There is a discernible leadership crisis creeping upon our society. At the moment, the crisis manifests itself in a number of ways, chief among which are the following: the amount of ordinary people who have neither understanding nor personal experience of effective leadership; the amount of historically privileged people who think leadership is merely about opportunistic competence; the amount of previously disadvantaged people who think leadership is only about simplistic legitimacy; the poor performance of our education system – historically and currently – as well as the high levels of self-centredness and lawlessness.

Many people in our society and throughout the world honour Nelson Mandela`s leadership brilliance without necessarily understanding it or making an effort to learn where it derived its effectiveness from. They think Mandela became a great leader when he was released from prison, when he was elected as president of the country or when he was inaugurated as such. They do not realize that Nelson Mandela became a great leader based on the many risky and painful personal decisions he took during crucial moments in his life. Those moments include leaving his own mother to suffer in his absence when he was fighting apartheid, even though he knew he was her only son; starting negotiations with his jailers when he knew many consensus-minded comrades in his organisation disagreed with him. He also, very importantly, demonstrated the greatness of his leadership model when he worked hard, during very uncertain times, to convince his constituency to allow our rugby to retain the springbok emblem.

It is against this backdrop of clearly inimitable leadership performance that we have to contemplate how we are going to find or produce our new leaders. Fortunately for us, the grandest challenge confronting the post-apartheid South African society in the current epoch is not to try and produce another Nelson Mandela for another classic David and Goliath narrative. That is mainly because our current area of engagement is not an area in which an individual or a small group of individuals can win the prize on behalf of millions of people. Our current area of operation requires every individual to be meaningfully engaged in their personal capacity in order for both the individual and the collective to make the requisite progress. Sadly, though, it is an area in which many other societies across the world, which also had great founding fathers as in the case of South Africa, still went on to fail afterwards.

Our current efforts have to be focused on trying to develop enough willing and effective leaders who can mentor people both young and old. We need to produce enough willing and effective leaders capable of designing and implementing innovative strategies to address the behavioural and technical learning needs of millions of ordinary people in order to help them defeat their various forms of poverty. Contrary to what many people believe, the fundamental cause of the endemic suffering in the new-order South African society is something other than the purported failure of democratic governments to provide service delivery.

The endemic suffering has resulted primarily from successive oppressive governments, with the connivance of powerful private capital organisations, taking active steps, over decades and centuries, to prevent the majority of people in our society from discovering and embracing self-driven life-long learning as the most dynamic and sustainable way to create value and live human life. The purposeful exclusion of the majority of citizens was so that they could not become competent and compete for opportunities and resources in the open market against people favoured by the establishment. The poverty or disempowerment resulting from the exclusion is of two main types: material poverty and psychological or mental poverty.

Different forms of discrimination or disempowerment will always come and go among humans. But a form of discrimination that is likely to endure is discrimination on the basis of learning, meaning the good that one knows, understands and can put into practice. Simply put, that means discrimination on the basis of competence or skilled knowledge. And it must be noted here that discrimination on the basis of competence or skilled knowledge is recognized by societies as a legitimate – legally and morally – form of discrimination. This is despite the fact that many developing countries, including South Africa, are scarcely able to provide decent education to half of their populations.

Admittedly, there are many things that need to be done to rid our society of the scourge of unnecessary discrimination, and many of them are already being done with varying degrees of progress. But the most durable insurance against needless yet destructive discrimination is learning. Learning ensures that one is able to knowledgeably steer one`s own life, one cannot be locked out of debates one has interest in and, most importantly, one cannot be forced to revert to mob-inspired destructive behaviours to win battles and prizes, hoping that the mobs one operates within will cover for individual failings forever. Indeed some people in our society go on to suffer for the rest of their lives for deeds they commit in the seductive comfort of mob security, like when they are denied economic opportunities later in their lives because of crimes against their names.

Whereas it is true that the notorious trio of self-interest, incompetence and lawlessness within our society make achieving our national developmental goals extremely difficult, it is critical that we do not lose sight of the fact that our most realistic opportunity is holistic people development in order to ensure that people learn to do things for themselves. The pathologies of self-interest, incompetence and lawlessness are known to thrive in conditions where learning levels are low and the majority of people have neither skill nor confidence to demand accountability. It is my firm belief that no government or political party anywhere in the world can deal successfully with developmental issues on the scale demanded by the post-apartheid South African situation without genuinely returning the power of people development and talent management to the centre stage.

What we need as a society to avoid total failure and collapse is neither a new government nor a new political party. What we need is a leadership pact or contract with our citizens to move positive human energy and ingenuity to the fore. We need to have a contract with our people, which will allow us to unleash the potential of the majority of ordinary people to serve as our engine of growth and development. What we need is to produce leaders, mentors and role models to assist ordinary people to forge or buy into a spirit of wanting to do the most with the least by embracing the concepts of self-leadership and mentorship. Currently, our society is on a trajectory that spends too much to produce too little, depleting irreplaceable resources in the process. Old and young people, even those in privileged circumstances, do very little strategic learning and succumb to destructive behaviours, which does nothing to move them closer to realizing their dreams or taking Nelson Mandela`s dream forward through their talents. Robust people development programmes will make it easier even for our government to perform two of its primary functions, namely to provide a supportive environment in the form of infrastructure and, very critically in our situation, to restore confidence in our society by protecting people against wanton self-centredness and lawlessness.

Oppression has always been about appropriation of resources and power. In our society it has been consistently enforced in two main ways: physical violence and deprivation of learning. Again fortunately for us, Nelson Mandela and his class have done plenty of good work to reduce spaces for physical violence as a means to enforce suffering upon people. However, reversing the high levels of incompetence, corruption and hubris, which resulted mainly from an officially sanctioned poor learning culture, is likely to prove to be a great challenge for many decades. Legalised oppression did not only deny the majority of people access to learning. It also provided poor learning to the minority, teaching many of them to worship technical or mechanical compliance methods, protecting them against fair competition and encouraging them to treat their fellow citizens as subhumans. On the other hand, it must also be emphasized that though education plays a very important role in the process of developing and exercising effective leadership, effective leadership is not merely a function education. Personal characteristics such as talent, effort, resourcefulness and moral fibre still play significant roles in determining the success of leadership interventions.

What needs to be made abundantly clear is that what keeps millions of ordinary people down in our society is not the type of high profile case that kept Mandela in jail for more than a quarter of a century and attracted enormous world attention. Ordinary people are kept down by a plethora of individual barriers and impediments, which are caused by a combination of apathy on the part of many ordinary people themselves and the self-serving tendencies of people in the corridors of power across the entire spectrum of our societal institutions. Indeed many ordinary people are held back by their own high levels of ignorance or indifference to learning as well as their exposure to dysfunctional forms of leadership as practiced by many people in control of opportunities and resources.

These realities, which affect ordinary people with devastating effect in their individual capacities, make it difficult for our society to unleash the potential of enough individuals to make the difference or progress we desperately need. It is the cumulative effect of these realities, in the long run, which will prove to have an even deadlier impact upon our society than the combination of both the armed struggle of the liberators and the total onslaught of the oppressors. Only learning-based self-leadership by ordinary people and their effective mentorship by competent patriots can provide ordinary people with the competence and independence they need to co-operate when they choose and compete when necessary. Competence and independence do not only give people the tools they need to make their much-needed contributions to God`s world. They also grant them the freedom to respond appropriately to other people`s behaviours, irrespective of whether those behaviours are meant to compliment or compartmentalize.

It is important to stress that leadership is not a human being, a position, an institution, power or resources. Leadership is a spirit. It is a spirit of wanting to co-operate willingly with other people to do positive work for the common good. It is a spirit characterised by significant levels of awareness, skills, courage and persistence or resilience. Most importantly, leadership is about caring for people. Caring for people starts with caring for oneself, based on a brand of leadership called self-leadership. Currently, among the greatest risks in our society is the reality that people both young and old have very little chances of finding and working with a leader who knows what they are doing and can positively influence their lives. We have not done sufficient effective leadership training historically and are still not tackling the matter with the decisiveness it requires.

Without effective leadership at all the right levels of our society, especially the community member and the worker levels, the debate in our society about economic empowerment or transformation will go on ad nauseam. But it will go on without doing anything concrete to avert the looming catastrophic intersection between the growing desperation of the downtrodden masses and the headstrong attitudes of the privileged. And the privileged will continue to pretend that the so-called trickle-down effects of the free market system will provide answers for our predicament. As this happens, the majority of ordinary people continue to derive little benefit for themselves from the new dispensation. They derive even less positive benefit for their families and derive the least possible benefit for their communities. We need to cultivate a robust culture of self-leadership and mentorship and we need to do it fast.

Gibson Sakong
Executive Chairman – Montshepetja Academy

]]> http://www.montshepetja.co.za/developing-self-leadership-doing-the-most-with-the-least/feed 2 http://www.montshepetja.co.za/tribute-to-the-courage-of-joseph-blatter http://www.montshepetja.co.za/tribute-to-the-courage-of-joseph-blatter#comments Fri, 11 Jun 2010 08:14:14 +0000 admin http://www.montshepetja.co.za/?p=346 In June and July 2010, Joseph Blatter will finally achieve his long-standing goal of bringing the FIFA World Cup to South Africa as a country and Africa as a continent. Joseph Blatter proudly spearheaded the campaign to bring the World Cup to South Africa and Africa in order to make it work for some of the most disadvantaged people of the world. It is important that ordinary people know and pay homage to the critical role played by this distinguished fellow in delivering the prestigious FIFA World Cup tournament to our country and continent.

The following words were said by Steve Biko in 1971: “We reject the power-based society of the Westerner that seems to be ever concerned with perfecting their technological know-how while losing out on their spiritual dimension. We believe that in the long run the special contribution to the world by Africa will be in this field of human relationship. The great powers of the world may have done wonders in giving the world an industrial and military look, but the great gift still has to come from Africa – giving the world a more human face.”

Steve Biko`s words above are a timeless challenge to Africans everywhere to step forward with courage and build their continent. There will not be many better opportunities to present Africa to the world as a continent of progress and success than during the 2010 FIFA World Cup in our own country, South Africa. We should rejoice that FIFA has as its leader at this point in history a man who understands how power works.

Joseph Blatter is not by any means among the most educated people on earth, yet he ranks without doubt among the most learned ones. And he is probably not among the cleanest. Yet he is certainly among the most courageous. His antagonists from the materially richer regions of our world have pursued him with allegations of corruption from day one, because they fear his sense of justice and palpable capacity for good.

May people are not aware that Joseph Blatter worked hard to bring the FIFA World Cup to Africa long before he became president of the organisation. They think all he did was to say no when some crazy but powerful people wanted to take it away from us on some flimsy excuses long after it had become ours. Joseph Blatter made bringing the FIFA World Cup to Africa one of the primary missions of his life and prepared well for it. That is part of the reason why his enemies who woke up yesterday to the news of the World Cup already on the way to Africa can do nothing to stop it. This was yet another classic case of privileged people sleeping through a revolution.

FIFA itself, like any organisation in world with a lot of power, is not clean and was used to serve the privileged parts of the universe since its first tournament in 1934 without many of the complaints we hear today. The antagonists of Joseph Blatter are prepared to keep quiet about the imperfections of FIFA and its leaders when it services their favourite parts of the world. They find every excuse to raise false alarms when it reaches out to disadvantaged people. Sadly for them and fortunately for us, Joseph Blatter has not just studied and mastered the subject of power but he has demonstrated incredible ability to put his learning into practice.

Joseph Blatter said the following words after the decision to discontinue the rotation system was made: “The rotation system has served its purpose and has enabled us to award our most prestigious competition to Africa for the first time and, depending on tomorrow`s decision, to South America for the first time in many years.”

Joseph Blatter is among the very few people on the world stage who know that democracy is judged on both process and outcome. He knows that whereas form is not unimportant, it cannot substitute for substance. He knows that whereas postulating from the pulpit has its merits, toiling in the trenches is what really makes a difference. He knows that organisations have no lives except for the lives of people within them. He knows that organisations have no way of doing good except for the deliberate good deeds of people within them, especially those in leadership positions.

The story of Joseph Blatter is a shining example of how the world can rid itself of the injustices built over centuries within international institutions. Whether we like it or not, the resources of the world have been distributed in a lopsided and unfair way throughout the centuries using many winner-takes-all approaches based on military power, political subjugation, economic exploitation, cultural annihilation, intellectual disempowerment, spiritual disorientation. etc.

We trust that Joseph Blatter, assisted admittedly by the talents and sacrifices of many honourable people, of whom our own Nelson Mandela is chief, has set a blueprint on the world stage for a courageous epoch of enlightenment and justice. We trust that other leaders within powerful international institutions such as the United Nations, which is fast approaching 2015 without having made much progress with its Millennium Developmental Goals, will take a leaf out of his book.

The Word Economic Forum and the International Monetary Fund are other institutions whose leaders can learn from the inspired leadership of Joseph Blatter. We also hope the economic and political shake-ups in major countries such as the US, the UK, Greece, etc, will provide further evidence that well-known human frailties such as greed, incompetence, irresponsibility and plain corruption are not the lot of poor people or countries alone.

The world will always depend on men and women who understand how power works to make sure it is used creatively and positively before it starts to become a force of evil or it does irreversible evil or damage. In our own country, we trust that government and business leaders can jettison their feeble efforts and embrace the art of using courageous engagement to dismantle the edifices of injustice once and for all.

Although many organisations sing the mantra of diversity and mutual respect, they are festering with inbreeding, hoarding and self-interest and reduce many of their stakeholders to toyitoying beyond locked gates. The world requires more and more learned men of courage who understand how power works and who can purposefully seek it, find it and use it to reverse the incalculable injustices of our times.

The world and nations everywhere require courageous people who will work knowledgeably from within organisations to ensure that the fine features of their organisations are sustained when those locked outside by greed and self-interest start pushing for opportunity and real change. Joseph Blatter himself, by his own admission, was inspired by Nelson Mandela, who is a world acclaimed icon on the use of power to free mankind from mankind.

Many people are made uncomfortable by the abrasive style of Joseph Blatter, which is evident especially when there are people who want to stand in the path of what he considers to be right. What many people do not quite understand is that the abrasiveness comes from his understanding of how power and privilege work. He knows that many people are cocooned in privilege and that enlightened abrasiveness or stubbornness is the most appropriate antidote against that, especially if, as a leader, he wants to do justice and see progress within the lifetimes of his beneficiaries.

Many educated people have mastered articulation and eloquence at the expense sincerity and delivery. Many uneducated people we see and meet in our lives do not interpret language but behaviour. As educated people learn more and more words, the uneducated people watch more and more behaviour. The greatest enemy of education and progress is not the uneducated but the educated themselves who fail to match their eloquence with behaviour.

Maybe we should recall words from yet another eminent citizen of the world, namely Emperor Haile Selassie, an African colossal who played a pivotal role in ensuring that colonialism never came to Ethiopia:

“I assert that the issue before the Assembly today is not merely a question of the settlement in the matter of Italian aggression. It is a question of collective security; of the very existence of the League, of the trust placed by states in international treaties; of the value of promises made to small states that their integrity and independence shall be respected and assured. In a word, it is international morality that is at stake.”

Haile Selassie was appealing in vain to the League of Nations to intervene. Whatever their reasons were on the fateful day of 30 June 1936, the leaders assembled in Geneva never intervened and the emperor was to be exiled from his country for five years. For various reasons, the issue of the FIFA World Cup allocation has become an issue of international morality.

Joseph Blatter and his lieutenants inside and outside of FIFA have shown the world that they are friends of Africa and the disadvantaged people of the world. The best way Africans in general, and South Africans in particular, can honour the great act of leadership on the part of Joseph Blatter is to ensure we have a successful 2010 FIFA World Cup. This journey of success must be championed by Bafana Bafana delivering credible performances from the pitch. We must all play our humble parts and pray for African success.

Gibson Sakong

Executive Chairman – Montshepetja Academy

I must admit that there is a lot of truth in the view, often expressed, that South Africa is probably among the very few countries in the world that have had to deal with the dual challenges of economic development and democratisation on a large scale at the same time. Many societies that have had to deal with the challenge of a fast-paced economic development did not have to grapple with democratisation issues on the scale that South Africa now faces. The same goes for countries whose major challenge was democratisation. Many of them operated from a better economic base compared to South Africa.

So our important challenge as a society is not just how to grow the economic cake. We also have to contend with the equally important question of how to distribute it with convincing levels of fairness and justice. The situation is complicated even further when we consider that, for various reasons, many of the people who possess or control the bulk of the economic resources, the old ones as well as those with newly acquired fortunes, are not believed by the majority of their compatriots to possess or control those resources legitimately.

It is very easy for people to argue, as many do, that we cannot share the economic cake without first growing it. That makes perfect sense and very few people will waste time trying to dispute it. But what many people with practical experience related to the behaviours of those in positions of power in our society want to see is evidence, with integrity, that we are sharing it the right way in areas where it is already possible to do so.

One thing that I must state very categorically here is that as a society, sometimes we are too quick to offer blanket amnesties. Blanket amnesties breed poor accountability and with poor accountability comes the erosion of value in society. The past sixteen years have seen big and powerful organisations, including the state, struggle to play leadership roles in the process of transforming our society. This has created an undeniable challenge for individuals and small institutions with courage and creativity to play breakthrough leadership roles.

Our society must stop pretending that the business organizations and other economic entities we have inherited from the old order will solve the massive developmental challenges – including democratisation – we face as a country. Every time I listen to or read about public or private business managers talking about their plans and what they want to achieve, I am left with a strong feeling that some really competent people are making good plans to achieve success for our economy and country. I become seriously impressed with what people are doing for our society.

The picture changes completely, however, when I come to know how many workers or employees our organizations have laid off in the last decade or two in order to increase or maintain their profit margins. Or how many jobs disappeared from the books of those organizations consistently in that period. The picture gets even worse when I visit communities where the former employees returned after they were laid off.

Life in many of our communities can be summarized in a few lines: many people have nothing to show after spending half their lifetimes working for big companies in towns and cities. High levels of anti-social behaviour are prevalent and are accompanied by general filth and squalor. More and more children are born into and brought up in those conditions. I regard this situation as nothing but a time bomb waiting to go off.

Our society`s performance deficits as related to job creation, training and development, productivity improvement, income per capita and, most critically, Gini coefficient need urgent action. We need effective strategies to deal with all these challenges. We urgently need strategies that are capable of turning around the fortunes of our country in a meaningful way for the sake of our society now as well as the societies of future generations. Those strategies must be able to make sure that our democracy and its attendant advantages materialize for the benefit of all or the majority.

At the moment, many of our people are brutally locked out of economic opportunities on the one hand while being tempted by agents provocateurs of all kinds to succumb to lives of crime and dishonour, on the other hand. But their sense of humanity and loyalty to the great ideals of their society continue to give them reason to hope that the privileged and more fortunate among us, like me and many others, will find the vision and courage needed to help them to move to and occupy their places in the sun. Our common humanity seems to give them reason to believe that those of us with good fortune will see the impending doom and move fast to create new institutions and opportunities to accommodate more of our people.

I say the more fortunate because good fortune and privilege are what the edifice of our society is founded on. We are a society that glorifies privilege and comfort and puts them ahead of talent and effort. And that is part of the reason why our society is not making the necessary progress in many critical areas of our development programme. Good fortune is fickle and can never have the dynamism of genuine talent. Good fortune is not innovative and cannot grow the base of our economy and facilitate transformation and improved opportunity distribution.

The greatest disservice being done to our society by the privileged and more fortunate is not merely that many of them lack the preparation or desire to perform in their exalted positions. The greatest harm done to our society by the privileged and more fortunate is that they deny that they are privileged in the first place. This is the greatest obstacle or tragedy we have to deal with before we can make any headway on the road to full democracy and economic development. To deny that they are privileged is a form of dishonesty on their part that actually borders on fraud, or even treason. We need decisive plans and action on this issue as a matter of urgency.

In line with the national reconstruction plan of embracing politics of rehabilitation instead of politics of replacement, we need the privileged members of our society to admit their histories and positions of privilege. We need them to admit that our society has unfairly privileged them. That is so that we can use them and the resources they control to strategically influence the difficult process of transformation and equitable opportunity distribution in our society. We have very tough decisions that need to be made and implemented with conviction but we cannot start with that till we have put some fundamentals in place.

At the moment, there are three issues that need urgent attention if we are to avoid the catastrophe that many people are starting to sense. All three of them are related to the one area that apartheid did its utmost to frustrate, namely the supremacy of talent. The first is that we have not shown the vision and courage to strengthen our education system appropriately at all levels to ensure that everybody who is supposed to be in school is indeed in school and is receiving the best possible form of education.

The second is that we have not moved with speed and purpose to ensure that every inch of our national space is recognized and utilized as a space for learning. The last one is that we have not shown the courage required to take people with special abilities, many of them admittedly having been unfairly privileged by our society, provided them with incentives and disincentives and put them in special positions to positively impact the process of transforming our society.

Many white people, who have lived privileged lives for decades under apartheid, today refuse to acknowledge that privilege and say we must blame their ancestors for what went wrong in our society. Many black people – even BEE beneficiaries – who have had privileges in the last sixteen years of democracy claim they have no association with affirmative action and that they became overnight millionaires purely as a result of their own talent and hard work. Some young people enjoying better educational opportunities at our prestigious institutions also believe the generations of their grandparents and parents as well as their siblings with little or no schooling are somebody else`s problem.

So the window of opportunity we have as a country slips away tragically as everyone feathers their own nests and shouts esoteric solutions from ivory towers. It is this chasm between the privileged and the poorest of the poor which threatens to swallow the country that worries many people today. One of the most frightening things to ever witness in our society is lack of proper dialogue or engagement between the various segments of our society.

It makes one both sad and fearful to see how people, especially young people, regularly come out of homes, churches and schools and start to loot and burn private and public property with impunity. The connections between each young person and their parents or guardians at home, their pastor at church and their teacher at school are supposed to make the young person think twice before involving themselves in behaviours full of illegality. But many adult people are disconnected from the youth and have long given up on trying to positively influence young people in our society, which is a sad thing indeed.

But what is even worse is their reason for giving up. The behaviours of many adult people leave much to be desired. They steal from their society and seriously abuse many of their democratic rights every day with the full knowledge of their kids. While some adult people do those things because of their desperate economic conditions and low levels of consciousness, many still do those things because of greed. Many people in our society chase technical competency with all speed and pay little or no attention to matters of behaviour or character.

The solution to problems related to people behaviour, whether old or young is always role modelling or leading by example. If adult people see themselves as being untouchable and being accountable only to themselves, then we have no chance as a society. I have been privileged to visit some important places in my society and must say here that it is frightening to see how many people carrying massive institutional power are accountable to nobody.

We need strategies to influence the behaviours of our people through meaningful engagement, utilizing companionship, mentorship and other forms of meaningful contact instead of relying on the police to use guns to deal with crowds when a protest march is already on and emotions are high. Incentives must be provided and people with credibility in the eyes of the poor can be encouraged to engage them creatively. This must be done in order to reduce the amount of people available to turn a peaceful march into an orgy of anger and destruction where property that took decades and centuries to put together is looted and burnt in minutes or seconds.

Whether we like it or not, we have to deal with the issue of men and women who, among other things, bring into the world kids they can neither take care of nor really need. We have to tackle the matter of young adults who fail to turn their companies into super universities. We have to deal with the situation of children who refuse to stay long enough in school to make sense of things and reap benefits. In dealing with all these things and many others needing serious attention in our society, the most effective strategy is positive engagement and the first step is to earn the respect of the people involved.

The government and the private sector must co-operate to create or support viable initiatives which can be used by competent people, with patience and skills, within their ranks to penetrate communities strategically and diffuse the time-bomb that threatens everyone. Both sets of privileged members of our society – privileged by both apartheid and affirmative action – who control resources must be willing to play meaningful roles and shun selfishness. The young people at higher educational institutions whose tutelage is paid for by our economy must also join the effort by providing knowledge and reasoning to the process instead of joining on the side of the problem. The whole effort must focus on returning community life to its rightful place as the centre of our society.

At the moment the less fortunate multitudes continue to wait in dwindling hope. They continue to dream of having opportunities to do something not only for themselves, but for their society as well. They want to earn the honour of creating or producing something valuable for more than just themselves. They want to feel their lives and efforts are worth something. They want to arrive at the end of their lives with some semblance of satisfaction and fulfilment.

The one thing we must never do is to doubt the ability of ordinary people to see sense and follow good leadership. Irrespective of whether they sit in bins of bakkies and trucks on half-tarred roads between their rural villages and their workplaces, or they trudge mysteriously along long hauls from their townships to their small towns, or they scavenge for food in rubbish bins within big cities, the difficulties of their situations are there for all to witness. They make you feel that they know each one of them has more honour and glory than all of us privileged people put together.

The grace and self-sacrifice with which the poor people of our country take their fate sometimes makes me fear that perhaps they know something I do not know. I must admit that at times they make me fear maybe they are planning some crime or evil against me and other more fortunate people. There is a pressing challenge for many of us, the privileged ones to stop taking ourselves too seriously. What we do as human beings in this world is so imperfect, so uncertain and so unclear. We need to stop taking ourselves and our ways too seriously. We need to give other people a chance to have a go at this game. We just cannot be right taking ourselves so seriously with so many people looking on so submissively.

That is precisely why I end up fearing that perhaps they know something I do not know. Or that they are attuned to something I have no connection with. They make me fear they know they are right and I am wrong. Or that they will be found to have been right all along when it really matters. Or how else do I explain their peaceful demeanour despite their daily miseries. Or how else do I explain how they bear the injustices arraigned against them with such aplomb and fortitude? Or how do I explain the fear and unease in my heart? When I look at how they treat their own security, I discover the reason why they seem not to care about mine. They certainly cannot feel much about my security when they live with so little security themselves.

We must try hard not to let people close to us, those who touch our knees or shoes with theirs as they shake our hand, we must try hard to prevent them from making it difficult for us to see the forlorn human faces right behind them. We must try hard to remind ourselves that not only do those forlorn human faces also belong to God, but that they also deserve their fair share of God`s abundance and generosity.

Gibson Sakong
Executive Chairman – Montshepetja Academy

I believe that whereas many homes, churches, schools, workplaces, playgrounds and other places where members of our society converge are engaged in good work, too many people continue to fall through the cracks primarily as a result of the long-term effects of apartheid.

I believe that whereas the transformation agenda of our society is vast, its two make-or-break challenges are how we are going to put our most capable people in front so that they can lead and how we are going to build capacity in the majority so that they can play their own roles.

I believe that whereas poverty and suffering are the lot of mankind and both poor people and rich people are aware of this fact, it is the sponsored nature of the poverty in our society that makes poor people find it both intolerable and unacceptable.

I believe that whereas the preservation of existing value as well the creation of new value are critical for the functioning and progress of our society, it is important to realize that it is the inequitable distribution of value that landed our society in the current quagmire

I believe that whereas the past blood-curdling war of political apartheid killed many people and left their loved ones in unimaginable pain, it is the current bloodless war of economic apartheid that kills even more people through deprivation of opportunity and promotion of ignorance.

I believe that whereas the strategy in the former phase of the liberation struggle was to mobilize the might of the muscle or the masses, the strategy in the current phase of the liberation struggle must be to mobilize the might of the mind.

I believe that whereas the majority in the previous phase operated the frontlines to confront bullets and bombs in support of their leaders, the leaders must in the current phase operate the frontlines to engage knowledge and education in support of the majority.

I believe that whereas the savagery of political apartheid in the former age required the bravery of soldiers and the resilience of victims, the callousness of economic apartheid in the current age requires the courage of patriots and the responsibility of citizens.

The organisation

I believe that whereas some organisations might have served people well in the past by providing them with guns and walls as a safety curtain, it is the duty of capable people today to protect their organisations through constructive engagement and reasoning.

I believe that whereas it is imperative for our organisations to produce people with the technical competence to build and lead robust organisations, it is also vital to produce people whose character and integrity can defend society against undemocratic institutions.

I believe that whereas organisations are effective in bringing people and resources together to work towards achieving common purposes, the mayhem they are known to cause when their immense institutional power is usurped or transferred into inappropriate hands calls for caution.

I believe that whereas organisations are vehicles for progress in any society, they cannot substitute for capable individuals and many organisations have spent decades using the resources of our society to promote incompetence and dependence in people.

I believe that whereas the current government and business leaders command the political and economic power to move mountains, the sheer scale of commitment, competence and moral rectitude required to reverse the ravages of apartheid will be difficult and long in coming.

I believe that whereas apartheid was concocted and effected in collusions between previous government and business leaders, its worst victims are communities and its ultimate defeat will not be seen until communities themselves take ownership of the fight for transformation.

I believe that whereas it is natural that every parent will want to give their own children the best support or resources possible, creative steps need to be taken at community level to ensure appropriate support for all children through processes of championships and companionships.

The individual

I believe that whereas citizens should determine for themselves the type of success they desire for their lives, from wanting to take care of their families to wanting to help heal our society, the tendency by progressive people to disown their poor communities is self-defeating.

I believe that whereas I am committed to the concept of becoming a companion for someone in order to share my knowledge and provide guidance to help build individual leadership capacity, I recognise the need for me to first become a champion of my own worthy cause.

I believe that whereas background plays a significant role in determining the future of young people, I am aware that life will reward each person not on the basis of extravagance but on the basis of the value the individual creates out of nothing or adds to what already exists.

I believe that whereas trying to find inspiration in our immediate environments is often difficult, I am aware that the rich histories of our country and the world make it possible for me to use the power of reading and learning to access leadership models worthy of emulation.

I believe that whereas for reasons ranging from my date of birth to my inadequate bravery I never took up arms as a soldier against apartheid, I am proud of those among my compatriots and others whose gallantry brought us to the current phase of the liberation struggle.

I believe that whereas various aspects of life around me are attractive and tempting, the most enduring privilege of the modern age is access to cutting-edge knowledge, which grants people an opportunity to understand things and determine the paths of their own lives.

I believe that whereas the seeds of apartheid and the strengths of our doubters or adversaries remain a threat to our democratic project and its ideals, what comes to derail our dream of liberty and prosperity might well be our own weaknesses or insufficient courage as believers.

I believe that whereas I cannot deny the difficulties of my own life, I am privileged to know what I know and pray to God the Almighty to grant me the courage I need to play my role in helping to create conditions that assist my fellow citizens to take responsibility and share in His glory.

Gibson Sakong
Executive Chairman – Montshepetja Academy

1. When was MoAc formed and what is its core offering?

Montshepetja Academy was conceptualised over many years, registered in 2001 and started operating in 2003. From an offering point of view, I must say that we are, first and foremost, a talent management organisation. We help individuals to embrace conscious learning so that they can be able to achieve competence and significance for themselves as well as add value to their organisations.

MoAc is part of a deliberate effort to move our society away from the unhelpful culture of passive participation to one of responsibility, rigorous analysis and learning. The greatest injustice done by apartheid to our society was to create an environment where fear and intimidation are the primary tools of operation instead of information and knowledge.

We must work hard to make lots of money. But we must know we cannot keep that money for long or grow it if we do not cultivate certain levels of competence and skills.

Homes, churches, schools and workplaces are battling to produce enough people of the calibre we need to play leadership roles in our society. Our country needs to build and capacitate organisations that can help complement the roles played by those institutions in dealing with our transformation challenges. At MoAc we help people achieve significance in their lives by balancing the pursuit of material wealth with the need to deliberately learn and live life competently. People who learn and live competently normally create legacies for others.

2. What is the strategy employed by MoAc to achieve its goals and objectives?

We have a group of talent management champions or companions who work with clients and stake-holders to implement our strategy. The talent management champions are guided by our values, strategies and other aspects of our organisation as contained in our master strategic document. Our grand strategy stands on three legs. The first leg is consciousness. You cannot start any significant work or project until you have raised your consciousness or understanding to the right level. But many people live their entire lives without taking a single pause to make sense of things.

The second leg or pillar is responsibility. Life will give you the equivalent of what you give it. Do not expect substantial rewards if you do not take responsibility for something substantial. The last leg is competence. Responsibility teaches you competence, which is a better determinant of significance or success than money or position. We help people embrace learning by introducing them to and guiding them through these three steps or phases of our strategy.

3. What are your main functions as executive chairman?

I am responsible for strategic management, from formulation to successful implementation. The critical areas included in my responsibilities are long-term planning, people management and financial management.

4. As the founder of MoAc, do you believe it is achieving its goals?

There is no doubt that MoAc is achieving its goals. I must mention, though, that the organisation is in a long-term investment market. We did not plan to reap instant material rewards when we started the organisation. And we are making very good progress in line with our vision and plans, especially within our areas of focus.

5. Are there any major achievements so far for the organisation?

Operationally, we have been positively touching and influencing people for almost seven years through a number of initiatives outlined under our strategic programme on our website www.montshepetja.co.za. We have been building the brand for those years and have identified and taken on board a core group of people who are passionate about what we are trying to do. Success without a good team of talented and committed people is not possible. We have selected a small number of talented and hard working people with the right values and potential to achieve success with the organisation. We recently acquired Montshepetja Garden, our new premises in Gauteng where we want to consolidate our presence. MoAc Online has also just celebrated its first anniversary. We continue to grow from strength to strength.

6. What is your definition of success?

I am a strong believer in the power of competence. I have always seen genuine success – we prefer to call it significance at MoAc – as a consequence of competence. Competence allows people not only to create value. It also allows them to sustain it once it has been achieved. Real success is less the material possessions we own or the lofty positions we occupy. It is rather the methods we use to obtain them and our capacity to maintain and grow them. Those things are functions of competence. I must emphasize, though, in line with our strategy that competence itself is underpinned by consciousness and responsibility.

7. Any significant challenges that MoAc faces?

We currently fishing for a good dose of financial backing to grow the brand in order to create and disseminate increased value to our stake-holders. Another challenging aspect is shortage of committed and competent personnel. Many people in our society are disorientated and are not building or acquiring the competencies the society desperately needs. We are also looking at forming strategic partnerships and alliances with more established institutions in order to enter new markets.

8. Any personal sacrifices or risks that you have taken?

I believe in the principle that the best measure of someone`s achievement is what they voluntarily sacrificed in order to have what they have. I have made several significant personal sacrifices throughout my life. But for now I will talk only about one. I have sacrificed personal comfort and glamour to pursue something that I believe will eventually not only define my life but will add real value to other people`s lives as well. I figured out very early in my life that our society`s greatest undoing is ignorance. I want to make my humble contribution to my society in the area of knowledge and talent management. So it is not just what you do that allows you make progress in life. You make your progress from a combination of the deeds that you deliberately do and those that you consciously reject.

9. What inspires you to live your life the way you do?

Two things in particular inspire me. The great people we hear about and see from time to time who made and continue to make sacrifices to create better conditions for our country and humanity in general. I am also inspired by people I meet regularly who live very difficult lives because of other people`s inhumanity and they still remain disciplined and positive that some opportunity will be extended to them one day.

I must admit I am also inspired by people I love and believe myself to owe, be they alive or dead. My simple philosophy is that my life is not more important than its responsibility and purpose. I work hard to ensure that my life serves its purpose before the Maker allows my soul to separate from my carcass. But I do not waste resources trying to be perfect because I believe that is beyond human capability. Every life has its contributions as well as its aberrations. I try to ensure that my inevitable aberrations are significantly overshadowed by my contributions. That`s it!

10. Do you have any role models?

I love success and learn from many successful people. But the truth is that you cannot find everything you want in one individual. As you try to mould your life, sometimes you find vision in Raymond Ackerman or Ernest Oppenheimer, loyalty in Walter Sisulu, competence in Trevor Manuel or Barack Obama, courage in Desmond Tutu or Beyers Naude or FW de Klerk, entrepreneurial brilliance in Richard Branson or Patrice Motsepe selflessness in Nelson Mandela or Mother Teresa. Sometimes you learn discipline, responsibility and sanity from your own parents, or the folks next door. To find a role model, you must first know what it is that you want.

Gibson regards Manchester United as not only being among the best soccer clubs in the world. He sees the club as also being among the best case studies in terms of people management brilliance.

11. What are your strengths and weaknesses as a person?

The first value in my life is discipline. Discipline is neither sheepish submissiveness nor blind loyalty. It is a combination of the capacity to personally sacrifice for things that matter and the courage to release yourself from things that are unhelpful or harmful. Among my other significant attributes will be that I am highly learning-conscious and competitive. My level of consciousness allows me to focus on my plans and makes it difficult for situations or other people to distract or derail me.

From a weakness point of view, I will tell you that I wish I had more courage to do the things that I want to do and believe I can do. The fear factor in our society is too high and that is part of the reason why productive capacity is so low. The environment we live in intimidates people instead of inspiring them. Another probable weakness of mine is my impatience with self-pity. I see self-pity as something as bad as corruption itself.

12. What do you dislike the most?

I dislike nothing more than healthy and able-bodied people who decide to live lives of cheating and corruption because of lack of discipline, laziness and greed. We have plenty of irresponsible pleasure-seekers in our society who produce absolutely nothing but want to live like kings and queens. Our society has very poor mechanisms when it comes to holding people personally accountable and that magnifies and multiplies poverty. Corruption does not only happen when someone siphons millions from organisational coffers. It is corruption when people sit on payrolls but do just enough to avoid dismissal. It is corruption when people who have neither leadership skill nor desire to lead with fairness cling to lofty positions. Corruption does not refer to the amount of money involved. Rather, it refers to the presence or absence of accountability and integrity in a decision or conduct.

13. What is your greatest personal achievement?

Without any doubt the greatest achievement of my life must be that I have created some space and freedom I need to live my life according to my values and principles. It takes a lot of deliberate effort to take advantage of the blessings we have in our lives and focus on trying to make our own individual contributions in preparation for our meetings with the Maker. In our society, with its history, there are many people willing and waiting to use you as their garden tool or flying machine and nullify your life if you lose your power to say no.

14. What kind of books do you read?

Although I think I have more books than some libraries that I have seen in our impoverished society, I do not see myself as someone who reads books. I regard myself as someone who reads subjects. If you read books without thinking you might not be able to master any subject during your lifetime because many books today are written purely to make money. Though I am flexible about reading, I read mostly on the conundrum of human behaviour and its mysterious ways.

15. Do you have any serious anxieties?

I have anxieties about whether or not as a society we have a capacity to extricate ourselves from the mess created by apartheid. I wonder whether our generals have a decent plan and whether the foot soldiers have the spirit to toil for the plan to bear fruit. There are many people at all levels of our society consuming much more than they can ever produce in their lives while millions are fast losing hope. It is very scary. There is too much self-interest, too little co-operation and even less learning.

16. Organisations make promises. The MoAc promise for the next five years?

We will continue our efforts to build ourselves into a robust talent management organisation that can help make our society embrace learning as a way of life. MoAc`s enduring promise is value creation and prolongation. We help to identify, develop and optimally utilize talent to create value where none exists and sustain it where it already exists. In a society where distribution of opportunities is traditionally based on privilege and not talent or effort, that makes a big difference. Another significant part of our promise is carried in one of our core values: integrity. Integrity means we put fairness ahead of care.

Apartheid has left us with a sick culture where people are unfairly and needlessly deprived and made infirm so that somebody can receive some perverted credit for claiming to care for them. And all this happens when the resources of the country are being depleted for the benefit of a few. Integrity at MoAc stands for fairness. Fairness reduces the amount of people who need to be cared for by encouraging the majority of our people take responsibility for their lives, which is a route more sustainable and more honourable. That is the MoAc service delivery promise in a nutshell. We want to help our society to create a culture where the majority of people take pride in fair reward for honest work and self-reliance. Remember the MoAc Way: consciousness, responsibility, competence and significance.

I regard the statement as concerning because too often, when this statement is made, praise is heaped indiscriminately upon South Africa as a country, without appropriate mention being made of the exceptional leadership and management skills we had at the time. I daresay that our miracle would have been impossible even to imagine without the great leadership we had at the right time.

I believe the people of South Africa are very good people. I agree they demonstrated this very eloquently with the incredible sacrifices they made to ensure the success of their country`s process of political transformation. The process, as we all know, was peaceful beyond the imaginations of even the wisest among us. But my knowledge and experience tell me that the human race itself is not a bad race. In other words, South Africa does not really have better citizens than any other country in the world. What South Africa had, in its hour of need, which many other countries often have to do without, was quality leadership.

My concern therefore is that the failure on the part of many people, both within and outside of South Africa, to appreciate the crucial part played by the quality leadership the country had when dealing with its political morass may result in many institutions in South Africa being unable to find the right leadership to take them into the future. The outstanding leadership provided by Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk, two former presidents of South Africa, in helping to avert the certain precipice the country was headed for must be understood in its proper context and be afforded the honour it deserves.

In my view, the reluctance to adequately appreciate the crucial roles played by De Klerk and Mandela in transforming South Africa is tantamount to saying Germany would have the same history without Adolf Hitler. Or nearer home, South Africa would have had the same experiences without the high priest of apartheid, namely Hendrik Verwoerd. Of course both these statements are incorrect.

Leadership plays a very significant role in determining the fortunes, or the misfortunes as in the cases of Hitler and Verwoerd, of nations. And the tendency to underplay its significance is completely wrong and misguided. It is wrong to not only because it denies leaders credit, or blame, that is due to them. It is wrong because, which I think is more important, it deprives the rest of us lesser mortals the valuable understanding and learning we need in terms of the functioning of the concept and practice of leadership.

The myriad of conflict-ridden relationships in our society today, which no doubt stand in the way of the country`s socio-economic development, require the same quality of leadership that helped South Africa put is political house in order. In economic terms, South Africa stands today exactly at the same point or stage where it stood politically when Mandela and De Klerk stepped in with their exceptional leadership skills.

Sadly, the deep divisions created by some of the policies used to govern this country in the past, which were misguided at best and murderous at worst, have ensured that no trust exists between the various sections. People in various sectors see others as their enemies rather than fellow-contributors to the success of their society. The situation requires leaders who are able to move outside of the narrow confines of their traditional constituencies and embrace what is best for their country. People in leadership positions are called upon to emulate the exemplary courage of De Klerk. They must put the country on a path to economic redemption. It is a very disturbing issue for South Africa that so many of the people in charge of powerful institutions are managers and not leaders.

They are technically competent people who command the skills and expertise to fulfil their functions within the narrow confines and parameters of their jobs. But they do not seem to possess the vision, courage and commitment to seek out and embrace the new economic models so desperately needed by our society. Many of them spend copious amounts of resources addressing peripheral issues, falsely hoping that the real issues will evaporate. And some of them are simply self-serving individuals who have neither the talent nor the interest to help their companies cease the opportunity to deal with the dilemma they face.

But the great risks taken by De Klerk could not have meant much for the country if they were not reciprocated by Mandela with his extraordinary capacity to embrace risk and uncertainty. So ordinary people as well must play their part by taking a leaf out of Nelson Mandela`s book. Ordinary people or citizens in their various formations must demonstrate a capacity to rise above pettiness and meet management or leadership pound for pound in the search for economic unity and prosperity in South Africa.

Leadership, at times, dithers about change because it is afraid change will create problems that will cause companies to lose revenue or value. My conviction, after many years of trying to make sense of leadership issues, is that organisations lose much more value from members who are on a permanent go-slow, and believe me many people in our society are, because of hostile operating environments resulting from poor leaedership than from any other cause imaginable. It is true that transformation will cause some real pains as the environment undergoes change. But transformation is the sole insurance against the disaster that will befall our country if ordinary citizens are allowed to lose complete confidence in the change process.

South Africa`s economic rebirth can only be made possible by a new breed of leaders who possess the vision and character to vacate comfortable positions in order to make a clean break with the ignominies of the past. Risks must be taken to rectify, once and for all, the anomalies in our society through transparent and fair processes of leadership.

The people of South Africa demonstrated very emphatically their resilience and commitment to finding lasting solutions to their country`s problems by standing firmly behind their leaders during the painful process of political transition. But without visionary and courageous leadership to take advantage of the opportunity for economic reconstruction, this great potential will go to the dogs. Our leaders in the economic domain and society in general can never say they were not warned.

Once again, I say the leadership abilities of Mandela and De Klerk must be accorded respect not merely to offer them the glory they deserve. A much more important reason to offer this respect is to encourage other leaders to step forward and offer the country what they can offer in these times of need. I have absolutely no qualms with the roles played by the populace as well as the bridesmaids or lieutenants. And I am not in denial about them or their significance. The point I make here is that it takes tons of leadership capacity to mobilise, channel and sustain the energy and loyalty of people, especially when pursuing uncertain causes. And people who can do that are in serious short supply in our society. So we need to do everything in our power to promote what Mandela and De Klerk did.

Leadership is a temporary event or commodity and we will always have arguments about who played a more important role than whom. What we need to understand is that ordinary people associate organisations with people who lead them. They come into and stay in organisations because they see sense in trusting the abilities of a particular leader. They do not only listen to the mantra of their organisations` founding documents. Mandela and De Klerk rose to the occasion as chief protagonists and power brokers of competence when the country called. They must be appropriately celebrated and their legacy promoted for the sake of learning and progress for our country.

I am aware that south Africa as a society has a long history of denialism and plain dishonesty when it comes to conferring credit due to people. But the case of Mandela and De Klerk is as straightforward as the case of Josef Blatter. Josef Blatter gave Africa its first FIFA World Cup and decided that Madiba was the most appropriate mortal to be honoured with it on the African continent. As I said, leadership is in many cases a temporary intervention to negotiate a particular difficulty. Josef Blatter worked tirelessly and risked plenty to give South Africa and Africa the 2010 FIFA World Cup motivated by, among others, the great sacrifices and consistency of the Madiba Brand.

South Africa is currently in desperate need of leaders of exceptional ability to help the country deal with its socio-economic challenges. The populace will certainly form part of the cast, and will certainly share in the spoils. But the show will neither start nor go on without the main characters. We need courageous leaders at this point in our history not only to initiate change but also to take charge of it as it happens so that it does not spin out of control. The first step in grooming the leaders of tomorrow is to appropriately honour those of yesterday and today.

Gibson Sakong
Executive Chairman – Montshepetja Academy

The first of the two principles is that each integral part will contribute equitably to the health and wellbeing of the whole. The second principle is that the resources and opportunities available in the environment will be seen and believed, by at least a majority, to be distributable on the bases of both legitimacy and fairness. In our society, apartheid and neglect have left us with a society where fairness is a form of anathema and many people are consistently reminded of this in their daily lives. On the other hand, people with no ability or desire to do good occupy all sorts of privileged positions and use inflated words and languages to pull wool over the eyes of clueless citizens while in reality feathering their own nests.

Many people hold different views regarding what the problems of our society are and how they can be addressed. The following, among others, are mentioned constantly as solutions to our problems: education, money, love, imprisonment and even capital punishment. Predictably, education remains many people`s favourite solution. For sure we must invest in education for the long term. But we must build institutions, mechanisms and programmes now to address issues of accountability before our country picks up speed down the slippery road to oblivion. A very critical matter that we must not forget as a society is that South Africa has been experimenting with democratic power or rule for only fifteen years.

The biggest question we face is whether we are, as a collective, smart enough to learn fast and do what other nations throughout the world and history failed to do. Ghana is starting to be celebrated as a promising democratic state on the African continent. But it took Ghana almost fifty years to get used to democracy and achieve the relative stability it enjoys today. President Barack Obama visited Ghana a short while after he entered the White House, partly to offer his support and encouragement to the people of Ghana for being the leading light on the path to full and mature democracy on the African continent.

Countless other African countries, including Ivory Coast, Kenya and Nigeria are still battling age-old demons that should have been defeated many decades ago. They have not been able to defeat the demons because of some intractable challenges associated with a society`s movement or development from imperialism to democracy. Among them, their educational and developmental institutions lack the capacity to cultivate and accelerate a significant change in the behaviours and capacities of their people in order to move their countries forward at the desired speed.

Part of the challenge is that their institutions, including those intended to nurture and protect democracy, battle to find competent individuals in sufficient numbers who can lead by example and inspire confidence in ordinary people. But the irony of this matter is that competent people themselves in numbers large enough to make a telling difference in a society can only be produced by sound and solid institutions. It is a perfect chicken and egg story and requires tons of patience and wisdom to unravel.

The greatest challenge of our society as South Africans is lack of accountability. It is without doubt lack of accountability that allows our society to become a training ground for delinquency, incompetence, criminality and corruption. It is lack of accountability that allows lazy and unproductive people to rise to positions of power and become millionaires while forcing our best and talented people to live in out their lives in economic wastelands.

Our constitution is hailed as being among the best in the world. But the constitution is merely a foundation upon which a real dwelling still has to be built to provide shelter and good life for the rightful beneficiaries. We need men and women who possess what it takes to read and understand the various tenets of our constitution and write our rules of behaviour from them. Those rules of behaviour, once agreed upon by all the relevant stakeholders, must be given to men and women of integrity and competence with appropriate authority to enforce with the full support of the majority in our society.

Accountability is not an attempt to embrace an impossible dream of pursuing perfection. It is an attempt to set standards and reject the incredible amount of hubris, corruption, pleasure-seeking tendencies and other corrosive behaviours in our society. It is an attempt to maximise the resources of our society by preventing wastage and deploying them profitably. The creative sacrifices and trade-offs we make between our rights and our responsibilities as enshrined in our constitution will determine the level of accountability we can get out of each of our citizens. But creativity and sacrifices require courage and time will tell whether we command enough of that as a society.

Certainly education receives the highest level of attention because it alone has the greatest potential to deliver on change. But education without clear and enforceable rules of behaviour is like a cart without a harness. The cart is loaded with all sorts of valuable things to take to the market in order to earn income. But there is no equipment to harness the available animals to the cart. In the end, even the most disciplined and loyal of animals will turn around and start feeding themselves from the valuables in the cart, which were intended for the market in order to serve everybody.

South Africa needs to decide fast which one between education and accountability is needed now and can be put firmly into operation and which one is a long-term investment whose results will only be seen in decades to come. Currently, everybody is talking about education and nobody is doing much about accountability and leading by example. What is even worse, that long term investment in education also seems to be floundering as we battle to get proper rules of behaviour formed and followed for parent, teacher and student alike.

In the domain of law enforcement, there are two popular concepts: the certainty of punishment and the severity of sentence. And they come in that order. But many people commonly call for the severity of sentence each time a crime is committed. What they fail to appreciate properly is that where there is no certainly of punishment, severe sentences are impossible or useless. Wrong-doers first need to be identified, arrested and brought to court before they can be convicted and given heavy sentences. Education, money, love and even imprisonment itself will make no difference if there are no real enforceable sanctions or disincentives to correct or punish unacceptable behaviour.

Each time we speak to politicians about their organisations losing direction, the retort is that their organisations do not have this or that tradition and that they do not and will not suffer from the particular problem. Each time we speak to soccer authorities about the poor quality of today`s playing standards, the retort is that the current players are not committed and are overpaid. Older generations in communities and organisations also lament the scourge of young people who are poorly disciplined. But nobody seems to be able to do anything about these dire indictments against our society.

Cultures and traditions will always evolve to take mankind forward to strange times that cannot be imagined from the current age. They will bring with them behaviours that are not in tune with our traditional values or long-held beliefs and practices. Progressive societies work hard to put mechanisms in place to ensure the baby is not thrown out with the bathwater when change happens, which nobody can prevent from happening.

It is not very difficult to see why ordinary people in our communities have lost confidence in the ability of their leaders to change things for the better for everybody. But there are two scary issues about the whole matter. The first one is the illegal methods ordinary people employ to influence change and the fact that those in authority seem to be powerless to stop the illegality. Those two phenomena alone leave even the strongest people in our society very worried.

Human beings are creatures of habit. If we allow the majority of our people to cultivate the habit of seeing nothing wrong with irresponsibility, incompetence, criminality and naked corruption, we will reap a whirlwind of a society that no midwife or nanny will handle. Our society must take steps now to stem the tide of excessive lawlessness and replace it with one where accountability is embraced by both individuals and organisations. This must happen not only to combat the prevalent mixture of inertia and corruption in our society but must happen also to put our country on its rightful path to recovery and prosperity.

Without appropriate mechanisms to ensure accountability guided by where we want to go as a society, no home, no church, no school and no workplace, individually and collectively, can produce people with the ethical and technical competence we need to change our society. In the final analysis, we must all either rise to assume our share of accountability or acknowledge that we are nothing but accomplices in a heinous crime of murder against our beloved society. We must remember, whichever we choose, that many people sacrificed their lives to grant our country the possibility it now has to take its rightful place among the nations of the world.

Gibson Sakong
Executive Chairman – Montshepetja Academy

The following are examples of what effective companions and mentors can do for learners:

1. Build self-confidence and growth by offering challenging ideas to work on
2. Encourage professionalism by planning for high standards of performance
3. Stand by their learners in critical situations by offering support and encouragement
4. Provide their learners with the guidance they to need make the right career decisions
5. Offer friendship by listening positively to their personal problems in times of need
6. Inspire their learners by leading by example and  giving them appropriate coaching
7. Share critical knowledge by explaining both people and organizational behaviour
8. Trigger self-awareness by effectively confronting negative behaviours and attitudes
9. Facilitate growth and development by providing practical learning opportunities
10. Build their personalities by projecting their beliefs and viewpoints in positive ways
11. Provide networking opportunities for their students to learn from progressive people
12. Increase their chances of success by teaching them to share their good fortunes
13. Show their learners the value of hardwork and discipline in support of natural talent
14. Teach them to live with courage and pride in order to contribute and be fulfilled
15. Provide them with platforms to shape their lives and be role models for other people

We distill knowledge. We instill courage. We inspire performance. We are Montshepetja Academy.

Aaron Mokoena – or will we give the armband to Steven Pienaar and hope to milk the currency of his solid performances and seemingly improved maturity? – and his mates are going to struggle against top countries next year largely because of what they are capable of first as individuals and secondly as team members. Another dimension that is certain to be tested will be the quality of the leadership they will be having, which is quite dicey at this stage.

We have a legal and moral duty to work hard in order to undo the paradigms or thinking patterns and knowledge systems of apartheid. We need to find ways and means of training a new breed of leaders, which can produce people who chose adding value and making a difference over mere participation and peer approval. We need to start producing a new breed of people who understand that at times the best form of unity is between an individual`s own thought and action.

We need to find a leadership breed that can take tangible steps to rid our society of leadership styles based on the vices of fear and intimidation and replace them with ones founded on the virtues of positive engagement and persuasion. We need to fashion for ourselves a dynamic society where the power of the leader is curtailed by the abilities of the individual team members while the leader`s authority is enhanced by his or her own ability to reach out. Leadership is a critical subject of our times and we must make sure that we put it up there with mathematics and other hard or super sciences in our schooling systems.

The greatest challenge confronting our society today is how we are going to expand and extend opportunities with justice and effectiveness to those who desperately need them, within the window period available. We need to find a way of getting the majority of our people to count their blessings and focus on playing their practical and historical roles, instead of wallowing in the dual pathologies of self-importance and self-pity.

I have never believed that the majority of our people are lazy or selfish. It has always been my firm belief that our people are mostly disorientated and distrustful as a direct result of the uncaring and wicked society they have lived in for long periods. I believe that with appropriate focus on both people and the environment, we can turn the fortunes of our society around. The first step we must take in this regard is to sift through our society to find leaders who can help free the arrested individual and collective potential of our people.

We need to hand-pick special people where necessary to help build special institutions – or change capable existing ones – to identify and nurture special talents for our leadership needs of today and tomorrow. But in general we need to find the vision and courage to free our entire society to think, plan and implement in order to take their destinies into their own hands. We need a leadership to take our country out of the dour culture of control, compliance and survival by replacing it with a vibrant culture of freedom, excellence and success.

Apartheid represents the worst that any leadership effort or process can produce. It has resulted in a society of endless square pegs and round holes as well as sick processes of trying to separate the chaff from the wheat instead of the wheat from the chaff. It has spawned generations of people whose temperaments vacillate between fear and anger, finding it difficult to stabilize on the fine intermediate line of reason and calm. It has produced a preponderant behaviour of teaching people to suck up to the rich and cock a snook at the poor, dehumanising both sides in the process.

The wickedness of apartheid leadership sank us to the bottom of the well of mankind. We cannot get to where we belong with ordinary leadership effort. But whatever leadership we come to have must make sure that it focuses on freeing every single one of our people to be themselves and do things for themselves. It is the only way we can be able to deal effectively with the maladies of illiteracy, homelessness, diseases, unemployment, unproductiveness, inequality, lawlessness, immorality and oppression.

We must find the courage and creativity to set people free to explore with their talents, plan things, do things and take responsibility for consequences or credit for achievements. We have a rich opportunity as a society to demonstrate that we can work together to fulfil the promise and potential of our nation, following in the great example of Nelson Mandela.

Nelson Mandela taught us that while the business sector has the power of money and the government has the might of the military, the poorest of the poor, whose wealth it is in the first place that purchases the power of business and the might of government, the poorest of the poor have a moral high ground.

Those of us in government must realize that the mandate we carry from the poorest of the poor bears more weight than the might of our army. Those of us in business must appreciate that the money we possess carries less weight than the moral high ground upon which the parched and shoeless feet of the poorest of the poor graciously stand. We require leadership to provide both steam and stewardship to advance the noble course bequeathed to us by the vision of Madiba and those in his class.

The world came to know Nelson Mandela and his iconic abilities mostly because of the magnanimity of one man. It was Walter Sisulu who moved mountains to make sure that Nelson Mandela got to occupy the leadership positions in our society that his talents deserved. It was Walter Sisulu who worked tirelessly and selflessly to ensure that there was enough support for Mandela`s leadership.

How many people like Walter Sisulu can we find today in our society? How many people can we find in our society today who will campaign for another on the basis that the abilities of another meets the requirements of the position? How many people can we point out in our society today who are able to consider requirements attached to positions before they consider benefits? The sad but truthful answer is that too few people – some of them neither sufficiently talented nor adequately trained – occupy too many positions, have too much institutional power and stifle innovation to the detriment of our long-term future.

Gibson Sakong
Executive Chairman – Montshepetja Academy

]]> http://www.montshepetja.co.za/leadership-development-and-transformation-part-three/feed 1 http://www.montshepetja.co.za/leadership-development-and-transformation-part-two http://www.montshepetja.co.za/leadership-development-and-transformation-part-two#comments Mon, 26 Oct 2009 05:37:13 +0000 admin http://www.montshepetja.co.za/?p=205 Leadership is the glue that brings individuals together, focuses them in a particular direction and keeps them moving. Leadership is neither a person nor a position. Leadership is the link or connection between those in positions of power and those at the mercy of that power. The higher the quality of the link or connection, the better the performance or results. But no amount of leadership can substitute forever for individual failures or shortcomings. As a result of our society being built upon prejudice and privilege, instead of talent and planning, a significant amount of our human resources capital remains trapped in cesspools of incompetence, corruption and poverty.

Even fifteen years into democracy, we still have no reliable systems of identifying, selecting and developing people with the best talent or potential. The few truly talented people like Lucas Radebe and Steven Pienaar, who actually become successful, depend on too much personal effort and pure luck to be discovered and serve their country. I still maintain that South Africa, despite its rich endowments, is a society that makes it extremely difficult for its young people to become successful.

Even among white people, as I stated in part one, mostly because of the injurious injunctions of apartheid, which made self-application optional, instead of making it mandatory, by artificially providing them with security and comfort at the expense of the basic and other human needs of the poor, quality effort and true excellence are hardly universal. What is required now is a moral courage and will by all to restructure and transform the edifice of our society. We must learn together as a nation so that we can perform and acquit ourselves well in international competitions, instead of artificially competing among ourselves.

We need to make sure that children of poor people do not continue to be denied opportunities on the basis of the poverty of their parents or families. We need to make sure that average people do not get exalted into lofty positions merely because their families or parents can afford parachutes. Talent is a creation of God and no amount of deceit or treachery is going to turn Gibson Sakong into Didier Drogba.

As a nation, we need to acknowledge the supremacy of talent and rebuild our society using it as base. We need to respect and honour talent. Yes, talent needs to be supported by large doses of self-application, coaching and mentorship. But appreciation of talent as the centre must be our primary concern. We have a massive challenge to strive to put our best foot forward by being led or represented by the most competent and suitable among our people.

We must not fool ourselves by believing that we can take just about anybody with a big heart, endless connections and chunks of luck and turn them into a megastar through protectionism and stealth. For sure we can use such individuals to form a soccer team and beat Lesotho, Botswana and Swaziland. But from an endowment point of view, those are countries we should be leading and providing support to instead of priding ourselves on beating them. We can beat those countries every day but we will notice that we are going nowhere when we come up against countries in our league.

I have said leadership is the glue that brings individuals together and keeps them focused and productive even in times of difficulties. This country still has to acknowledge appropriately the leadership abilities of a man called Clive Barker, especially as demonstrated around the 1996 African Nations Cup. A detailed study of his leadership career, even at club level, will show people that he has two outstanding attributes, among many: he has a genuine type of care for people and infuses his team with positive energy to move mountains on behalf of stakeholders; he is a mature and self-effacing man who lets even the most undeserving people bask in the glory of his achievements. He is among our nation`s ablest leaders.

From a strategic point of view, South Africa or SAFA should be providing him with resources to open and run a soccer academy. He would not only be able to help young boys learn to play soccer, he would also help them to build their characters and become more upright in these challenging times for young people. But in our winner takes all society, his immense gifts are painfully allowed to go to waste. It is my wish to see him wind up his coaching career at Kaizer Chiefs or Orlando Pirates, as a fitting tribute to his abilities and contributions to the game. It would also give some respite to the long suffering supporters of those great institutions. It would give them some respite from the shenanigans of the expensive clowns regularly employed there as coaches.

Michelle Obama tells people that the difference between herself and any other woman in the world is merely that her activities, including the unavoidable mistakes that she commits as a human being, happen in front of cameras. Everybody should know that Mrs Obama is being modest, especially because she attended good schools and worked hard to make success of her life, unlike many women around the world. Many of the teams coming to our shores in 2010 to compete in the FIFA World Cup will be brimming with people who, like Mrs Obama, have benefitted from learning at good institutions and residing in societies that are fairer and healthier.

However, in our country the situation is entirely different. Years ago when I started to understand the world of work, I realised and expressed the opinion that the difference between the performances of many of our workers, supervisors, managers, executives, the lot and the shambles of Bafana Bafana is merely that those of Bafana Bafana happen on television or in public. Very few of our people get to attend good schools to help them with core learning and good grooming. Further, there is very little culture of individual effort and pursuance of artistic excellence in our society.

All forms of leadership start with self-leadership. So if all we do is to focus on providing our players with technical training and do nothing about the host of complex individual behavioural competencies they require to impose their game upon their competitors, we should not expect success. In general, if we do not reach out and create opportunities for the majority of our people to positively develop and free themselves from the palpable shackles of fear and insecurity, as reflected in abnormal levels of self-importance and self-pity, we will fail to build this country.

Gibson Sakong
Executive Chairman – Montshepetja

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