Defining Moment: When I decided to leave my teaching job to go into project work and start my own business
Significant Movies: Ant Z, Free Willy, Pay it Forward
Significant Books: Let Africa Lead (Reuel Khoza)
Significant Poems: Kubla Khan (S.T.Coleridge), Wandering Aengus(W.B Yeate), Ulysses (Tennyson)
Significant Music: The song: Why? (Roger Whittaker) and anything that leaves me feeling happy, uplifted and inspired
Significant Cartoons: Garfield and political satires by Zapiro
Leadership: 1. Leadership is about leading an enterprise. 2. As soon as you have a leader with followers, you have an enterprise. 3. A true leader is not the one with the most followers. A true leader is the one who creates the most leaders.
PERSONAL: I am a romantic idealist, a dreamer and a wanderer. I love travelling and being outdoors, hiking and camping. I have a mischievous sense of humour with a strong sense of the ironical and witty. I love music and dancing. I enjoy books about future trends and, lately, about leadership in Africa. I am an African with three generations of ancestors in Africa. I live in Nelson Mandela Bay with my wife, Sharon, and two boys: Timothy (12) and Joshua (9). We have been through many trials together and I love them very much even though my work takes me away from them quite often.
WORK: I have a varied background in education, publishing, advertising (copywriter) and project management. I am a visual, conceptual thinker with strong intra-personal skills (reflective, analytical, perceptive). I function best as a facilitator. My passion is to “see the brightness” in other people’s eyes. My success lies in helping others to be successful. Currently, I have my own training consultancy offering an integrated leadership and performance management programme in association with Howard Cook. My challenge is to keep this programme relevant to developments in Africa in the context of the African Renaissance. So my dream is to interact with other African Leaders to create a developmental African Leadeship Model that fully integrates the best of conventional Western leadership and management techniques with the best of Ubuntu - to integrate Ubuntu into the modernising organisation (or is it the other way round?)
FUTURE: I believe one reaches a stage in life where who one is and what one does converge - where one is happy for what one does to define who one is. The ultimate fulfilment and happiness is surely when what one does and who one is are the same: to be able to say I love what I do and I do what I love. So, when I grow up, I want to be a Backpack Consultant in Africa.