Montshepetja Academy, which started operating in 2003 in Limpopo, acquired premises in Gauteng in the middle of March 2010. That coincided with the first anniversary of MoAc Online on 13 March 2010. Eric Mbuyazi and Kabelo Sakong, Marketing Manager and Brand Manager of MoAc respectively, did an interview with Gibson Sakong to shed some light on the organisation as well as its leader and some of his unorthodox perspectives.

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.