Corporate Leadership: Francis Okello’s Rise From the Lakeshore to the Boardroom

Corporate leader and legal mind, Francis Okello, the long-serving Group Chairman of TPS Serena Hotels Group, listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange, has launched his much-anticipated autobiography.

A first for a serving chairman of an NSE-listed firm, the memoir titled CONCERT OF LIFE- From the Lakeshore to the Boardroom, took 20 years to package. In capturing the journey of a man who has shaped boardrooms and businesses, it offers a rich chronicle of corporate leadership, public service, and personal resilience.

The grand unveiling was presided over by Philip Waki, a Retired Justice of the Court of Appeal, and who also serves as Judge of the UN Residual Special Court for Sierra Leone.  Mr Waki stated that the book narrates Okello’s life journey and experiences.

“He does this with dexterity, weaving his cultural world into modern business, and wading through the Anglophone world, where he trained in British or American-leaning business philosophy, but ended up working with corporations founded on Asian philosophy,” noted Waki.

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He added that Okello has used his story to unpack a highly insightful career journey in multiple sectors spanning five decades, and to decode the intricate web of the Aga Khan Development Network, comprising its economic arm, Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED), the Social Development arm that addresses Education, Health and Habitat issues through the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF), and the cultural arm, Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC).

Noting that Okello’s work on the autobiography was immensely inspirational, Waki announced that he would also write his own. “Mine is about a decision I made in my youth that my working life before retirement will be 30 years – 10 years as a Practicing Advocate,10 years as a Kenyan Judge, and 10 years as an international Judge, even though I have ended doing much longer stints,” said Waki.

Francis Okomo Okello described the memoir as an “enhancement of a welcome tradition which is just emerging and in which Kenyan corporate leaders have only in recent years begun to share the stories of their lives.”

He noted that beyond being his personal story, it is a mirror of Kenya’s growth, struggles, and triumphs across law, business, culture, and society. “It is a tribute to perseverance, modesty, and the conviction that grounding, integrity and inter-disciplinarity must be at the heart of corporate and public leadership,” he stated.

Mr Okelo added that in the book, he shares his stories with present and aspiring corporate leaders, professionals, entrepreneurs, academics, scholars, historians, and general readers, trusting that they will be inspired in their own journeys and to write their own stories.

He explained that the Concert of Life, From the Lakeshore to the Boardroom, is an “odyssey of self-discovery serving as a personal reflection and opening a window into the evolution of Kenya’s private sector and its role in the nation’s economic development.”

Okello posited that the book’s fundamental themes are identity, purpose, impact and significance, legacy, the centrality of family as the axis of our existence, and professional interdisciplinarity and polymathy. He pointed out that through these themes, the book is designed to complement the existing body of knowledge on Kenya’s and Africa’s leadership landscape and to enrich conversations on ethical or value-based leadership in Boardrooms and in thought leadership spaces in Kenya and beyond.

Furthermore, the book will serve as an inspiration for interdisciplinary problem-solving among professionals and entrepreneurs and create awareness of the need for professionals and entrepreneurs to consciously seek to be polymaths. Ultimately, he stated that the book will inspire more family-oriented historical narrative documentation and delivery, and trigger more corporate leaders to courageously reach for similar levels of vulnerability and share their individual stories with the public.

The event, attended by captains of industry, legal luminaries from the bench and bar as well as academia, academics, scholars, diplomats, and government officials, underscored Okello’s prominent stature as one of Kenya’s most visionary corporate leaders and guardians of governance ethics.

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