Chinese economic presence in Africa comes in for a lot of criticism: the projects to which they contribute financing favor foreign companies while leaving local contractors behind – or so the critics say. The Chinese are also known for bringing in their own people to do the work. In Kenya, for instance, there has been a recent…

High growth startups – and in some cases, new industries like social networks and internet content marketing – rely on breakthrough ideas to create new products. Established firms can benefit from the management ideas that guide these startups, and leverage them further due to an important advantage: their access to resources and networks that startups…

As a part of my learning trip, I arrived yesterday to Accra, Ghana where I will be for one week. Travelling from Nairobi to Accra would have been as easy as travelling from Barcelona (where I was last week). But that's not the case for most of intra-Africa business travel. There are very few flight…

Last week I led a discussion among public managers on the ethics of their job, during a session of a public leadership program at IESE. I want to share with you the preliminaries of our conversation and the questions that finally came up. First of all, the owner of the public institutions is the people…