My story
My parents arrived in the UK from Kenya in the early 1970s with the kind of suitcase you can carry by yourself. What they built afterwards – a family, a foothold, a life their children could plan from rather than just survive – shaped the way I think about leadership long before I had a word for it.
For twenty years I worked at the senior end of corporate life. The titles were good. The rooms I sat in were the kind people fight to be invited to. And for a long stretch of that, I was tireder than I knew, performing a version of myself I no longer entirely recognised.
The pivot was not dramatic. It rarely is. It started with Covid – the week before the UK went into lockdown in March 2020. My whole household of six went down with it. My father was in intensive care. So was I. He didn’t come out.
