The Bench

Songhai Management Team
Arrojah Adade-Boafo

Mr. Arrojah Adade-Boafo has 30 years of experience in the information technology industry. He spent 15 year with IBM as a management consultant serving multiple industries including Energy, Telecom, Media & Entertainment, Insurance, Health, & Education. An enterprise systems strategy and implementation expert, Mr. Adade-Boafo has led the acquisition, management, and implementation of strategies for technology innovation projects in the Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) space for U.S. Fortune 100 organizations and the U.S. Government. As a technology innovation implementer, Mr. Adade-Boafo has led the implementation of Smart Grid technology for firms in the U.S. Energy & Utilities sector.

Laila Owusu

Laila Owusu has over 20 years of experience in the Sales and the Education fields. She has served in a variety of roles in operations, sales and employee development . She is passionate about communication, education, and the intersection of those 2 disciplines in driving employee engagement on projects, strategy and company culture. She is a Senior Director at the Practice School responsible for the Fierce & Relentless Program module for Workforce Performance Management. Laila is a co-founder and the current president of The X-Team, a non-profit organization which champions the rights and promote the welfare Under-Privileged children in the Ghanaian society.
She is a team player who encompasses strong leadership as well as great interpersonal skills with excellent communication skills.

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Aku Kwapong

Aku Kwapong brings more than 20 years of strategy and operational experience from several Fortune 50 companies including Microsoft, GE Capital, Deutsche Bank and The Royal Bank of Scotland, and most recently led the restructuring of a hotel group in Spain as part of Songhai’s tie-up with the Park Street Advisors private equity group.  He brings a wealth of experience from GE Capital and Deutsche Bank from building out multi-assetdsecuritization platform, a value-based metric management system, and a back-office validation & control framework for a fixed income business.

He served as COO with Royal Bank of Scotland, where he led the restructuring of its global Credit & ABS business.  Until recently, he served as the head of strategy and new markets overseeing global credit electronic trading business, overseeing operational execution of strategy; including regulatory imperatives, risk management, implementing supervisory framework, and overall profitability of the EMEA Credit & Mortgage Markets.

partner@songhai.com

MBA, Finance Engineering, MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, MA
PhD – Systems Dynamics & Control, Columbia University, New York, NY
BS & SM – Chemical Engineering, MIT, Cambridge, MA
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Vince Kwapong

Vince Kwapong is a GE certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt with over 25 years experience delivering productivity improvement at fortune 50 companies.  Previous roles included Global Operations Leader at Johnson & Johnson, Operations Leader at General Electric, and Director of Operations Excellence at United Technologies.  A graduate of MIT and Carnegie Mellon, with MBA in Finance & Strategy from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.

vkwapong@songhai.com

MBA, Finance & Strategy, University of Michigan Business School, Ann Arbor, MI
MSE, Industrial & Operations Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
MS, Metallurgical Engineering & Materials Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
BS, Electrical Engineering, MIT, Cambridge, MA
c4fbb0_bdfda734cdc44c0cbdbc6afb6d3ae160-mv2L. Mitchell

L. Mitchell has over 25 years experience with fortune 500 companies having served in a variety of roles ranging from applications engineering to operations, employee development, and HR systems design.  She has done work across the globe including operations excellence training in Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe. Previous stints include varying positions of responsibilities at Whirlpool, Proctor & Gamble, and IBM. Her areas of expertise cover business process improvement, organizational design and corporate audits.

Ms. Mitchell has Executive MBA training in Management Development from USC Marshall School of Business, Los Angeles, CA and HR Certification from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

lam@songhai.com

Management Development Program, USC Marshall School of Business, Los Angeles, CA
HR Certification, Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Ithaca, NY
BS – Mechanical Engineering, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY
Kwaku Appiah-Adu (Partner Emeritus)

Kwaku Appiah-Adu is Professor of Strategy and Dean at Central University Business School. Previously, he was Head of Government’s Office of Policy Coordination, Monitoring and Evaluation, Chairman of Ghana’s Oil and Gas Technical Committee, member of the President’s Investors’ Advisory Council and Advisory Board for the UN Initiative on Continental Shelf Delineation. Earlier Kwaku was a project manager in the UK construction industry, overseeing the development of residential, industrial, retail and office projects. In consulting, he worked with PwC where he led the policy, strategy and management consulting team to drive strategic and operational transformation in Ghana’s banking, insurance, hospitality, media and education sectors, among others.

An author of several books and over 100 publications, Kwaku has researched extensively into industry/competitor analysis, corporate/competitive strategies, product/service innovation and customer/market orientation in the manufacturing and services industries. He has facilitated workshops in corporate and market strategies globally and been elected to the ANBAR Hall of Excellence for Outstanding Contribution to the Literature and Body of Knowledge.

kappiahadu@songhai.com

MBA, Marketing & Finance, University of Cardiff Business School Cardiff, UK
PhD – Strategy, Middlesex University, London, UK
BSc & PG Dip – Architecture, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology, Kumasi, Ghana