Tag: leadership

What happens when South Africa’s most successful CEOs, founders, and business leaders let their guard down? In CEO Nights, the bestselling author answers this question through candid conversations that reveal the realities of leadership beyond the boardroom. Drawing on his 25-year leadership journey across Africa, Mabunda explores the principles, mindsets and decisions that shape exceptional leaders.

The Springboks’ remarkable journey from a humiliating 57–0 defeat in 2017 to their narrow 12–11 victory over the All Blacks in the 2023 Rugby World Cup final provides the foundation for Paul Steenkamp’s Stacked. The book explores how talented individuals can transform into exceptional teams through deliberate development, accountability and shared responsibility.

We are often taught to think of a successful career as a straight line. Study something, find a job in that field, gain experience, move up, and keep going. But many careers do not always play out this way. This may be more useful than we realise.

When people picture South Africa’s automotive industry, they still picture a factory floor filled with men in overalls. That image is out of date. Motor Industry Bargaining Council workforce data show that women now account for almost 95,000 employees across the organised automotive retail aftermarket. That represents about 30% of a workforce of nearly 317,000.

Wellness days, Employee Assistance Programmes (EAPs), flexible hours; employers have spent years building programmes that address health, mental health, work-life balance, and more. Everything except the one thing actually keeping people up at night: money stress.

Traditional strategy rests on assumptions that often fail when organisations face uncertainty, complexity and rapid change. Professor Clayton Fraser Williams challenges these assumptions. He asks a deceptively simple question: What is strategy?

Hybrid work has transformed how organisations operate, but it has also made disengagement far less visible. The challenge for today's leaders is no longer managing attendance - it's sustaining accountability, purpose and performance when teams are no longer under one roof.

From the Stoics and Ancient Egypt to Rome and Artificial Intelligence (AI), perhaps the greatest wisdom lies in learning to distinguish appearance from reality

I was promoted three times before I ever asked for a promotion. Each time, it happened because the person above me left. Someone needed to hold the work together. I stepped up, and I didn't campaign or pitch myself for the role. I just did the job that needed doing. Eventually, the title caught up with the work.

For boards of listed companies, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) succession is often framed as a debate about background. Finance or operations, commercial flair or financial discipline? The tendency is to treat the top job as the natural culmination of a particular functional path. The evidence suggests that this thinking is increasingly outdated.