I am often asked to summarize what I teach in a sentence. I cannot. But I can give three words, and the relationship between them is the lesson.
Sankofa
Sankofa is an Akan word and symbol: a bird looking backward while moving forward. It is usually translated as "go back and get it" — the idea that you cannot build wisely without retrieving what came before. I did not learn this as theory. I learned it first at a market stall in Nkongsamba, watching elders price goods by a logic that no business school had written down, and later again at MIT, watching engineers solve problems their predecessors had already half-solved twenty years earlier and forgotten.
Sankofa is not nostalgia. It is the discipline of returning to retrieve — a method, a value, a warning — and carrying it forward deliberately.
Ubuntu
Ubuntu is usually rendered as "I am because we are." In my work it means something specific and operational: no leader, no institution, and no system earns the right to call itself excellent if its excellence is measured apart from the people it touches. I have built curricula for hospitals, for aerospace technicians, and for university faculties on four continents. The metric that mattered in every one of them was never throughput alone. It was whether the people inside the system still had their dignity at the end of it.
Ihsan
Ihsan is an Islamic concept of excellence that goes beyond correctness — doing something not merely well, but beautifully, as if it were being witnessed by something larger than the task itself. It is the standard I hold for operational work: a Lean Six Sigma deployment, a course design, a leadership program. Competence is the floor. Ihsan is the ceiling.
Why hold the three together
Sankofa without Ubuntu becomes mere tradition, disconnected from the people living today. Ubuntu without Ihsan becomes good intentions without rigor. Ihsan without Sankofa becomes excellence with no memory, liable to repeat the mistakes of the very systems it replaces.
I did not invent any of these three words. I inherited them, from three different places I have called home. My contribution, if I have one, is refusing to let them stay separate — and insisting that an institution can be measured by all three at once.