhaps because it reminds me of how life works. We tend to remember the destinations. The new job. The business. The big contract. The house. The relationship. The promotion. But when I look back over the years, I realise that much of life actually happened between the destinations. There were...

There is an old saying that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. After many years of working in different places, meeting different people and watching life unfold, I have come to question that wisdom. Sometimes the grass is greener on the other side simply because you haven't been watering yours. I have seen this in careers. Someone becomes frustrated with their job and starts admiring another company. Better salary. Better office. Better people. Better opportunities. So they move. Six months later, they discover that the new place also has difficult bosses, demanding clients, office politics and meetings that should probably have been emails. The grass wasn't necessarily greener. They were just looking at it from a distance. I have seen the same thing in business. We look at somebody else's successful company and wonder why ours isn't doing as well. What we don't see are the years behind the success. The sleepless nights. The mistakes. The d...

There are vehicles that are bought to make a statement. And then there are vehicles bought because somebody has work to do. My Tata Xenon double-cab belongs firmly in the second category. It has spent a good part of its life around construction sites, carrying tools, materials, equipment and occasionally things that probably deserved a slightly more serious discussion about weight limits. It has travelled on good roads, bad roads, dusty roads and roads that make you wonder whether calling them roads is an act of excessive optimism. Yet it keeps showing up. That is what I like about it. Construction is not particularly kind to machinery. A pickup working around construction sites is not spending its days cruising on perfect tarmac. There is mud, dust, stones, potholes, steep climbs and the occasional trench appearing exactly where you thought you were going to drive. The Xenon has experienced most of these. Sometimes it complains. Sometimes a warning light appears with impeccable timing...

Farming has a rather uncomfortable way of teaching you that good intentions are not enough. You can wake up early. You can employ good people. You can buy seed, fertilizer and machinery. You can make plans. And then the farm can look at all your plans and quietly say, "That is interesting. Let's see how this goes." Over the past month, I have had one of those lessons. We have had to let go of two farmhands and, eventually, the farm manager. At the same time, we have scaled back production considerably. For now, the farm is largely back to its essentials: livestock and crops under the greenhouse. It was not a decision I made lightly. Anyone who has spent time around a farm knows that reducing production feels almost like admitting defeat. You spend years trying to make the place more productive, and then you find yourself deliberately doing less. But sometimes doing less is not giving up. Sometimes it is simply accepting reality. One of the biggest problems we have been de...

I have always found it interesting that in some games, winning does not simply mean that you have more points. It gives you something else. Options. I was thinking about this recently while watching baseball. Baseball is a peculiar game if you are not familiar with it. It can look almost leisurely at times. A player stands at the plate, everyone waits, someone throws a ball at considerable speed, and suddenly the entire stadium wakes up. But underneath the apparent calm is a fascinating lesson about advantage. When a team gets ahead, the game changes. The team that is leading has something the other team does not have: room for error. It can play more conservatively. It can protect its lead. It can make decisions that reduce risk. The team that is behind has a different problem. It has to chase. And chasing changes behaviour. You take bigger risks because standing still will not get you back into the game. But there is another interesting feature of baseball. Unforced errors are expens...