SunWords

Customer Care, Leadership, Sunny's Signal I had a really strange experience on Kenya Airways recently. Everything went right! It started at the check-in desk. A smiling young man greeted us and was all too willing to make a complicated change to our booking. Next, the lounge, where a chef full of early-morning fizz was making omelettes at a live egg station. Huh? That never happens.

Leadership, Strategy, Success, Sunny's Signal A recent assignment in Mauritius brought a strange bird back to mind. It is on the country’s coat of arms, and all over popular culture: public imagery, tourist shops, even stamps. The dodo. The dodo is extinct, though. Mauritius has turned the dodo into a national ghost with a commercial and emblematic afterlife. Raphus cucullatus lived solely on Mauritius, minding its own business, eating fruit, nesting on the ground, bothering no one.

Leadership, Life & Society, Sunny's Signal What if you were in the hands of someone who told you exactly what to do? Offered to remove the heaviest burden from your life: the burden of thinking? No more uncertainty. No more difficult choices. No more lonely judgment calls. Someone wiser than you has already seen the truth. Someone stronger than you has already named the enemy. Someone braver than you has already chosen the path. All you have to do is trust and obey. That offer sounds like comfort.

Customer Care, Sunny's Signal, Technology Since the COVID pandemic, many restaurants exclusively use digital menus. You scan a QR code from your table, get a menu on your phone, pick your dishes, even pay for them right there. Your first meaningful contact with a human being might be when the dishes are brought to your table. It’s quick, it generally works, it’s cheaper and more efficient than printing expensive menus and employing more young people to explain them. And yet.

Leadership, Life & Society, Success, Sunny's Signal Munchy_Monk went viral recently by asking why so many music concerts are being cancelled. The usual theories came out for inspection. Maybe the music is worse. Maybe young people no longer want to gather in person. Maybe they prefer consuming life through little glowing rectangles. Perhaps that is why cinemas are struggling too, and why young adults seem slower to buy houses, cars, weddings, prams, the whole caboodle of adulthood.

Leadership, Life & Society, Strategy, Success, Sunny's Signal Strategy, at its best, is one of humanity’s great gifts. It lifts our eyes when others are stuck in the mud of details. It helps us look ahead when most are wasting their days ruminating over the past, or maximizing returns in the present. Strategists are big-picture people. They see patterns others miss, connections others fail to make, consequences others are too hurried or too blinkered to notice.

Life & Society, Strategy, Sunny's Signal My weather app is great. It tells me exactly what benevolences—and challenges— the sky will bestow today. Hour by hour. My weather app is crap. When it warns me about heavy rain, the sun keeps smiling brightly. When it tells me to expect a warm and dry afternoon, the sky ends up laughing on my laundry. It’s been a long rainy season, and my app is correct about that. Where it goes wrong is in attempting to be too precise.

My dining table is more than 50 years old. My parents bought it when they moved house in the 1970s. It was a great novelty then: round, with a revolving centre for serving yourself, otherwise found only in the Chinese restaurants of the day. It was passed on to me a couple of decades ago. I looked at it the other day, and thought: this thing could easily last another 50 years. It is sturdy and stable. The revolving centre glides as smoothly as ever, and it still wears its original high-sheen varnish.

Life & Society, Strategy, Sunny's Signal You walk into a situation. Perhaps it’s a media briefing by a big corporate. The funeral of a noted politician. The birthday party of your kid’s best friend. Or a street in a war zone, after the smoke has cleared. What do you see? Tina Brown has had one of the great modern editing careers. Still in her twenties, she took over Tatler in Britain and made society journalism sharper, less deferential, more alive to the vanity and theatre of power.

I recently had to move out of a house my family had occupied for nearly a quarter of a century. It was a lovely old house from a bygone era, standing proud for more than 90 years. It had a Mediterranean vibe, with whitewashed walls and colourful creepers, and Italianate details and flourishes from another age. Our son was born there, and spent his entire childhood playing and growing within those thick walls and stained glass windows.