Growing up in a small mining town did not give one much upside on life but I am ever grateful for two things. I started playing cricket at the age of eight, which eventually provided me with a sports bursary to pay for my university education; and, bless my mother, she introduced me to reading at about the same age.

To this day I am still not without a read.

Among my past year’s books for an international audience are:

• Why Nations Fail – Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
• Trust and inspire – Stephen M R Covey
• The Speed of Trust – Stephen M R Covey
• Thinking the Future – Clem Sunter and Mitch Ilbury.

Among my past year’s books of particular South African interest are:

• Fortunes – The Rise and Rise of Afrikaner Tycoons – Ebbe Dommisse
• Manifesto – Songezo Zibi
• Expensive Poverty – Greg Mills
• Kasinomic Revolution – G G Alcock
• Cultureneering – Ian Fuhr
• Genius – Bruce Whitfield.

Clem Sunter and Mitch Ilbury introduce us to Stoicism in Thinking the Future. It’s an ancient story dating back to Socrates. The Stoics, as the movement would later be called, was about the relationship between our external circumstances and our reaction to them. The key ingredient to this Stoic resolve is a clear distinction between what is within and outside of one’s scope of control. A Venn diagram drawn in the sand at the time would look like this:

The circle not in our control, the external world, is significantly larger than that within our control. The external world is not within our control, so instead of seeing ourselves as being at the mercy of forces beyond our control a simple rational flip can immunise our internal constitution from feelings of panic, fear and hopelessness.

We do this by understanding what is within our control – the second circle. Stoics believed it did not consist of much, and actually mostly just one thing – our judgement. But this is the one thing that really matters because it alone has the capacity to constrain our emotions. We can decide what we think of the situations we find ourselves in. The agency lies with us, this is where the buck stops.

The overlap represents where we do not have control but have influence and where our judgements inform our actions. Amongst Stoics, Epictetus holds special prominence; he pinpointed what he believed was his principal purpose. He said: “The chief task of life is simply this: identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to choices that are my own.”

At Legitimate Leadership our approach as leaders is to create excellence in our people. From a Stoicism perspective this is within our sphere of control. As an individual leader you can decide (judgement call) that Caring and Growing your people is your leadership mantra irrespective of other leaders in your organization, or you can wait for leadership to change from the top down, over which you have no control, or you can influence other leaders to change by setting the example. If you are a leader in your organization and you are wondering where leadership change starts, it actually starts with your own judgement.

Irrespective of our leaders, do we not also as individuals have the judgement capacity to control what we do in our workplace? In our Legitimate Leadership Grow to Care workshop we unpack how individual choices (judgement) determine our success in the workplace and help us to understand that the intent we come to work with every day influences what we actually do instead of just floundering around hoping that what we do has meaning.

SOUTH AFRICAN BOOKS

I also have had the privilege of extracting some leadership gems from the book Fortunes – The Rise and Rise of Afrikaner Tycoons, by Ebbe Dommisse.

While many well-known Afrikaner tycoons feature in the book, what interested me was the latter chapters on the “Megaboere”. This group of 10 farmers make up a significant part of the less than 20% of South Africa’s commercial farmers who produce roughly 80% of the country’s food. To name a few: Dutoit Group, ZZ2, Karsten Group, Schoeman Group and Wildeklaver.

They have a set of common denominators:

• They are all exporters and proven market leaders worldwide.
• They are innovators, they all diversify.
• They have leadership qualities, they are visionaries.
• They are all creative businesspeople.

I would like in particular to highlight Pieter Karsten of the Karsten Group. The motto by which he lives is: “Excellence is the result of caring more than others think is wise, risking more than others think is safe, dreaming more than others think is practical, and expecting more than others think is possible.”

About people, he says he uses the old-school system: “Empower, support, train and check whether people understand what’s going on. It’s about instilling confidence in people, it’s empowerment, and out of this comes the beautiful stories, such as one – Boy Maleko, who started off as a general worker but today is a fully fledged production manager.”

He has no time for farmers who do nothing to uplift their employees and at the same time only complain. The joys and sorrows of his employees are also his because their wellbeing affects him personally.

He concludes: “There’s this thing people need to understand about agriculture: farming is practised countrywide in the most rural areas where there is not even a proper café. The farmer is THERE. And he has a large number of people for whom he is a vital artery. And without those people this country is also sunk.”

Pieter Karsten is not a generations-old farmer; he is a self-made man dating back to buying a small farm in 1974.

Let’s unpack Pieter’s approach from a Legitimate Leadership perspective.

Legitimate Leadership (Wendy Lambourne) says: “When leaders in an enterprise have benevolent intent, they are there to give or serve their people. This giving is not giving of things, so much as giving of self. Employees work willingly for those who exercise authority over them, only when they deliver on two drops of essence. In the first instance those in authority have a genuine concern for those in their charge, as human beings, not human resources. Further to this, they enable their people to realise the very best in themselves.”

Pieter may feel his approach is old school but what is at issue between employer and employee is not the price of a commodity called labour, it is the legitimacy of a relationship of power which can only be earned through the Care and Growth of your people. I go for old-school Pieter anytime!