Africa’s best executives are held back by the very competence that promoted them, new book argues
On Saturday, October 31, 2026, the book, The Operator’s Trap: Why Africa’s Best Executives Never Truly Lead, and How the Ones Who Escape It Build Something That Lasts, published by Narrative Landscape Press, will be formally presented to the public. The book, by the governance and strategy adviser Dr Ini Abimbola, argues that the continent’s most capable executives are held at the operational level by the same competence that promoted them, and that the leadership models they were trained on were built for markets behaving nothing like their own, and preorders open today at https://narrativelandscape.com/products/the-operators-trap.
Dr Abimbola has spent more than twenty-five years advising institutions on governance, strategy and sustainability across the public and private sectors, including nine years as Chief Executive of ThistlePraxis Consulting, the management consulting firm she founded in 2010. The book draws on that advisory work inside Nigerian and West African organisations, and its central claim is that operational excellence, the quality that carries an executive up through the ranks, becomes the constraint that holds them in place once they arrive. Nobody warns them at the point of appointment, because the organisation has every reason to keep rewarding what it already values.
The book puts the cause in the conditions executives work under. Talent pipelines remain thin enough that delegation carries real risk, institutional processes often live in individuals rather than in documented systems, and the strategy models taught on most MBA programmes assume stable currencies, deep capital markets and predictable regulation that African markets do not reliably supply. Executives who fall back on operating under pressure respond rationally to the environment they work in, and the book treats what follows as a design problem with solutions.
“I spent years looking for this book before I wrote it,” said Abimbola. “I watched executives who were among the most capable people I had ever met make decisions well below their intelligence, and the reason was never ability. The tools they had been handed were built for a different environment, and this book is my attempt to give them something built for where they actually stand.”
The foreword is by Bola Adesola, Chairman of Ecobank Nigeria, who has spent more than three decades in banking. The Operator’s Trap runs to twelve chapters across four parts, supported by twenty-two frameworks and diagnostic tools gathered in a consolidated appendix. The chapters cover strategy in volatile markets, reading boards and stakeholders, the move from doing to deciding, strategy that survives economic instability, people and attrition as strategic issues, financial fluency for the executive who is not a finance specialist, cross-sector transition, women in the boardroom, communicating strategy to different audiences, and the measurement of execution. The argument is carried by a composite chief executive, Emmanuel Okafor, whom the reader follows across five years, a device intended to make the frameworks legible in practice as well as on the page.
The book will be available in paperback, hardcover and e-book on Amazon from 31 October 2026, and preorders placed now will be dispatched from October 12, 2026. A public presentation and launch will be held in Lagos on October 31, 2026, with attendance by invitation. Review copies, extracts and interview requests are available through the contact below, and organisations ordering 100 copies or more can arrange direct supply through the publisher.
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