You can’t jump a chasm in two jumps, says Nick Binedell, the affable outgoing dean of the Gordon Institute of Business Science (commonly referred to as GIBS).
As one of South Africa’s most influential and inspirational business leaders, Nick has grappled with the joys and challenges of change in the “frontier country” he is happy to call home. In this wide-ranging interview, he shares his thoughts on overcoming your fears, making the most of every opportunity, and learning by doing.
During our conversation, which was recorded for the Change Exchange in Johannesburg at the end of 2014, Nick introduced a lovely German word to my vocabulary of change: Fingerspitzengevoel. Feel it in your fingers. Go out and jump the chasm, and in the process, learn to love change.
Transcript:
R: Our guest in the studio today, Nick Binedell, head of the Gibs Business School and on your way out, I hear?
N: Yes, that’s right. I’ve had 15 wonderful years and so I am moving out of the role.
R: You said that you got really bad grades at school.
N: I did.
R: What made you focus and start working?
N: Well I went to a good school, but I moved… My family lived in many countries when I was young, so we lived in six countries by the time I was 10, it took me a while to settle down at school. And I didn’t study enough! That explains bad marks, normally. And then later in life I think I found the things I was passionate about, so I went to university, did a BComm at Rhodes, and then after that, I had a wonderful, short period in my career where I worked in London and New York, and I seem to have then woken up to life’s possibilities.
R: Life’s possibilities. That’s a wonderful expression; does it have a specific meaning for you?
N: I worked for a company where I took minutes every Monday morning for about four years, listening to senior executives discuss the business and I wasn’t allowed to say a word. And I learned a lot from them about leadership and about business and it gave me a… sort of a room with a view, and that simulated my career in business and shortly after that I got a big promotion, and I did an MBA and ran a company at quite a young age. And that pressure really also opened up a panorama of what business is about and what’s happening in the country at the time and I started teaching part time and I really relished that.
R: But you said you were in New York on the 16th of June, ’76 and you said that changed your life. Why and how?
N: Well it had a big impact on me. I was far away and the information came through what was then a telex machine, and I worked in public affairs for Mobil Oil, in the political affairs department, and I remember standing at the telex machine and I used to have to get the lead to see what stories are coming up every day. And I saw the story and I remember the first opening line on the AP, Reuters, saying A Cloud of Smoke Rises Over Soweto – and that was home, it grabbed my attention. And I suppose it affected me more because I was so far away. And I really forced me to think about the country and who I was.
R: Did you consider not coming back?
N: No… when I went to do my doctorate in Seattle in the 1980s, sometime later, I did wonder whether I would come back, but once again I just found… Well I’ll tell you the story. I was having a dinner party that lasted for many, many hours with good friends, and at some point someone turned and said: “Ah, you’re just like one of us.”
R: Canadian? No, American?
N: Well I was in Seattle, and then I realised: “No, I’m not.” And after I recovered from the hangover I thought well, actually, where do I belong? Certainly not in America. Not in Britain. It’s home. And I came home in the middle 1980s, the week before the 2nd State of Emergency that PW Botha imposed, and I came back to all of that and have been here ever since.
R: Why were you not an American?
N: Because I’m an African.
R: In what way? What does that mean?
N: Because I think for most of my life I have been part of the dynamics of this amazing continent. I grew up in Kenya for some of my childhood, and I have travelled through the continent as we tend to do, mainly in the South, but more recent years everywhere. And I have relished where we are.
R: I think it was Doctor Rupert who first said: “Here, our lives actually make a difference.”
N: Yes, this is an extraordinary country, going through, probably going to go through another extraordinary era of change, and I have seen two extraordinary years in my lifetime, and so there is something very compelling, I think, about being here. And living your life as fully as you can, and trying to make a contribution whatever way is right for you and the situation, which is always changing so quickly.
R: And things are not settled yet.
N: No, no, no.
R: We can actually make a difference.
N: Absolutely. I am very interested in deep structures and how they play their way out over long periods of time, not decades, but longer periods. I guess as we get older, we look further back. I try and look further ahead, but I am convinced South Africa will be a country in transition for the next 50, 60, 70 years, quite easily. We still have to find each other. And what’s working and not working now, if you like, is these initial dynamics given where we came from to where we are. We’re in a much more open space now. Kader Asmal used to quote a lovely Irish poem that said: “Now that the fight for the mountains is over, the struggle for the plains begins.” And we’re in the plains now. The deeper structural stuff has to get dealt with. And this is a long journey, and it’s one that changes all the time.
R: You were at Wits Business School from 1992 onwards, how did you experience the… that dramatic change at that point?
N: I was there from 1986 to 1998; head of the school for six years and a few of us were quite engaged in political life then and brought some of that conversation into the curriculum. It was very fulfilling. We were challenged by many of the faculty. I will always remember one discussion with a senior colleague who came up to me and he said: “I hear you have been talking about politics in the classroom!”
R: Oh dear.
N: And I looked at him and I said: “I hear you haven’t.” So that caused a bit of a discussion. But we worked hard to ensure the issues of the day, I think as we do at Gibs, are in the curriculum and that the dynamism of the country is reflected in the institution.
R: Did you see the university change at that time?
N: Yes, I think it went from a… I mean Wits was a, is, was an English language university, with a very particular tradition in a mining town.
R: Classical liberalism? No?
N: Well that would be a long discussion as to what liberalism really means and how it changes its definition and what that means in a colonial environment, because that was a form of liberalism that had to with the colonial outlook. But yes, for sure, the university went through dramatic change quite quickly. Some of it manageable, and some of it not.
R: Like what, how did it change?
N: Well I think, clearly a student who studied at the university changed dramatically.
R: The student body changed?
N: Ja, and the politics of the student body changed. If you think back, it’s not so long ago that we look back and say, if you think back to the time that SASO and Steve Biko breaking away from NUSAS. And it’s all been written about now, I mean NUSAS was rejected and then had to find its own way as a student body amongst mainly English Universities, the so-called liberal ones he referred to and find a political discourse and political action to bring about the change he believed in. So much of that sentimentality was present at UCT and Wits, I think they were the main leaders of that argument.
R: Why did you move to… you started Gibs, you were the founding head?
N: Yes, I have spent 13 years at Wits, which were very enjoyable years, and six as the head of the school. I did find the bureaucracy a little difficult at times, because it’s a very big machine. And universities are often very centralised. I met Johan van Zyl, who was then the vice-chancellor of the University of Pretoria, now the CEO of Sanlam. At a chance encounter and I had already announced I was leaving and he said: “Why don’t you come and work with us?” So I went to him with a proposition of starting a new school in Johannesburg, not Pretoria, but under the umbrella of the University of Pretoria. That’s how it began. A lot of people didn’t think there was room for another business school in Johannesburg, but there was. And our approach was to be very close to business and to be applied in our thinking to try and help people running businesses to do a bit better with a bit of our help, and that’s really where we started.
R: What is it like to start something from scratch?
N: Scary! I once asked Johan and said: “What happens if this flopped?” And he said: “I’ll be doing agricultural research and you’ll be chained to a desk next to me.” It was a big risk that the university took, because I wasn’t known to them. And it was, it was a big responsibility to begin, because they funded it well. I said if we were going to do it we must do it well. And so they funded it well, and it was scary, although I knew quite a bit about what we were doing, because I had run a business school and I had been in business and I had been at this for quite a while. And travelled around the world, working with business schools, so I knew the territory. But it was quite a big risk. And we started out, I went and had endless cups of tea with chief executives in 1998, 1999, asking them what were the challenges in their businesses and what they were thinking about. That helped me shape the philosophy of the school to be about certain themes that they were talking about.
R: I was going to ask, that interplay between theory and practice. Can you really learn to be an entrepreneur? Or even to run a business?
N: Well I often get asked that, and also can you learn to be a leader. And the answer is yes and no. You can certainly accelerate, almost all of us can learn about thinking like an entrepreneur and thinking and behaving like a leader, but mainly it’s got to come from somewhere else. It’s got to come from your own kind of consciousness and your own philosophy and your own experience of life. So yes, I think you can accelerate it, like most things. You can take someone who is no good at music 10000 hours and give them a violin and if you train them long enough you will play reasonably. All of us can improve what we’re doing in that area by studying best practice, by looking at bad practice, by observing ourselves in action, I think.
R: How has your approach changed over the past years?
N: My own approach? Part of stopping is to have a look back and see, I suppose. I think we learn mainly by experience, actually.
R: So? How do you teach?
N: You have to reflect on what you’re doing a little more than normal. And I think most of us live such busy lives that we are always on to the next thing. And so, quite early on, I developed two practices. One was when I go home, reflecting on the day. What had gone well and what had not gone well. And also, I used to take a week away. To go and really think about life and what was happening around me and I found both of those practices actually very helpful. I think we learn by experience. You can’t teach all of this and I think business schools can be useful, but you learn mainly by doing. You learn from doing. Many craft. You can’t play golf by watching a DVD, you actually have to hit the little white ball. So I think that’s true in life. What business schools do, institutions of learning do, is try and share some of the ideas of best practice, try and force you to make decisions about what it is you are doing, in other words get practice what you’re doing. But mainly you learn by doing it. It’s a craft. The Germans actually have a lovely word I have been using, Fingerspitzengefühl, the feeling in the fingers. And a lot of executive judgement, judgements in life, are intuitive. It’s more of a craft than a science. Anyone who thinks business is a science have a misplaced view.
R: What are the common things that trip entrepreneurs up?
N: Well I think very often what happens is they have a flash of insight into something they think is unique, and they pursue… you know, it’s the better mousetrap. And they pursue that without really understanding what needs to come with it. So if you look at a lot of the big companies, they were started by people later in life. You get the odd Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, but it’s quite rare. Often companies are started by people with some business experience, because a lot of it is not just about the good idea, but it’s about the organisational ability, the selling ability, the communication ability. Being able to attract people to the idea. And so people associate entrepreneurship with a good idea. It’s a good idea, plus plus. Donald Gordon, who I knew quite well when he was at Liberty and later, was an incredibly clever guy, but he had this ability to attract people around him to make much of this happen. And many of our entrepreneurs are very good at this. I can think of many names in Jo’burg that have companies, started by an individual, but what separates them from the person with a good idea, is a series of good ideas, but more the ability to build an organisation around it, rather than just the idea itself.
R: We used to say about the founder of Carte Blanche, Bill Faure, that he would walk through a room and throw silver balls into the air. And walk out the other door! And other people had to catch them and keep them going.
N: Yes, well I mean at Gibs partly we talk about… is I was pretty scared and paranoid about whether this would work, I knew I was betting my career on it, apart from the university’s reputation and capital. And the support we had from the Gordon family. But I ran, and when I looked over my shoulder there were fortunately a few people behind me, and I have been very privileged to have a very stable team working with me over a long period of time, and that’s partly why this is the right time to think about moving on and for someone else to give shape to the next phase of the school.
R: Are you moving on to something specific?
N: No, I’m going to be a professor at the school, I’m very conscious of staying out of the room and letting the new team lead, led by the new leader, take it forward. I’m going to teach, which I have been doing, but I’m really looking forward to sharpening that skill set again, and I’m going to take a bit of a break and get the octopus off my head. I always say running a company or organisation is when you put an octopus over your head and you spend the year looking through other people’s eyes. So I get the octopus off my head and I look again, and I am fascinated by what is happening around us, whether it’s South Africa or the rest of the world, we’re living in I think, a most remarkable era, in which the rate of change is going to accelerate, competitiveness is going to accelerate, challenges we have are going to accelerate and I want to take another look at them and see where there’s a little contribution I can make in that broad agenda. I’m at that time of life where I’ve got a bit of agility and flexibility, so I think there’s another something, but I’m not sure what it is at this stage.
R: Is that a bit scary?
N: Well, Americans have a lovely expression. They say you can’t jump the chasm in two jumps. Chasms have to be one jump, so I have always said… when people used to talk about immigrating in the 80s, they used to say to me: “We don’t know where to go, so we’re not sure we should immigrate.” And I would say: “No, separate those. First you decide to immigrate; Then you’re going to decide where you’re going to go.” So I decided to leave the role, and in my career, at least, I’m sure it’s true for many people – when you stop something, something else arises and maybe look at it from another angle.
R: Partly because there’s space.
N: Because there’s space, yes.
R: In your own head?
N: And also I think, and I have talked to a lot of CEOs who are retiring or have retired recently, and there’s a new energy, because you are in a very particular role. If you’re running a big institution, it’s very easy not to realise how tough and pressured these jobs are. How many judgement calls you’ve got to make, how much uncertainty there is. So I think a lot of people… it’s like coming off a battlefield, coming off with a need to refresh and then maybe there’s another thing they can do. And I’m very conscious these days that you don’t stop at a certain age, you shift the emphasis. And South Africa is one of these frontier countries where there are so many things going on, that I think everyone going through this process can find many, many more things to do. The country is just in its infancy in so many ways.
R: And you say that with a smile? Many people in this country at the moment are saying where are we going and we’re going off the cliff.
N: It’s always been like that.
R: Yes, always.
N: So for me…
R: Like it was going to blow up every five years, forever.
N: I remember reading a Newsweek Magazine, about 1988, that said South Africa is faced with the empty promise of a forgone conclusion.
R: Sjoe!
N: Well it’s still like that.
R: And maybe not.
N: And maybe not, because if you looked in 1988 and said where we would be by 2000, they would have locked you up and changed your drug regime. And if you looked at where we ended up, you never know. So I look at the continent and all the opportunities there, and I look at the transitions and the transformations that are occurring, I look at Gibs at who comes to the school. We have lots of school kids come through and work at Gibs, and they are extraordinary. And I say no, why bother impaling yourself on the uncertainty, when in fact there is so much you can do and we never know the outcome? That’s life, so get on with it.
R: You also had children growing up and you had to also be a father and a husband and all of that, while your career was taking most of your time, I’m sure? Women always talk about the balance. Did you think about that, consciously or does a man just forge ahead?
N: I carefully looked for the balance and kind of ignored it! No I’m just joking. I have one child and she’s in Scotland. I was very focused on my work I have to say. It’s very difficult. I think for women it’s just a much, much tougher thing than for men. I think some men battle with work, life balance, and some are obsessed by an idea and ignore it and in a way lead an unhealthy life and often they achieve great things. Others manage to find that rhythm and the balance and all sorts of ways of doing it, but for women it’s a much bigger issue, I think, a much bigger challenge for women, although I am seeing so much change in that area as women take their place far more authentically as leaders now, and I think will in the future. Especially in this country, it’s very interesting to look at the role that women play in politics and in business, increasingly.
R: And do you think that is affecting the way men look at their roles?
N: Oh absolutely. Without making it overcomplicated, I think that the industrial era was a question of a certain kind of power. A lot of it broad, muscle power. And we’re in the knowledge era, and we’re in the network era, and we’re in the multi-dimensional decision-making era. All suit women more than men. Men are always A and B and C, men are very focused on what they do, they are very rational thinkers and women are far more intuitive and creative in that way. And I think around the world this is a thing that is happening, which is wonderful to see. In South Africa I think it is happening and at Gibs I mean I think 70% of the people who work at Gibs are women. So that’s a very encouraging thing. And both angles – they don’t have to be male or female, but these different mix of skills. The artistic and the scientific, the intuitive and the rational and the individualist versus the group, the emotional and the supportive are all blends that you want in a society or organisation.
R: And in a team.
N: And in a team. And then there’s the generational story, which is so interesting. Because young women of 17 today, as they should be, are very different from women who are older.
R: Talk to me about your home. Where do you live and what is it like and what sold that place to you?
N: So I live down the road in Oxford road in a home that has been redone and it’s been opened up, which gives it a lot of light. I started cooking more than I intended and so I’m doing that, which I enjoy, not very well. And I have quite a big library. I do have a weakness for books.
R: For paper books?
N: Yes, and I don’t like… maybe I will now, but I can’t read a book on Kindle the way I read a physical book, still.
R: Do you mark it?
N: Yes, I do. Not with a marker, but with my thumb nail. So I have quite a big library and I’m an avid book buyer, so my home is a bit about that and the media. I have always been a paper reader, and now, the joy now of the simple idea that all your information in the world is two clicks away – not the knowledge, but the information – I find myself getting lost in the forest. I start on one topic and I see oh, look at that, and then 20 minutes later I am in another territory, I am in Mongolia! It’s fantastic. And the fact that a kid in Bangladesh can do that and if they’ve got access to the internet as well as in Silicon Valley, is an unbelievable thing I don’t think we’ve understood yet. We’re going to go through a process of remarkable human development, I’m convinced of it. It’s going to be unequal as it always is, but three or four billion people are going to have access to information only a billion had before. And their creativity will change the planet, there’s no question about it.
R: I was with someone the other day, an environmentalist, who said that how can we keep growing and think we can keep growing with finite resources! And I thought but the one thing that is not finite, is what is happening in our heads.
N: Well also the way we use resources, say if you look at agriculture today – everywhere in the world it’s five times more productive because of scientific adaptations…
R: Yes, and that starts here (points to head).
N: And it starts with the mind and science and technology, which I don’t understand, but love.
R: Thank you so much, and all of the very, very best, I hope you find very creative ways of filling that space that is opening up.
N: That’s very kind of you, thanks very much.
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