A Favourite Building

Designed by the Ghanaian architect David Adjaye, the Skolkovo Moscow School of Management is one of my favourite works of contemporary architecture:

Flip Magazine Zambia

Zambian satirical magazine:

The Pickens Leadership Plan

The Start-Up of You

The slideshare visual summary of the book is now available.

Inspirational Words

It's my birthday today! I got two beautiful cards, one from my wife and one from our kids. One of our kids wrote this in their card:

To the world you're just a dad, to your kids you're a hero.

Wow. That made my day, my week, my month and my year. In fact, it's enough inspiration to last my whole lifetime.

Reids shaking in the wind

Reid Hoffman is one of the best commentators on the contemporary tech industry. I always find his writing insightful and thought-provoking. He writes short(er) blog posts for LinkedIn and long(er) essays for his own website.

Alternative Finance

The BBC's Evan Davis recently interviewed the co-founders of three technology-based services that are disrupting conventional banking and financial services: M-Pesa (mobile money), Zopa (peer-to-peer lending for individuals) and MartketInvoice (auction-based online marketplace for unpaid business invoices).

Masterpiece

From the King's Singers, 400 years of classical music in less than 10 minutes:

From Indignation to Indifference

The Economist (13 May 2000)

The Economist (3 December 2011)

I can still remember my immediate reaction to The Economist's now (in)famous "hopeless continent" cover back in the year 2000: indignation. How dare they pass judgement on an entire continent and its millions of individual citizens?

My response to the magazine's "Africa rising" cover over a decade later was not one of elation, rather it was one of indifference. Why? What had I learnt in the interim? It was this: Ultimately, it doesn't really matter what "they" think, whether good or ill, and whoever "they" may be. What really matters is what Africans themselves think (about themselves and about their continent) and, more importantly, what they do -- or don't do -- about it.

Who is African?

"We are Africans not because we are born in Africa, but because Africa is born in us."
- Chester Higgins Jr.