Vukani Mngxati | CEO | Accenture in Africa | mail me |
A critical debate is needed in boardrooms right now on how to develop new thinking when it comes to sustainability. The very word has become ubiquitous, overtraded and I worry at times that it has lost its import.
Simply put sustainability means meeting our own needs without compromising the ability of future generations to achieve their own objectives. Failure to get the balance right will have a serious impact on economic survival and I wonder if we are spending enough time being future-focused on this issue. I suspect not.
Thinking differently about sustainability
It’s my challenge to organisations of all sizes to start thinking differently about sustainability and pushing staff and clients to embrace real change and stick to promises that are often grandly made but never followed through on.
Across our internal and external universe Accenture has signed up to take responsibility in this respect; lead from the front and not focus solely on earning profit.
Each day I believe we are rising to the challenge by finding our real purpose in helping create sustainable cities and communities in the spaces where we live. We see sustainability as a source of innovation, not as cost and we are clear that sustainability is not negotiable. People must take meaningful steps in driving sustainability with practical solutions.
One of our bold goals is to contribute to zero emissions by 2025 so when we talk to clients or suppliers, we ask the question – how can we help reduce your emissions? We believe in joining forces with others in the ecosystem to partner effectively and ‘strongly nudge’ them to achieve these things together. If we are to make any meaningful inroads into finding that balance a new approach to leadership is needed and paradoxically the COVID-19 pandemic has made us think better and differently.
In my organisation, it has worked to embolden who we are as a business. We stepped back and thought about our people and this new thinking was then extended to the impact we could have in rebuilding the economy adhering to principles of sustainability. My advice to any business executive right now would be to think deeply as to how your professional thinking has changed and whether you are paying more attention to principles like energy-saving, sustainable material choices, environmental product declaration and corporate social responsibility.
A crisis for our nation
Principle among these items must of course be the development of new thinking when it comes to decent work for young South Africans. This is undoubtedly a crisis for our nation. We simply cannot afford that two-thirds of young people cannot find jobs.
We have bright young minds with significant talent; we have excellent infrastructure in comparison to the rest of Africa; we speak good English; we have all we need to deal with this scourge, but we’re not. We have a ticking time bomb and need to do all we can to avoid a possible repeat of last year’s July riots.
I strongly believe most of the youth could be placed in meaningful work. The vision is for us as leaders to build skills for the future to sustain our economies. Every CEO needs cloud computing, data, Artificial Intelligence, cyber security. In the next five years, we at Accenture are committed to building at least 50,000 of these skills locally and that number is nothing, we need millions of these skills to help us move forward.
The grander vision is how we can build sufficient skills to be the next exporter of these skills and supply other nations in the same way India, the Philippines and Eastern Europe have mastered this art. I dream of a country where we have delivery centres in the same way as India does. Dozens of buildings with thousands of people working to service us and the world.
The reality in SA is that we have a limited pool of graduates from universities in any given year. The majority of people we should tap into are those who complete matric and then get stuck because there is no funding or they go to colleges in surrounding areas, graduate and stay at home. There is no child in the world who wants to work that hard only to languish at home. This defies human decency.
We must focus on identifying the pool of talent we could potentially unleash. At the end of the day, I buy the skills of someone who has the capability to code. This person may never have seen the door of a varsity but has been taught the know-how by an institute or NGO. Competency-based skills development works.
In conclusion
Corporate SA, civil society and government must come together and ask what programmes we need to build such expertise at scale to achieve a sustainable future. We’re not competing, we‘re stopping a national crisis.
But for corporates to invest we need to have the right conditions – incentives by government, economic zones, technology zones, income tax breaks – to enable the right conditions for growth.
Too many people don’t trust that we have their interests at heart. We have created citizens who are disenfranchised. How do you create trust? You must make a promise and live it. We must stop breaking our promises.
