Gichohu

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...