On July 4th, 2024, the company I lead--Thebe Investment Management--turned 10 years old. After a decade as CEO, here is what I think is most important to consider when leading in an organisation. I've distilled what I've learned during that time to a list of what I consider the most important priorities for founders, CEOs and senior executives. Here's my list:
--Chew glass and learn to endure it
To start with, you constantly need to remember that no one is coming to save you. You are on your own--it's your baby! Your destiny, your outcomes are entirely yours to build--or not. There are moments when as a leader it is a hard going leading your people. It gets tough. Elon Musk calls it "chewing glass and looking at the abyss." In those moments you can either fight, or you can take flight. Being a leader of consequence requires that one ride through tough moments. If you leave, you leave on the top of the hill--not the trough. Pain is inevitable when doing anything worthwhile. If you're allergic to it, leadership is not for you. If you can learn to endure it, you will find joy in the outcome of your work--but the pain of effort will always be a companion.
--Stay Alive
Planning is good, being adaptable is better. In the 10 years I've been building; I've gone through 4 devaluation cycles. The national currency has devalued by 4x. There is no planning that could have foreseen the situations we've faced. We planned, but ultimately--we learned to adapt to the highly dynamic circumstances we faced. More importantly we survived. When you're in a position of leadership you have to have the mindset that the job is like being a parent. You don't pass the buck to someone else--you are the person most accountable, and if for whatever reason you stop being responsible--your child may face significant danger. Of course in a job you can always step aside, and in a career you will certainly have to make a decision whether or not to; however those decisions shouldn't be flippant. I'm wary of people who have not made significant long term decisions to stay in jobs for several years or alternatively leave a job in the flash of a moment. They can't be trusted to deal with truly difficult moments; and the reality is that as a leader you have to accept that those hard moments are as likely as good ones. Business is both a constant endurance sport. At the end of the year you either win or are alive enough to be part of the game in the next year--and then do better and win.
--Healthy paranoia
When times are good it's easy to take it for granted. There's an unusual dynamic leaders need to balance; persistent paranoia and savouring good moments. Leaders are often well attuned to fighting, it's in their muscle memory. Learning to savour the good almost seems wrong--and yet it must be. What's the point of enduring pain, if when delight comes its turned away? The trick is not to ever think you've arrived. You have to allow some room for your paranoia; the prospect of new challenges randomly emerging. However, in doing so you have to be grounded in reality. You have to build out war games based on emergent trends instead of imagined boogey men.
--Equip the Generals
Leading is not a one man job, not at the CEO level or the Executive level or managerial level. Every leader needs their generals. There is no Augustus without Agrippa. The challenge is finding them, trusting them and then giving them the space to succeed. Ultimately there are three factors that qualify generals for leadership. The first is clear and obvious talent--without which they wouldn't even be considered for the position, the second is success in the battlefield, and especially ability to overcome initial challenges or defeats. The third is loyalty; you shouldn't ever have to question the trust of your generals. This isn't to say that they won't move on and go elsewhere, or have differences of opinions, or even be absent of conflict. Rather it is to say that regardless of circumstances they will always be forthright and communicate honestly with you. In exchange, you have to give them whatever it is they need to achieve their strategic goals provided you can afford it. More often than not, for capable generals this means equipping their soldiers and putting them in a position and psychology to win.
--Eat with the soldiers
Whereas the generals lead the legions, it is the soldiers that do the fighting. It is the soldiers that meet steel with steel in the battlefield. The generals plan, the soldiers execute. If you want to know first hand what the challenges of the battle are, you need to "eat" with the soldiers. You need to hear directly from them. Generals that are competent will not feel insecure about this because they too eat with their soldiers. Which is to say they get to know them, they hear about their challenges, they are told about the nuances of their adversary. For executives and CEOs that is the market and its constituents. Whereas an organisational chart tells you how the flow of operational leadership cascades, it doesn't tell you who the most consequential people in your organisation are. More often than not, they are just as likely to be at the front lines as they are in the executive suite, or in the supply chains that feed the front lines. An innumerable number of consequential people create value. It's unlikely that you will develop meaningful relationships with all of them--but you still need to know who they are and what they do; and how they contribute. Capable generals are adept at doing this, capable CEOs probably enjoy this part of the job most--listening to their people.
--Learn to laugh
I've found that the best medicine for stress and a stressed team is to laugh. There is so much in life to be serious about, but being able to laugh daily with the people you work with makes work pleasant and keeps relationships strong over the long haul. Provided a team is productive and constantly engaged with its work--there really shouldn't be a cap on laughter. A work culture devoid of laughter will not be resilient. Be very serious, but leave space for jest. People tend to commit more to that sort of organisation or team.
--Look far but stay near
Good leaders have to always be on the lookout for opportunity. You have to be willing to search far for it, to go to the places no one else dare seek out opportunity. You have to be willing to venture out and scout new frontiers. It's the only way to learn what's possible. You won't grow your team or your business simply doing what you've always done. All that guarantees you is sameness and maybe some growth but certainly not a transformational new horizon. The paradox to leadership is that to achieve unusual future success you need to be willing to go far for it, but to stay successful in the here and now you also have to "stay near." By that I mean that you have to stay in the business whilst also being on the business. You need to be present to make decisions, to engage on the daily basis whilst also having space to scope out new opportunities and develop them. You have to be engaged with vision, whilst also present enough to see what's right in front of you.
--Reports
I've found that teams that do their reporting daily, and are never late on their weekly or monthly reports tend to also have limits on how poor their performance gets. They are typically better performers; and in part that is because they are more disciplined and transparent. Teams that are late on their reporting tend to also be the most indisciplined. Ultimately, a CEO needs to have zero tolerance when it comes to lax reporting. When you're in a position of leadership, your metrics are critical for decision making. Your ability to modify tactics and decisions in the operating environment--day by day is greatly aided by being able to see all your OKRs and KPIs across your KRAs on the daily. Monthly reporting is good for comparative purposes, but daily and weekly reporting tell you if you're still alive or not. If you run a startup or startup team, the more granular your reporting, the better. For startup leaders and teams, improper reporting should be a chargeable offence; in principle late reporting ought to be dismissible. Not reporting or reporting late is essentially lying or covering up important facts--it shouldn't be tolerated. The ability to make decisions requires a constant flow of information. Whilst the quality of your decisions is your responsibility, the flow of information to you is your team's responsibility. If your team does not give you that information, they hinder your ability to lead and the responsible individuals are a danger to your organisation. This isn't just a rule for CEOs, it's true for team leaders and generals too. In many ways team leaders and generals need to be given the highest fidelity reporting from their subordinates because they are closer to operations that require quick decision making. They often are also more likely to need to share up-to-date information with regulators and other types of external stakeholders.
--Clarity of thought
Even with all the information in the world, with the best generals, or the best teams; ultimately if you're a leader your core responsibility is to make high quality decisions. I've met incredibly smart people who lack clear eyed ability to make good decisions, and I've met people who do not immediately come across as intellectual powerhouses--but make extremely clear eyed and pragmatic decisions. The ability to make high quality decisions is not about whether those decisions turn out to be right or not. It's about whether the considerations taken in framing a decision tree, and the flow of decisions therein were sound. As a leader you have to accept that you may often be wrong. However when it counts you absolutely need to be right. The ability to see the trees from the forest but still be aware of the forest is cardinal here. Additionally, my point on reporting becomes critical too. If you assume that you will often be wrong, then your ability to pivot from a decision becomes especially critical. You have to built convictions with all your decisions but you also have to be very willing to quickly let go of those convictions when the data demonstrates that another path is better. Sometimes this will look like a lack of decidedness; but that's fine. If you're able to see all the paths before you, what is important is your ability to explain your options to others--and then decide. You wont always have the privilege of meditation or a retreat to allow yourself the quiet of mind to do this. Consequently learning to make high quality decisions with all the noise of life, and the reality of market engagement is critical. You must be forthright about your options--always. Cultivate a team of advisors that help you do this.
--Friends
Your job as a leader is a difficult one. Without friends it's an impossible one. You need to cultivate a range of friendships. You need friends that you can share the difficulties and victories of business with. You need to have friends that you share interests with and without any connection to business. You need to have friends you can relax with. These may be the same people, but they might not. Either way you need them. They help bring levity to your life. They advise you when you you feel lost, they encourage you when you need the boost, they bring you back to earth when you overestimate yourself. The number of people who do this for you will probably be fairly limited if they are to truly know you. But here's one way to think about this--if you dropped dead today; which of your friends from across your circles would volunteer to be your pallbearers? Whatever your answer--keep those people close.
--Be fierce
If you go into business thinking it doesn't have the potential to warp and break you. Then business is not for you. It is an all consuming practice that will affect your family life by taking your time, it will consume your thoughts and take more than a pound of flesh. It's not just a thing you do, it's not just a career--in many respects it is a way of life that has the ability to transcend generations. Going into business is easy. Building a business is hard. Staying in business is hard. Business is for hard people. It is not for soft people. Any softness that exists in business is a reward for the bone crushing hard experiences businesspeople go through; and even then the most successful people don't engage in business for that particular reward. They do it because they enjoy the business they are in. They are obsessed with what they do. This is not a place for people that are nice. Don't get me wrong, civility is important, all the various virtues such as humility and kindness are important. However in business, results are what matter most; and I don't know that there is a "nice" way to lay off people when it becomes critical to business viability. No matter how civil you are, no one enjoys that experience. There is no nice way to remind a person to deliver on their KPIs. You can be civil and should be civil. However even if you put icing on a turd- it remains a turd. Accepting that is important. If you're to succeed, you need a team of fierce people; and to build that team--you need to start with yourself first.
--Study
I've learned a lot about business from friends, from books, from podcasts, and even movies. I've learned a lot from my own mistakes and studying them. In some regards studying business is like working on a literature review that just never quite ends. It's an unending interrogation of your thesis, set against an anti-thesis that is live in the arena--and from your various learning inputs; and then synthesising everything every day. Whether you're a COO, CEO, CFO or CMO this is a process that you probably need to go through. You have to challenge yourself by constantly learning what else is happening in the world of business and transferring those learnings to your own context and interrogating whether any synthesis is possible--and where it is not--why. In a sense you have to constantly engage in a virtual war game, and apply what you learn to simulate what the potential results might be. Often this will be in your mind, sometimes it will be in test environments, and it might even be live in your business practice. You need to observe your competition, both near and far. Studiousness has to be an active part of your approach to business. Assume you are the best at what you do, and ask yourself what it would take for you to remain the best. Proactive learning is probably going to be up there.
Thus-far most of my points have been grim, and maybe it's because I've had to learn to be a CEO in a tough economy. We've built a business I'm proud of. We've sold ~3000 units of property (on payment plans) in Nkwashi over the ten years since our founding. We've invested essentially all our earnings back into Nkwashi and related infrastructure projects. We continue to roll out the sort of infrastructure typically built by governments--building power distribution grids, water and waste infrastructure, and new streets. Outside of Nkwashi, we're expanding our new hamlet development practice by adding new large-scale rural projects to our portfolio; rural wilderness estates, rural agricultural estates, and rural climate projects. Whilst Nkwashi remains a very significant area of focus for us, over the next 10 years we'll be known as much for climate investment as we are for new city development. We'll be known for building private farming estates just as much as we are known for building a new city project like Nkwashi. What will be consistent across all of it is a commitment to land development in the various forms that help people from various walks of life meet their aspirations. Building places that people can live, work, learn and play.
In the end none of us know what our stories will be until they are quite mature and the course of our lives certain and sometimes mostly spent. Despite that there's a lot to be learned by watching what direction the tail winds in your life and career blow. It's better not to fight your tail wind--you're best served by leaning into it. The list I've shared here is by no means comprehensive or exhaustive. It's not meant to be a scientific essay with data to support it's views. It is biased by my context, and my experiences. If you live in a country or region with a pleasant economy this might not be for you. But if you're a fighter--I hope it resonates.
