There are ambitious plans to build a seven-star hotel in Nairobi, to be called The Prince. The Ministry of Lands has granted a 50-year lease on the land to Galaxy Walker Ltd, the company behind the planned development, which is to include a shopping mall, furnished apartments, executive offices and a parking lot designed to accommodate 1,000 cars. The lease was granted more than a year ago, but its existence has only just been made public.

A controversial feature of the new lease is that the annual rent for the 4-acre prime real estate is just Sh1.6 million ($24,000), whereas the annual rent for the same property under the previous lease was Sh6.3 million ($95,000). Perhaps the Ministry of Lands felt it was justified in offering concessional rental because of the substantial benefits the new buildings would bring. But many people have other suspicions.

The man behind the new lessee, Galaxy Walker Ltd, is none other than Kamlesh Pattni, the man widely said to have been the architect of the Goldenberg scandal, Kenya’s largest ever theft of public funds, in which politicians and businessmen conspired to steal public funds amounting to some 10 percent of the country’s annual GDP. Mr Pattni was arrested but soon released, and no-one has ever been held to account.

Chester Carlson was born on this day 104 years ago. After studying physics at the California Institute of Technology, he worked for Bell Telephone Laboratories as a research engineer then in the patent department. He was made redundant during the Great Depression, but subsequently found employment in the patent department of the P R Mallory Company (which later became Duracell), and he studied part-time for his law degree.

At the same time as he was working and studying for a law degree, Carlson was searching for a simpler way to make copies of documents, as his job as a patent attorney required him to make multiple copies of submissions to the Patent Office. He experimented with photoconductivity and filed his first patent application for electrophotography in 1937. After successful experiments, he tried for many years to find a company interested in investing in the invention, and in 1942 he persuaded the Battelle Memorial Institute, a private technology company, to take up the invention.

A few years later, Battelle negotiated licensing contracts with the Haloid Company, which sold its first copying machine in 1950, shortly after Carlson’s first patent had expired. Eventually copying machines using the new “xerography” process became very popular, and in 1961 the Haloid Company changed its name to Xerox Corporation.

A Christian is someone who has faith in Jesus Christ. Having “faith” is not the same as belonging to a political party. It means that you trust Jesus with your life. But if you never have occasion to actually exercise that trust – if you go through the whole of your life without ever actually needing Jesus – how can you really be “trusting” in him? Paul’s life was spent constantly needing Jesus to save him from his latest scrape, as illustrated by the shipwreck described in Acts chapter 27.

The ship on which Paul was travelling to Rome as a prisoner was caught up in a tremendous storm which lasted for a fortnight, and the crew and passengers thought that they would certainly perish, but Paul had a vision in which he was told by an angel of God that everyone on board would be saved. Sure enough, although the ship ran aground and broke up, all of the people on board managed to reach land safely.

You only ever really get to experience God acting in your life at those moments when you stand to lose everything unless God miraculously intervenes. Faith is a relationship between yourself and Jesus which grows as you experience miraculous intervention after miraculous intervention in your life. If you are not taking big risks for the sake of the Kingdom of God, then your faith does not get the opportunities to grow.

We live in turbulent times and if we want to survive we have to make innovation a way of life. That’s the message which Gary Hamel brings us in Leading the Revolution: How to Thrive in Turbulent Times by Making Innovation a Way of Life, and it is an important message. The book is written in a brash, opinionated style which appeals to some readers but not to others. Hamel says the age of progress is over; we are now into a new age of revolution. Somewhere out there is a bullet with your company’s name on it. Every company must become an opportunity-seeking missile. Only stupid questions create new wealth.

When I read a business book, I look for principles that I can apply. This book has plenty of principles, but I am not sure how useful they are. For example, chapter 8 sets out 8 design rules for innovation: unreasonable expectations, elastic business definition, a cause not a business, new voices, a market for innovation, low-risk experimentation, cellular division, and connectivity. I think that some of these might be useful for some businesses, but I have met plenty of managers with unreasonable expectations and elastic business definitions whose businesses were not going anywhere.

I do not usually complain about a book’s typography, but whoever did the layout for this book spends too much time downloading free fonts from the Internet. Can’t decide which ugly chunky font to use to highlight random sentences? Why not use them all?

The book does contain a number of interesting stories about innovation in different companies, and it is worth reading for the inspiration. It really is important for businesses to have an innovation strategy, but I am not sure that you will find one to meet your needs in this book.

A video review is available on my new site, BusinessLessons.org.

No matter what personality type you have or how easy to get along with you might be, there are likely to be some people that you can work well with, and others that you struggle with. Some partnerships work so well that the two partners working together achieve far more than the sum of what they could have achieved working apart. Other partnerships achieve less than what one of the partners could have achieved by himself or herself. Power of 2: How to Make the Most of Your Partnerships at Work and in Life, by Rodd Wagner and Gale Muller, sets out to identify the factors that make up a great partnership.

The Gallup organisation conducted research into the issue, and this resulted in a theoretical model of dyadic collaborative relationships. Rodd Wagner and Gale Muller have distilled this into eight elements of a successful partnership. In a successful partnership, the respective partners have complementary strengths, they share a common mission, they treat each other with fairness, there is a high level of trust, the partners accept each other’s idiosyncrasies, mistakes are forgiven, the partners communicate well, and they are unselfish towards each other.

The book includes a chapter on each of these elements, and concludes with some additional insights for leaders and managers. The chapters contain plenty of anecdotes illustrating the principles described, making them very interesting and engaging. This is a useful book for anyone who wants to work on improving collaborative relationships.

A video review is available on my new site, BusinessLessons.org.

This is the first in a series of posts discussing themes from The Aid Trap by Glenn Hubbard and William Duggan. In chapter 1, the authors say that since the 1960s trillions of dollars in charity aid have failed to make a dent in poverty. They say that the projects run by government agencies and NGOs, funded by charity, have never lifted people out of poverty; it is business that creates the jobs that lift people out of poverty.

The World Bank provides an annual ranking of how easy it is for a local citizen to start and run a business. In the ranking for 2008, the three countries which receive the most aid per local dollar (Sao Tome, Guinea-Bissau and Malawi) were ranked at 163rd, 176th and 127th, respectively, out of 178 countries. There is a strong correlation between how hard it is to run a business and how poor a country is.

The authors say that charity for the purposes of giving people the basic food, clothing, shelter and medicine they need to survive is a good thing, and something that should continue. But aid for economic development needs to be redeployed from its current ineffective and counter-productive uses into support for the business sector. This is an interesting argument, and I will examine it in future posts.

The World Bank is substantially increasing its financing for countries in response to the global economic crisis, according to Vinod Thomas and Marvin Taylor-Dormond of the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group. A major problem for Africa has been the fall-off in private financial flows to developing countries from $1,200 billion on 2007 to $360 billion on 2009, and the poorer developing countries face as $12 billion financing gap.

To get economic growth back on track, it is essential to restart the private financial flows. It is also important that government fiscal stimulus spending be handled well, with spending directed to high-productivity areas such as key infrastructure projects and skills enhancement. Very few governments are actually doing the important work of analysing, tracking and evaluating project costs and benefits.

Unfortunately the countries which have the greatest poverty often have the governments and financial systems which are least equipped to deal skilfully with difficult economic situations. The World Bank can lend countries as much money as it likes, but life for the poorest people in the world will not improve until the systemic factors which keep them poor are removed.

Just over a year ago, the Ukrainian ship M V Faina made the headlines when it was the 26th ship captured by Somali pirates in 2008. The ship was held for several months until a ransom of US$3.2 million was paid and the ship was released. Some embarrassment was caused to the Kenyan government when it was rumoured that the cargo, consisting of 33 Soviet tanks and numerous other weapons including rocket-propelled grenades and anti-aircraft guns, was bound for Southern Sudan, in defiance of a peace agreement reached in 2005.

The Kenyan government claimed, somewhat unconvincingly, that the tanks and weapons had been ordered for the use of the Kenyan military. The Kenyan military must have had only a short-term use for the equipment, because – surprise, surprise – the tanks have now been spotted in southern Sudan. The build up of arms is threatening the fragile peace between north and south Sudan which was negotiated in 2005 after many years of civil war.

Citizens of the southern part are due to vote in a referendum next year on the question of whether southern Sudan should become independent of northern Sudan. It is expected that if the referendum is allowed to proceed in a fair manner, the vote will be overwhelmingly for independence. The northern-dominated predominantly Muslim government does not have a good reputation in the south or in the west of the country on human rights issues.

US President Abraham Lincoln signed the thirteenth amendment to the United States Constitution, prohibiting slavery, on this day 145 years ago. Some five years previously, the Republican Party’s candidate Abraham Lincoln had won the presidential election on an anti-slavery platform, and seven southern states seceded from the Union before Lincoln took office on 4th March 1861. The rebel states were joined by four others, and the American Civil War commenced.

In September 1862, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared the freedom of all slaves in Confederate states that did not return to the Union by 1st January 1863. The war dragged on for another two years, and 620,000 soldiers were killed, as were an unknown number of civilians. As 1865 arrived, it became apparent that the Union were winning, and in January the House of Representatives passed the Thirteenth Amendment.

Some of the states ratified the amendment immediately – Illinois being first on 1st February 1865 – while other states took longer. 18 states had ratified the amendment by the end of February. General Robert E Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S Grant in April, and the Confederate resistance essentially finished by mid year. The Thirteenth Amendment came into force in December 1865 after three quarters of the states had ratified it.

Paul’s defence before King Agrippa is described in Acts chapter 26. Paul tells of his upbringing and early life as a strict Pharisee, of his opposition to the followers of Jesus, and of his journey to Damascus with the intention of persecuting Christians. He then tells of his heavenly vision and encounter with Jesus, and how in the vision Paul was given the mission of being a witness for Jesus to many people.

It is interesting to observe the effect of what Paul said on his listeners. Governor Festus said, “Paul, you are crazy! Too much studying is driving you insane!” King Agrippa said, “Are you trying to make me a Christian so quickly?” The responses indicated that both listeners were feeling the magnetic pull of what Paul was saying. Something about the passion with which Paul spoke and the way the Holy Spirit was working through him made the listeners contemplate the possibility that what he said might be true.

There is always a similar moment of spiritual magnetism when someone first encounters Jesus. Evangelism is never solely an intellectual exercise in presenting the logical reasons for the existence of God. We like to rationalise our decisions as if they were made based solely on the facts, but a decision to believe that God really does exist and that Jesus is who he claims to be is an emotional and spiritual decision as well as a rational decision.