Nairobi, Sept. 2 -- This week the national carrier announced yet another leadership transition. An acting chief executive stepping down, the company secretary stepping up in an acting capacity, a substantive search promised.

Our founders' forum lit up. One member traced the cycles of which discipline gets the corner office: legal ruled once, gave way to finance, marketing and operations, and now returns. Another argued the business needs start-up energy at the top, not a steady hand.

This column is not about the airline. It is about the mirror it holds up to every founder and custodian. I kept asking the founder's question: if I owned this business, how would I have managed this transition? The founder in this case is a government, whos...