What Harvard taught me about running a business in SA

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I was also encouraged to realise that, despite our relative isolation, South Africa is right up there when it comes to the way Harvard thinks businesses should be run. More about that later...

The course was aimed at people leading professional services firms - mostly sizeable firms and only a handful of business owners like me. There was no one in the people-development field apart from me. Our 100-person class comprised largely students from outside the US; five of us were from Africa.

Content was delivered through case studies, a method we found fascinating considering the lecturers were personally involved in each firm we studied. They could speak in great detail about what happened further down the line in each example.

Key learnings:

• The central message of the course was the critical importance of alignment between strategy, leadership, culture, and people. This is a big idea: it's not easily executed, but the power of this alignment is significant.
  
• When all four elements of a business are harmoniously working together, underpinned by shared logic, magic happens. The power and efficiency of a business that gels in this way is enormous.
  
• Getting any one of the four elements right on its own is complex, so it takes some real focus and quality thinking to bring about the alignment.
  
• It is this alignment and power that lie at the core of outstanding businesses, which are those that are successful in every respect. I believe these businesses are commercially and culturally remarkable, sustainable, attractive to the best talent, resilient, they are the highest performing environments and are in a state of "flow".
  
• Bringing about this alignment requires outside guidance in most cases.*

As it turns out, South Africans are particularly strong in all four of these key areas. I think this is partly due to our social history and the conversations we've been forced to have as part of the apartheid recovery process. This gives us something of a surprising competitive advantage on the world stage!

Learnings relevant to the South African market:

• Our cultures are strong, our leadership has been panel beaten and tested more than we realise, and we are most likely resilient beyond what we imagine.
  
• Many of the work realities of the companies I gained an insight into felt fairly lifeless. Not inefficient mind you (most of them were successful), but in terms of what the future of business looks like; not necessarily ready for some of the changes that are sure to be coming their way, such as autonomy, choices, portfolio existences and bottom-up pressure to transform from the lower reaches of organisations.

This is not to say we are ahead of the game - in many respects we are lacking. But there is something about our quality of leadership, out engagement levels, the quantum and nature of training and development that is a significant achievement as a nation

I believe that it useful to take some confidence from this.

So what?

I came away with these three thoughts resounding in my consciousness:

• Be brave about expansion. The world has something to learn from South Africans.
  
• Be particularly brave about expansion into Africa. We are by far the best positioned to take our intellectual property, our rich company cultures and spread this excellence.
  
• Keep investing in culture, development and people engagement as these will continue to give your business a great competitive advantage.