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How to Build a Happy Sandpit

Second Edition

By Colin J. Browne

West St. Floyd BooksLondon | Johannesburg

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HOW TO BUILD A HAPPY SANDPIT

Copyright © 2013, 2015Colin J. Browne

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in aretrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-0-9572039-2-1

Published byWest St. Floyd Books

4C Garfield Road, Twickenham, TW1 3JS

United Kingdom

Second Edition

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My intention in writing this book was to learn as much as I could so that I can share as much as I can. I am grateful beyond words to the men and women who gave me their time and their wisdom to enable me to put this enormous topic into perspective. I hope you’ll all feel you’ve been treated with dignity and respect as I have intended.

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To Linda Liquorish. This is a long-overdue promise kept. You’ve witnessed this project from beginning to end and there is no doubt in my mind it is a million times better for your wisdom, your patience and your unwillingness to compromise. I remain in complete awe of you, which is a pretty amazing way to feel about the woman you’re madly in love with.

I really am the luckiest guy alive. Thank you always xx

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List of interviewees in alphabetical order, by company

Don Packett co-founder 21TanksPhil Helmsley founder and CEO AdvanceNet

Julia Raphaely CEO Associated Media PublicationsBenjamin Mophatlane co-founder and CEO Business Connexion

Alan Knott-Craig CEO Cell CMike Stopforth founder and CEO CerebraCraig Rodney managing director Cerebra

George Sombonos founder and CEO Chicken LickenRakesh Wahi co-founder and vice-chairman CNBC Africa

Erik Venter CEO ComairBarry Sayer founder and CEO Continental Outdoor Media

Mark Lu founder and CEO CorexIngrid Kast founder and CEO DAV Professional Placement

Eddie Vosloo CEO Dawn WingYaron Assabi founder and CEO Digital Solutions Group

Penny Thlabi director of people capital DiscoveryMoray MacLennan internal communications specialist Discovery

Jolandé Duvenage CEO eBucksLitsa Roussos former-CEO Emmanuels

Michael Jordaan CEO First National Bank Mike Greeff founder and CEO Greeff Properties

James Herbst CEO Huge TelecomReg Lascaris co-founder Hunt Lascaris

Marco van Niekerk CEO Incredible ConnectionMarc Kahn head of human resources & organisation development Investec

Pepe Marais co-founder Joe PublicGraham Warsop founder and chairman Jupiter Drawing Room

Gideon Galloway founder and CEO King PriceBrand Pretorius retired CEO McCarthy Group

Caroline Engelke executive general manager for people development and support Metropolitan Life

Richard Mulholland founder Missing LinkDave Meyer head of strategy Missing Link

Jason Lurie founder and CEO MoyoEric Parker co-founder Nando’s and founder of Franchising Plus

David Coutinho managing director NashuaRyan Bacher founder and CEO NetfloristMike Schalit co-founder Net#work BBDO

Candice Arnold EMEA sales and marketing director OpenSymmetry

INTRO

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Oresti Patricios founder and CEO Ornico GroupFrancois van Dyk operations manager Ornico Group

Rainer Gaier founder and managing director Ovations GroupFrancois du Plooy financial director Ovations Group

Leoni van Tonder human resources manager Ovations GroupAndrew Golding CEO Pam Golding Properties

Paul Anley founder and CEO Pharma DynamicsRaymond Ackerman founder and retired chairman Pick n Pay

Manny Rivera founder and CEO Planet FitnessKuben Pillay, chairman, PrimediaHitesh Patel director Primi World

Nicholas Barenblatt new developments manager Protea HotelsRohan Vos founder and CEO Rovos Rail

Ivan Epstein founder and CEO SageSteven Cohen managing director Sage Pastel

Anja Hartman-Weitz human resources director Sage VIPAllen Ambor founder and chairman Spur

Nkhensani Nkosi founder and CEO Stoned CherrieAlison Treadaway South African managing director Striata

Phil Duff founder and CEO SysproDerek Bouwer group CEO TBWA

Travers Hathrill managing director The Business CentreTrevor Ormerod group commercial executive Times Media GroupVusi Dlamini group human resources director Tsogo Sun Group

Michael Allschwang managing executive VodacomJanine Hills founder and CEO Vuma ReputationDavid Lancaster senior partner Webber Wentzel

Jeremy Botha CEO WerksmansGuy Munnoch CEO Zurich Insurance

All titles indicate the roles for which the individuals were interviewed, but these do not necessarily reflect the whole of their portfolio of professional positions.

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Thanks to the following for your generous assistance in connecting me and leading me in the right direction:

Lynne Adcock, Daryn Basson, Linda Bobbert, Gwynneth Bownes, Nick Browne, John Browne, Kathleen Browne, Michelle Buthelezi, Claire Carr, Andre Cillie, Christopher Coetzee, Debby Coltman , Nicolle de Lucia, Gaahele Diseko, Sacha Du Plessis, Janine Duncan, Gertrude Eland, Farzana Fakir, Karin Fourie, Kerryn Gordon, Dianne Haantjes, David Hallas, June Hanks, Michael Hann, Sanchia Harley, Rebecca Harvie, Hillary Hornett, Lisa Hovgaard, Mark Jakins, Candice Jones, Werner Joubert, Nicole Kandier, Mark Keating, Yvonne Kiewiet, Elnathan Kock, Joanne Kruger, Lindelwe Kunene, Claire Lamb, Michele Lazarus, Craig Leppan, Linda Liquorish, Phyl Liquorish, Shehnaaz Loonat, Railene Maccario, Storm Maclennan, Nici Malamoglou, Tumi Manong, Dawie Maree, Alison Mckie, Celeste Meidecen, Terry-Joy Mogano, Bronwyn Mollentze, Debbi Mulder, Sim Mzaidume, Mala Naidoo, Tracy O’Brien, Duncan Palmer, Mia Papanicolaou, Adeline Pillay, Indren Pillay, Tanita Poipao, Lauren Richardson, Heidi Rogers, Vinnie Santu, Nadine Stella, William Surmon, Roman Szulc, Claire Taylor, Thalissa Theeruth, Nozipho Tshabalala, Claire Tyler, Dries Van Der Merwe, Susan van der Ryst, Lex van Wyk, Brenda Vos, Priscille Walsh, Eleanor Wardrop, Samantha Watt, Brett Wood.

Special thanks to the brilliant design team at MDOT who worked around the clock to make this all happen.

Extra special thanks to Liquorish Inc. for embracing the Happy Sandpit concept and taking it to a level I could never have achieved on my own in a million years of trying.

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CONTENTSPART ONE: YOUR BUSINESS AS A SANDPIT

CHAPTER 1: So what’s this all about?

CHAPTER 2: Why it matters: the challenge of change

CHAPTER 3: Defining your own Happy Sandpit

CHAPTER 4: You deserve the people you have

PART TWO: SIX KEY OBSERVATIONS ABOUT SANDPITS

(WHETHER HAPPY OR NOT)

CHAPTER 5: The role of leadership is only to create Happy

Sandpits

CHAPTER 6: Happy Sandpits thrive on (moderate) democracy

CHAPTER 7: Happy Sandpit subcultures are inevitable

CHAPTER 8: Happy Sandpits need consistency

CHAPTER 9: You cannot prescribe happiness. You either are or you

are not

CHAPTER 10: Merging and acquiring Sandpits

CHAPTER 11: We are all responsible for our own Happy Sandpits

PART THREE: APPLYING THE LESSONS

CHAPTER 12: What to do now

INDEX

C17

19

33

45

75

97

99

125

159

177

199

207

219

227

229

241

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INTRO

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Culture has been absolutely fundamental to building our story. I learned years ago that when you’re changing your business, never change your culture and Values, but change your business practices. And a lot of people get mixed up with that. Changing your business practices because you want to make sure you’re modern and your formats are right and your accounting is right and your buying processes are right, is very different from changing your culture. Pick n Pay was built on culture and I don’t believe – and this may be me being a little bombastic – but if you spoke to our people that they would say there is a disconnect on culture. Of course there will be a disconnect with some of the union leaders who try to spoil our culture but that’s a different story. My role as retired chairman, and I am here every day, is to ensure that the new guys can run the business and make the changes that are required, but I am watching that we don’t ever change our culture. And that’s how important this subject is.” – Raymond Ackerman

It goes without saying that a book like this should have a purpose beyond the mere reading of it. In fact there are two. On the one hand I’d like it to help early-stage entrepreneurs fall back in love

INTRO

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with the businesses they started by detailing ways to overcome the most difficult of all challenges: hiring people. On the other, I’d like to help companies of all sizes overcome their fear of hiring by demonstrating how an emphasis on a constructive culture can drive employee engagement. Our nation cannot grow without a significant increase in employment opportunities, but for employers to take on new people means navigating some genuinely tricky waters. Our labour law makes firing a difficult task, so there is an insane amount of weight on us to get this right. In Denmark, where employment is an enviable 99%, you can sack a lousy employee on a whim and there are no consequences to face. In South Africa that’s just not the case and if you’ve ever spent a pleasant hour or two defending your position in front of the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA), even when you’ve been careful to follow the rules, you’ll probably want to avoid doing it ever again.

But if you can’t just move people out of your organisation when the love has worn thin, you need an alternative, and the best one I can think of is to make sure you only allow the right ones through the front door in the first place. That’s what this book is about, at the most basic level.

But it’s about a little more than that too. I spent the better part of nine months interviewing more than 60 founders, CEOs and heads of HR of South African companies and they have stories to tell which you may find eerily familiar. If you don’t agree, it could be that you’re very lucky and I hope this book will prevent you from ever having to find out.

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The origin of the term Happy Sandpit may interest you. As a parent of a three year old, when I’m not working, the odds are that I’m at a restaurant near my home which has a play area attached, watching as my daughter either does or does not have a fun time playing. It’s never the restaurant that’s to blame if she does not. It’s never the equipment. It’s never the weather. It’s always some rotten kid (and I have to confess, from time-to-time it is her) who ruins the whole experience. That’s what it’s like at work too, and for that reason I have come to believe in the importance of building Happy Sandpits like a religion. People are everything. With the right ones, you can achieve dramatic victories. Without them, it’s more of a struggle. I’m right about this, and I have more than 60 leading South African businessmen and women to back up my arguments. Surely it’s worth a deeper and more complex look at your own organisation’s culture to try to create a better match?

So what are you going to learn? Well, brace yourself, because you may learn that you’ve got a lot of work to do. Building a Happy Sandpit takes thought and committed action, which will be demonstrated amply throughout this book. There are ideas and actionable points from those more than 60 business leaders across a group of organisations representing a cross-section of the very best of South African enterprise. It’s been a load of hard work pulling this together, but I must acknowledge it has also been a privilege. Now allow me the good fortune to help you put this to work.

Colin J Browne

INTRO

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PART ONE: YOUR BUSINESS AS A SANDPIT

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CHAPTER 1: SO WHAT’S THIS ALL ABOUT?

Allow me to make three important observations. The first concerns a fundamental complexity in hiring, which I call The Sand Kicker Conundrum. It’s one that most employers will have some experience with, and though you probably have another name for it, the principle is pretty universal. It came to me following a miserable six-month experience with an employee who was without a doubt, the worst fit I have ever seen for an organisation. In this case it was my company, and so I had first-hand experience and a major role to play in removing that person and together with my colleagues and I, cleaning up the mess she had made.

On analysis, the thing that irks me the most about the whole episode isn’t the employee however, but the fact that my partners and I, as the company’s leaders, had allowed this Sand Kicker into our Sandpit in the first place. We had the choice to say no, but we chose to say yes; a decision which I have never been able to get my

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head around in retrospect, because it seems like every discussion we ever had about her was that she was going to require a lot of energy if we were to get the best from her. Why did we make the decision? We were seduced by skills and experience, which we needed at the time. Subsequently I’ve come to understand what now seems rather obvious: that there is a chasmic difference between people who can do things and people who actually will.

What perhaps isn’t obvious enough however, and is revealed through the Sand Kicker Conundrum, is that there can be an equally vast difference between the positivity and supportive messages relayed by a candidate during the job interview and overall hiring process, and the way they actually behave once they enter the Sandpit. The Sand Kicker Conundrum is simply this: in order to maintain the constructive, good-fellowship of your Sandpit, it’s necessary, however counter-intuitive it may be, to completely ignore a candidate’s past experience, work knowledge and skills in your final decision. That’s a tough call to make, but I stand by it, and I urge you to do the same. Just because someone can do the work, doesn’t mean they will.

Perhaps alarmingly, it’s increasingly apparent that the most often-used filter when looking for prospective job candidates, the Curriculum Vitae (or CV … or resume … whatever you choose to call it) is almost completely irrelevant. I say almost completely because there is some value in an employment history and a declared list of skills, but when you consider that an estimated 40% of all the information on CVs is exaggerated at best and fabricated at worst, there’s a risk in allowing one to influence your decision-

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making. Many employers have come to this conclusion already. Erik Venter, CEO of Comair, says that only 3% to 7% of the CVs his company receives result in a job offer, for example.

What matters today, is the human being in question. In the case of our Sand Kicker, the skills and employment history contained within her CV described an innovative go-getter with a taste for winning, but the human being couldn’t have been more different.

Many of the organisations interviewed for this book have addressed this issue of hiring people over skills and experience with real vigour and the results are evident in their own Happy Sandpits. We’ll speak a lot about that later on.

The second observation is what I call The 18 Month Rule. There comes a time, around 18 months after their start date, when all employees slightly resent you for ever hiring them in the first place. It’s not that they dislike their work as such, or their colleagues, their work environment, or even you, but as the glow of newness wears off, the focal points are the irritations, and the workplace is full of irritations. From this collective mind set flows the general dull hum of most organisations, offering a considerable leadership challenge.

I’ve had a personal role to play in perpetuating that sort of thinking, I’m afraid to say. I recall one afternoon during the mid-1990s, as a magazine editor at a publishing company in Dubai, how a previously invisible-to-me attitude was brought to my attention. Because 80% of the population of Dubai is from outside the country, new arrivals to our office were generally new to the United Arab Emirates too, which meant that they needed assistance in getting

PART ONE: SO WHAT’S THIS ALL ABOUT?

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their bearings and generally settling in. And because I liked that role, I was very often the one who took them out for a welcome drink at the Irish Village, a pub local to the office. It wasn’t only me, but in my 20s, single and free, I was usually one of those rolling out the welcoming wagon.

One afternoon, as a colleague and I were preparing to take a new arrival named Matthew out for a drink and a bite to eat, we were called into the general manager’s office where he asked us if we could do him the favour of not bad-mouthing the company that evening. It was an embarrassing, but enlightening moment. You see, we all thought our employer was a little bit rubbish. Things weren’t run on big budgets and there were lots of little niggles such as the lack of parking as the team began to expand. It was part of the vernacular of that company to complain. And yet an overwhelming number of people, including me, turned up every day and took pride in the work that we did. From the outside looking in, you wouldn’t have known that there was anything but the happiest of Happy Sandpits inside the company walls, because while we complained among ourselves, it was also part of our language to be fiercely defensive to the outside world. I remember sitting over a burger at the local Fudruckers with a fairly senior executive of Cisco Systems Middle East; by any measure a more substantial business than the one I worked for and one where employees such as he received exceptional benefits; who told me how great my life must be, and that he was secretly a little envious.

Nevertheless, my general manager made a very important point during that conversation. To new employees, the words and

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actions of existing employees are wildly influential, and it’s that, which many organisations struggle with, often blindly. These new employees have no personal frame-of-reference yet, so what they hear and see from their new colleagues carries exceptional weight.

The failure of organisations to address that has a long-term impact, which can become rapidly destructive when the new employee is poorly chosen. My lasting impression is that our Sand Kicker was far too willing to believe all the bad things and ignore the good. Not all employees do that of course. While employee disengagement numbers around the world in the middle of the second decade of this century tell a tale of workers so numbed by boredom and a lack of appreciation that they struggle even to turn up for work, the reality from my many thousands of interactions is often very different. For the most part, employees seem okay being where they are, working with a group of people they know and doing jobs that they mostly have chosen to do. The fact that things are far from perfect may be the low-level conversation, but that doesn’t affect their ability or willingness to get their jobs done according to the general requirement.

Bluntly, management is powerless to change the 18 Month Rule. Unless we work out a way of totally reprogramming human nature, people will pour scorn on things that irritate them with varying and often cyclical degrees of intensity. Through it all however, positive people tend to be positive people no matter what you do to them, and negative people tend to be negative people, no matter how much you give to them, highlighting once again, the importance of focusing on the human traits of your candidates.


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Doing so, plays to the positives; doing the opposite can very much play to the negatives.

As a footnote, the Bermuda Triangle for goodwill in any organisation is often the point of congregation. For easy reference, look to the smoking balcony. Though I am by no means knocking the smokers specifically, the smoking area is the one place in any organisation that random people from sales, marketing, finance, logistics, admin and every other department will congregate several times per day. Where people congregate, the presence of a Sand Kicker can have a very serious impact.

The third observation is that you can give, but you can’t take away. Generally, it’s probably true that employers, managers and team leaders would prefer to manage their people with generosity and kindness, but often that leads to actions that terminate in a cul-de-sac of entitlement. A freebie offered out of kindness may quickly become an expectation, and any points you score by offering it are lost many times over should you take it away.

It doesn’t even have to be an extra perk, for that matter. It’s common enough to be a meme that the work and remuneration package that was agreed during the hiring process, begins to look skewed heavily in the employer’s favour to employees, as time unfolds.

As Vusi Dlamini, group HR director for Tsogo Sun put it, we create our own monsters in trying too hard to be kind employers. “We’ll say to people you know when you first joined us and wanted a job, during the interview you said you’d go the extra mile and so on? Well now you have the job, and your attitude has changed. You’re saying

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you’re underpaid and overworked and whatever. You have the problem that people end up taking things for granted.”

Julia Raphaely, managing director of Associated Magazines, says something similar in reference to employees’ reactions to budget cuts; that people adjust like the proverbial frog in boiling water, slowly and gradually taking an increase in temperature for granted without realising that a new situation actually reflects a change. On the day we met, she told me she had spoken to her staff that morning about the budget for the next financial year and that she did so “verbally so that they can see me in clear vision”.

She didn’t expect that her message would fully resonate with any individual however until it came down to something that directly affected them such as not being allowed to travel, or the rejection of an expense claim. This is such a common theme in the Happy Sandpit research that there is an entire chapter dedicated to it in Part Two of this book.

Acts of generosity can also be absurdly political. Ryan Bacher, the founder of Netflorist, decided at one point to offer shopping vouchers as rewards for performance and initially selected Woolworths. A lack of enthusiasm for the idea from some parts of the organisation – because of Woolworth’s relatively higher prices – led him to add a voucher from Checkers to the mix, but that made things more complicated. People receiving Woolworths vouchers felt they should be of a higher monetary value because you get less for your money than you do from Checkers. Eventually, an idea which was intended to spread some goodwill, was scrapped because of the risk of creating division.


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Again, it’s a common theme. There are alternative versions of the story of course. Eddie Vosloo, CEO of Dawnwing, says that management needs to be innovative about resetting employee expectations by, for example, never allowing an activity to last longer than three months. His belief is that as long as employees see things as temporary anyway, the problem is limited by taking such action.

Perhaps that’s true. But it could just be time to admit that we’re all getting this wrong by misidentifying what it is that makes people happy in the area of incentives. One man I must credit substantially for my thinking on the topic of incentivising groups of people is American writer Daniel Pink, whose Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us is a recommended read. Pink says that we need to upgrade the entire concept of motivation to move away from the last-century methodology of carrots and sticks to what he calls autonomy (we want to be allowed to make our own decisions; Pink points to the simple example of how children play), mastery (we want to get better at doing things and thrive when we have a sense of progress) and purpose (we want to connect with a cause larger than ourselves). Those are culture words.

So what does happy mean, anyway?Of the more than 60 South African organisations interviewed for this book, there were very few which appeared to be paying lip service to an innate desire for happier organisations. Often where they faced significant challenges was in understanding how to drive happiness in the first place. While happy is the biggest word on the

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cover of this book, it makes reference not to making employees happier, but to creating an organisation where happiness is possible in the first place. There’s a very serious difference between the two. You can devote time, energy, resources and everything else at your disposal to the task of trying to change the outlook of individual employees, but a focus on the underlying principles of what makes a happy organisation is infinitely more achievable and has a long-term strategic impact.

Perhaps the reason you’re even reading this book is because we tend not to create organisations with happiness in mind. One of the great paradoxes of the entrepreneurial journey is that entrepreneurs leave employment to go out on their own because they hate the rules, the feeling of constraint, and because they hate their bosses. They believe they could do something better on their own and so they go out into the world to lay down an exciting challenge, but ironically, they start businesses exactly like the one they hated.

Why is that? Well, one assumes that real entrepreneurs posess some sort of business smarts; selling skills, an idea or two about product development and marketing, and perhaps some sense of financial control and the importance of cash flow, without which you probably don’t have a real chance of business success anyway. What is lacking however, in the overwhelming number of cases, is any real insight into how to source people who will be easy to craft together into performing teams. In the absence of any such insight, the knee-jerk reaction to poorly performing employees is to create processes and policies to try to lessen the potential for conflict, but


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the outcome, over time, is a business that feels to its employees, exactly like the one that the entrepreneur left, felt to him or her.

Policies and processes aren’t in and of themselves a bad thing, of course. If we don’t have policies, how do we know where to turn up on a Monday morning? If we don’t have processes, how can we replicate yesterday’s work without reinventing the wheel every time?

The problem is the number of them, and the spirit in which they are created. You’ve probably been on the unpleasant end of many of these, over the course of your life; policies that are written to protect the organisation against the 3% of people who might screw it over, all the while handcuffing the 97% who were never going to do it in the first place, even without the policy.

Creating culture change isn’t as simple as rewriting policies or relaxing rules; it’s about modifying the spirit, the core thinking, that thought such policies were a necessity in the first place.

The myth of work / life balanceThere is a simple way to understand what we’re collectively missing. We speak about work / life balance as if it is some sort of panacea for the overworked modern soul; that by finding balance through taking up a hobby or spending more time with the family, we are able somehow to make the challenges and demands of work appear less arduous. Even cursory analysis shows that it’s utter nonsense however. In fact, the only reason we speak about work / life balance at all, I believe, is because work doesn’t feel enough like life.

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Consider this: as an adult, there are several things that I take for granted. I am the head of a household, for example (or at least, co-head, just in case my wife is reading …), which means I have some sort of status. To me, it’s everything. I have a piece of the world that belongs to me; I have animals, I have little people, and I get to make the rules that govern them. I’m quite good at it too; my little corner of the world runs very well and I am absolutely capable of handling responsibility.

There is trust in my relationship. I hope it’s the same for you, but I don’t just mean in terms of fidelity, which I hope is a given, but in terms of how my wife and I have each other’s backs. We don’t require a lot of status update meetings at home; don’t fill out a lot of Excel spread sheets. Our rule is that I always put her ahead of me, and she always puts me ahead of her, and as a result, we both always win. The bills get taken care of because we’re watching out for one another.

My opinion is valued. I don’t always have the dominant voice, of course, but it’s rare that anything happens under my roof that I know nothing about, unless it’s a deliberate surprise. She’s interested in what I think and I am equally interested in hearing her views, so we speak a lot about matters of importance.

And perhaps the best thing about being an adult is that I get to pick who I spend time with. If I like you, I may invite you over to the house and become your friend. If I don’t, I don’t have to call you, ever.

That’s my life, and it’s very easy for me to be engaged. It’s easy for me to take ownership and be enthusiastic, because it has been


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tailor-made for me, by me. When I become unhappy with one or other aspect of it, you can bet that I am very active about making changes.

But when I come to work, something quite different happens. Far from being the head of a household, my status is dictated by someone else, and it often has nothing to do with the way in which I perceive it. The manifestation may be the desk and the chair I am told to sit at and the corner of the room in which they are placed.

I am not trusted. At least, it’s not that you don’t trust me, it’s just that in an effort to remove any room for error from the company’s operations, I am stuck with many of those processes and policies referenced earlier. My humanness; my intuitiveness; none of these are called upon in the company’s pursuit of predictable results.

As for my opinion, nobody ever asks me about anything. Even if I had the sense that you cared to hear what I feel about the way things are going, there is rarely an effective mechanism for making my voice heard.

But if I can’t use my intelligence, or voice my observations, how do you expect me to take ownership of anything? Even if I am a diligent employee, a fundamental of my existence at my place of employment is that I don’t feel you want me to be responsible, and therefore, I don’t act as if I am.

And here’s the worst bit: far from being able to pick who I spend time with, what happens at work is that the boss turns up on Monday morning and says “Here’s Kevin, make him feel at home.” Now, I am sure Kevin is a decent bloke, but I didn’t pick him and there is a constant discomfort as we try to work each other out.

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Over time, I may find that I really dislike him, but I am stuck with him because he’s been placed at the desk next to me, without my having any say in the matter.

The result is that when I come to work, I put on a work hat, and adopt my work persona, which is a pale comparison to the energised, enthusiastic, excited person I am in the conduct of my personal life. In essence, that’s why so many organisations struggle to create Happy Sandpits.

There is one other dynamic, of course, which is relevant to organisations where employees are heavily unionised. As one CEO put it to me: “We used to try to do anything we could to make life better for the staff because we really cared about it. Now with the unions, whatever you give away in year one, they’ll want more in year two. And that is damaging. You want a culture where people know we’ll do everything we can for them, but we have to hold back now, which is very sad. It damages the relationship between management and staff.”

The challenge may seem relentless, but if we can embrace this concept, we can either modify and perhaps even reverse some of the most exhausting limiting practices in our organisations, or if we’re lucky, prevent them from taking hold in the first place. But you can’t preach morality when there isn’t enough to eat; people who feel deprived will invariably take less passionate interest. If leadership is to have any hope of building Happy Sandpits, it first falls to them to create environments where happiness is possible.

Dr Andrew Golding, CEO of Pam Golding Properties, says that pre-2007, before the financial crisis and the resultant property


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market crash, nothing could go wrong and the company was dreaming up all sorts of weird and wonderful ways to provide employee benefits and to outcompete competitors in areas that had nothing to do with its core business. Then things changed and Pam Golding Properties was forced to reduce its overheads, retrenching more than 100 people. He says it left the organisation emotionally scarred and the years since have been about rebuilding that emotional wellbeing and looking for employees’ intrinsic motivators.

There’s nothing easy about that, yet it’s essential. To be absolutely clear, a Happy Sandpit is a two-way street. It’s about give-and-take and mutual benefit for both employers and employees. We all have a role to play and casting blame is unhelpful in the achievement of happiness. It was that rather profound realisation that compelled me to learn as much as I could about organisational culture. The Sand Kicker Conundrum did not indicate so much a failing of an employee who might have been a very different person in another organisation, as a lack of our own understanding about just what our company was and what sorts of personalities would advance us. If you want success, this may be the most critical business lesson of them all.

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CHAPTER 2: WHY IT MATTERS: THE

CHALLENGE OF CHANGEIt’s a rare occasion when you have the opportunity to contradict one of the greatest management thinkers of all time, but I feel confident in suggesting that when the great Peter Drucker said “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” he was overlooking something quite obvious. It’s an imaginative idea and it’s not entirely wrong, but it suggests that culture obviates the need for strategy, which simply cannot be true.

The Happy Sandpit research points to something rather different; the purpose of a strong culture is that it enables the development of new strategies quickly, possibly many times over, which could be the difference between life-and-death in the face of a crisis. Two historical examples from beyond the business world illustrate this rather brilliantly and form part of the Happy Sandpit keynotes and

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workshops because they’re so captivating. The first begins with an ad that ran in a London newspaper in 1912, saying the following:

Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages. Bitter cold. Long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.

If you think that sounds like a better job than your own, you could well be in the wrong place. Jokes aside though, the sheer genius in those words cannot be over-stated. The ad was placed by Polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, who was recruiting for what was grandly named the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition; an endeavour, which would traverse the South Pole as it journeyed across the frozen continent from coast to coast. Were he to achieve it, he would be a celebrated pioneer, but he apparently recognised something terribly important about the challenge ahead of him. In such an expedition where the worst-case scenario was that everyone would die an appalling death, having a culturally-aligned team was of utmost value. Shackleton was already a well-respected explorer and certainly knew that he could rely upon the skills of the most experienced experts. By his name alone, he likely could have drawn support from the best of all dog sledders, the most innovative of all Antarctic sailors and people with other essential skills. In fact, he received more than 5000 applications from people who wanted to take part. By filling his team with these experts however, he ran the risk of having a ship filled with men who, three days into the voyage, would already be starting to jostle for the

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status their egos demanded. If that was what he wanted, he could certainly have worded his job ad quite differently, perhaps using the language employed all too commonly – and with distressingly predictable results – by many recruiters today. He might have said:

Wanted, dog sledder with six years experience. Must have own pack of huskies and be willing to travel.

Shackleton died in 1922, so short of investing in a Ouija Board, I can’t ask him what was going through his mind, but I’ll stick my neck out and suggest that was a deliberate pitch for people of a similar cultural mindset. His description of hardship may not have appealed to the best-of-the-best, but those to whom it did appeal were defined in that one statement.

Shackleton must have felt pretty confident with his team of 28 men and 70 dogs as they boarded the Endurance and set sail from the island of South Georgia in December 1914, and perhaps it softened the blow a little bit when it all began to go terribly wrong.

To cut to the relevant part, the Endurance got trapped in ice that ultimately crushed the hull, sinking it. The men, having rescued the dogs and their supplies, were forced to make camp on an ice floe which drifted through the ocean for more than 490 days before it began to break up, forcing them into the Endurance’s lifeboats. Five gruelling days at sea finally gave them sight of land, but their landing was only marginally better. Elephant Island was uninhabited and offered no sources of food. And so it went. A suicide mission across 1300 km of frozen ocean with ice cold

PART ONE: WHY IT MATTERS: THE CHALLENGE OF CHANGE

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waves washing over the small boat, led by Shackleton himself, got a group of the men to an inhabited whaling station and after three months and three failed attempts, they finally rescued the rest of the men from Elephant Island. The intention was that the expedition would take 120 days. It took 633.

The reason this matters is that nobody died. It’s a remarkable thing considering the immense hardships

and the length of time. Many things may be responsible for their survival, but I would like to suggest that their shared culture was top of the list. Had Shackleton taken the route of hiring the best of all expertise, he may have suffered through a management nightmare where activities are deemed to be not my job.

Should any of them have shown the attitude that it was their job to build shelters, but certainly not to source food, they would have had a reduced team framework with missed opportunities. It’s much less likely they would have made it back without fatalities if any of them had made it back at all.

Shackleton’s hiring process established what I refer to as a crazy pool from which he coult recruit, because you’d have to be an extreme risk-taker to find his description inviting. It therefore appealed to something deeper within the people who responded, and ultimately that was critical.

The initial strategy was devastated when the Endurance sank. From that point onward, the men of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition were in a near-constant state of innovation, reacting to the conditions around them and deciding on new pro-active courses of action. New strategies. Their shared culture was not in-

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and-of-itself what saved them, but rather the force that enabled them to get behind the latest emerging strategy.

A second example can be seen in the team at NASA Mission Control during the week of April 11 – 17, 1970. I’m going to assume you believe men have walked on the moon here, but if you don’t, please bear with me. At least in the case of Apollo 13, you’re right. They didn’t.

If you’ve seen the Ron Howard movie of the same name, starring Tom Hanks as Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell, you’ll know some of this story, but perhaps not the most important lesson it can teach us.

There were very few points during that six-day saga when the men who controlled the mission from Houston, Texas had any real doubt that they would succeed in bringing their astronauts safely home. Not because they had any guarantees; they certainly did not. Nor had they practised for almost any of the eventualities that came at them hard and fast during that sleepless week. They were sure they’d pull it off because inherently, they were the perfect breed of independent-thinking team players. They were, to hijack a term from a totally unrelated TED talk by Britta Riley, R&D-I-Yers: Research & Develop-It-Yourselfers.

The Apollo 11 team had successfully achieved a moon landing and safe return to Earth in July 1969 despite the fact that they had been unable to test critical parts of that mission.

Four months later in November 1969, Apollo 12 was almost routine. They’d done it before, so they did it again. Apollo 13 should have been the same, but it was upended 56 hours into


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the mission when Lovell reported an explosion onboard with the words: “Houston, we have a problem.”

Suddenly the strategy was dead, and they needed a new one fast.Thankfully, Mission Control people shared a cultural mindset,

which played a starring role in what might still be their finest hour. Specifically, they routinely took it upon themselves not only to check the data they were constantly being fed and to recalculate what it told them in real-time, over-and-over, in order to take remedial action where it was necessary, but to check one another’s work and accept that their work would in turn be randomly checked. Three major benefits came out of that during the Apollo 13 mission alone:

(1) Shortly after the explosion in one of the oxygen tanks that badly damaged the spacecraft and ended any hope it would be able to land on the moon, one engineer at Mission Control did a calculation of how the other systems would operate out in space. He discovered that though they had more than 70 hours before the astronauts would make it back to Earth, they only had 16 hours of battery life. Recognising that, they were able to run simulations on Earth starting immediately, to determine the minimum power required to keep the three men alive for the full 70 hours. That bit of thinking was never in the manual.

(2) On the return journey, it suddenly became apparent that the carbon dioxide levels inside the spacecraft – the result of the astronauts exhaling – were becoming dangerously high and would soon pose a potentially lethal threat. The lunar landing craft in which they had taken shelter had simply never been intended

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to support three astronauts for six days, and with no replacement carbon dioxide filters to hand, one had to be improvised, fast. A group of engineers worked double-time on the ground at Houston to make a new filter using only materials that the astronauts would have with them on the spacecraft, such as a sock, and then radioed instructions telling the astronauts how to do it themselves. It was improvisation on the fly that surely saved their lives.

(3) In the final approach, as last-minute checks were made, one bright spark noted that their angle of approach was wrong. If it were too shallow, the spacecraft would bounce off the atmosphere and back into space. If it were too deep, they’d burn up on re-entry. The realisation came to an engineer taking it upon himself to check the data one last time for irregularities and noting that their trajectory was wrong for an unexpected reason: since the astronauts hadn’t landed on the moon, they didn’t have the additional 200 kg of moon rocks on board that they expected to have. Again, there was no game plan for that. A correction was calculated and the boosters were fired up for a few seconds to correct the trajectory.

Ultimately, the reason the Apollo 13 mission was merely a failure of technology, without loss of life is because the NASA of the Apollo-era was staffed by constant R&D-I-Yers who observed no boundaries in the scope of their responsibilities other than playing their part to get the job done. It’s one of the greatest stories of teamwork ever told. We can only speculate how things might have been different, but how do you think it might have turned out had there been even one person on that team who didn’t believe the job could be done? One naysayer? One Sand Kicker on the proverbial


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Mission Control smoking balcony who felt like he didn’t belong and didn’t share the same spirit of responsibility?

In the business world, financial services firm Discovery might be an easy place to work for any of those Apollo 13 Mission Controllers because people tend to make what you do there, their business. Everyone has an idea about what everyone else should be doing, according to Penny Thlabi, Discovery’s director of People Capital, but she says the products end up being much better if people are open to that.

The importance of these examples is this: change is inevitable. You may not be exploring Antarctica or outer space but I’m pretty damn sure you’re exploring something. New sales channels, new products or whatever else. As you do, the strategy you have developed will be tested and often proved to be in need of adjustment. At the same time, the world is changing, with new technologies, new competitors and new challenges. They all demand a response and there should be little doubt that a faster response is better than a slow one, and a comprehensive one is better than a spotty one, with one part of your organisation adapting while another lags behind.

Raymond Ackerman, founder and now retired chairman of Pick n Pay, made just that point when we met in his office at the South African retail giant’s Cape Town headquarters. He’s facing the fight of his life with the arrival of Walmart, the world’s third largest public corporation according to the Fortune Global 500 list in 2012, the biggest private employer in the world with over two million employees, and the world’s largest retailer. It’s a tough

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competitor and one that could forever change the South African retail landscape.

At 82, Ackerman may be the most experienced retailer in the country and he’s certainly no pushover. But while he no longer commands the company he founded – that job falls to his son Gareth who is executive chairman, while former Tesco UK-chief Richard Brasher is CEO – he continues to don a suit and tie and report to his office every morning. The reason: he is determined that while Pick n Pay’s businesses processes may have to change, the culture must remain the same. In fact, it is the culture that enables the smooth adjustment of business processes in the first place, he says. Ackerman finds himself in the interesting position of being forced to get scrappy again just as he was during his underdog days in the late 1960s when Pick n Pay’s very survival was challenged by his competitors, Checkers and OK Bazaar. It’s a shift that will demand new things of Pick n Pay’s 70,000 employees and he doesn’t mince words in his belief that the defining advantage is his company’s culture. There are of course those who would dispute that, but Ackerman’s achievement of a strong company, however unionised it may be, must lend some weight to his point of view.

Sometimes the change comes from within, as Manny Rivera, founder of the Planet Fitness health club chain, found out. Somewhere along that company’s path to growth, the money began to flow more predictably and the edginess that had defined Planet Fitness fell away.

With the company no longer the underdog, Rivera describes Planet Fitness, in that era as being “no different to the big boys.” It


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was a realisation that drew him back into the company he’d drifted away from, to take action. “I was supposed to be CEO but I was disconnected from the business. When the recession [of 2008 to 2010] hit, I took an active role again and realised that the Values of many of the people working for us were wrong. And it starts and ends with recruitment. We were hiring people who don’t train, who smoke, who drink, who were forming the face of our business, and yet they were a complete disconnect from who we stand for as a wellness brand,” he says.

Those people weren’t necessarily Sand Kickers, but there are many ways in which a person can be totally wrong for the Sandpit in which they have been placed and their removal is often the only thing that makes sense.

Office automation giant Nashua, has also been forced to make deep changes over the years as it has matured. Nashua’s culture from its inception in 1973 was one where the play hard part of the old battle cry work hard, play hard had particular resonance. Stories abound of employees crashing cars, wrecking restaurants and thrusting themselves headlong into other socially challenging behaviour which the company has worked hard since, to confine to the history books. But old habits die hard and as I’ll demonstrate in the next chapter as we examine the building blocks of organisational culture, they don’t always have to have a clear connection with the present to suddenly reappear.

One such incident that floored the company, took place aboard a commercial airliner when a Nashua employee ripped the TV screen out of the back of one of the seats and walked around laughing as

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he showed it off to the other passengers. As he relates the story, it clearly angers MD David Coutinho* because it appears to have come from out of nowhere. “You can’t have the culture that was 40 years ago. You go from being a challenger to an incumbent and the acceptable behaviours change,” he says. “All that happens with such people is that no matter how hard the other people at Nashua are building, there are people who by their behaviour can break it down and as the leader I cannot allow that.”

It’s a rare organisation that cannot relate a similar story and it is incidents such as these that represent the ultimate test of your Values. It’s easy to fire someone for gross misconduct when that person is an average employee and easier still when they have failed to impress. But what do you do when your top sales performer or a senior member of the executive team goes off the script? Mark Lu, the founder and CEO of IT component distributor Corex, says it has to be black and white if your culture is to mean anything at all. “When the rule book says you cannot have a relationship in the office, but the top salesperson does so anyway, what do you do? Do you lose R5-million in monthly revenue in order to protect your culture and stick to your principles or do you accommodate the situation? I think 99 of the top 100 CEOs in the world would say that you have to ask that person to leave.”


*Even CEOs and other senior executives move on. Where one has left the position they occupied when they were interviewed for the First Edition of How to build a Happy Sandpit, this Second Ediition will contain a footnote.

David Coutinho left Nashua at the end of 2014.

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It might be argued, therefore, that while culture enables change, it may also sometimes be the thing that enforces it.

In another sense, however, it could be the thing that enables change not to happen at all.

The tale of Continental Outdoor Media has been an odd one with one set of owners replacing another over the years, as CEO Barry Sayer keeps funding partners in the fold. Each has attempted a change in the business in accordance with their point of view – the group of financiers which currently owns it has a very different set of business expectations from the international media company which owned it before – but Sayer says that when you have people coming in and giving 100 ways to change the business, and you prove at the end of the day that your ways are working, they tend to come back to your way of thinking.

We’ll discuss more such challenges later on, but at this point it’s worth looking at what culture really is so we can begin to understand how it works.

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CHAPTER 3: DEFINING YOUR HAPPY SANDPIT

In Enron’s 1998 annual report, it describes its Values as ‘Respect’ (We treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves. We do not tolerate abusive or disrespectful treatment. Ruthlessness, callousness, and arrogance don’t belong here); ‘Integrity’ (We work with customers and prospects openly, honestly and sincerely. When we say we will do something, we will do it; when we say we cannot or will not do something, we won’t do it); ‘Communication’ (We have an obligation to communicate. Here, we take the time to talk with one another ... and to listen. We believe that information is meant to move and that information moves people); and ‘Excellence’ (We are satisfied with nothing less than the very best in everything we do. We will continue to raise the bar for everyone. The great fun here will be for all of us to discover just how good we can really be.).

In December 2001, Enron filed for bankruptcy, brought down by an internal whistleblower who revealed that its financials were a

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deliberate and wilful fraud. Former CEO Jeffrey Skilling is in jail, serving a 14-year sentence for among other things, conspiracy and securities fraud and false accounting. Former Chairman Kenneth Lay died of a heart attack before he could be sentenced but was certainly facing between 20 and 30 years behind bars. Altogether, 16 Enron executives were sentenced. The fallout was the destruction of wealth for hundreds of thousands of shareholders, the loss of jobs for thousands of employees and an increasing feeling that corporate America has a problem telling the truth.

In other words, their Values didn’t mean a single damn thing. They were clearly lies. And I don’t mind telling you, that scares the hell out of me.

It’s for that reason I approach this chapter with a degree of trepidation. What follows is an examination of the three levels of culture, and a long list of the ways South African companies have embraced them. What I cannot tell you is whether they all live up to the Values they claim. A refreshing declaration came from Ingrid Kast*, the founder and, at the point that I interviewed her, still the CEO (she stood down just weeks later) of D.A.V. Professional Placement Group who said: “When something goes wrong we’ll ask, do you still agree with this Value? Because people forget. And I’ll tell them I also fail in that Value. Don’t think it’s only you, I fail all the time. But we never let it go and say Oh well, we don’t care now.”

*Some CEOs stepped down even while the First Edition of How to build a Happy Sandpit was being written. Ingrid Kast is among these, though at the time she was inter-viewed, just weeks before she left, she made no mentiion that she was planning her exit.

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Most CEOs won’t admit to any such thing, and of course I have to admit that it’s possible there’s no reason for them to do so. I certainly hope that is so. Yet I am fascinated by the number of organisations which list Integrity as a Value because it implies that integrity is a choice, as if there’s an alternative. I understand of course that Values are guiding principles for employees and that such words are intended to have resonance for individuals who may not inherently own those traits. But I’d have to argue that any organisation which feels the need to demand integrity of its people may have a deeper problem than it realises.

Values such as Integrity are what we at Happy Sandpit refer to as permission-to-play Values; those which should exist if you’re to have any chance at success, but which have no real power to describe who you are as an organisation because they’re simply too generic. Who you are runs deeper than that, and permission-to-play Values cannot be effective enough differentiators, which is surely the whole point.

We’ll get to that later because they’re worth examining in context and because Values are only one of the three levels of culture, according to the theory of Edgar Schein, former professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who in 1985 wrote Organisational Culture and Leadership, probably the definitive work on this topic. Along with Values, Schein gave a name to Artefacts and Shared Basic Assumptions. They’re each wonderful concepts in their own right, so let’s examine them in the context of South African business.

PART ONE: DEFINING YOUR HAPPY SANDPIT

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ArtefactsSchein says these are the visible elements of a culture and can be recognised by people who are not part of that culture.

There are varying degrees of extremity in organisational Artefacts. A presentation strategy company in the Fourways area of Johannesburg, called Missing Link, has a tattoo parlour, a fireman’s pole, a shooting range (note, not for real guns), and a tree house within the premises which serves as founder Richard Mulholland’s office. The reception area is a mock bathroom with a pane of glass over a real bath full of rubber ducks as the receptionist’s desk, and a toilet and urinal on the wall behind her. They say things like: “Don’t hire us because we’re interesting … hire us because you’re not,” and their business cards frequently carry expletives in the cartoon drawings on the back. It’s hard to believe that large corporate organisations such as Absa and Liberty hire Missing Link because the Artefacts seem so out of step with their own, and yet they offer Missing Link a constant stream of business. There may be organisations which feel uncomfortable with Missing Link’s overtly challenging persona, but others probably choose to work with it because being challenged is precisely what they most badly need.

It’s without question however, that those Artefacts act as a filter for Missing Link, both for the types of people it attracts as employees and separately, for the sort of behaviour allowed or indeed, expected of them. Importantly, those Artefacts are completely authentic. Missing Link isn’t putting anything on.

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Know Mulholland and you’ll know that Missing Link couldn’t have looked any other way.

Another company with a crystal clear statement through its Artefacts is Rovos Rail, the luxury train service which operates tours from its home station in Pretoria. Everything about it harks back to a time in the past when travel wasn’t a pre-packaged experience of substandard food, uncomfortable seats and a constant, maddening rush. The trains are for the most part re-fitted carriages from the 1930s, pulled by elegant locomotives. The station bears no resemblance to modern commercial train stations save for the fact that there is a track running alongside the main platform. It’s easy to imagine you’ve been transported to a completely different era. Employees who are drawn to Rovos Rail can have no doubt about what they’re getting or the types of customers they will be expected to deal with. Like Missing Link’s, Rovos Rail’s Artefacts serve as a very effective filter.

At King Price, a challenging new insurance company – at the time of writing, it was 14 months old – things are not what they appear. That’s something I asked CEO Gideon Galloway about because while the company is an insurer and the office space is for the most part a call centre, you’d be easily led to believe it’s a creative agency of some sort. There’s a reason for that: Galloway owns one of those too, named Think Tank. But a bigger reason is because that’s the space in which Galloway wants to work. Pop art bedecks the walls; the sales leader board is like a board game with bobble heads of Elvis Presley, Chewbacca the Wookie and Batman’s nemesis The Joker representing each salesperson; there


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are Slush Puppy machines, free popcorn and on the day I arrived to interview Galloway, he approached me across the office floor on a mountain bike. Galloway’s office is full of toys because that’s what he predominantly thinks about and yet the purpose of the business remains in basic terms no different to that of any other insurer.

Ask Galloway what the point is and he’s clear about it: work is hard. That is how it should be. But there’s no point in making workspaces that don’t aim for maximum enjoyment.

Hunt Lascaris, the much-celebrated advertising agency founded by John Hunt and Reg Lascaris, continues to fly a Jolly Roger on a flagpole outside its offices. At its former headquarters in Sandton, that skull and crossbones motif was painted imposingly on an external wall, directed more at the agency’s employees than the outside world. It challenges them to act like pirates, not the navy. Not in a sinister sense, of course, but in the sense that pirates think more creatively, act more independently and may be quicker on their feet. It’s not so much a filter as a challenging command, but it’s also a creative differentiator; no insurance company is ever going to align itself with the Jolly Roger. There’s something unusual happening in an organisation that does.

Rand Merchant Bank used to display an absurdly large rulebook in its reception area, there for anyone to read. Open it up and you’d discover the pages were all blank; a statement that anything goes there. It’s not true of course, because banks are very heavily governed by legislation, but beyond that which it cannot control, it intends to encourage employees to think more creatively.

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At computer supplier AdvanceNet, everyone dresses smartly, wears nametags, and there is no such thing as a casual Friday. Founder and CEO Phil Helmsley insists on a jacket and tie because for him, it’s a filter. He says you don’t want to waste your energy convincing customers that the way you’re turned out is not a reflection of your professionalism. You need to spend your energy convincing the customer that you’re a good company with which to do business and you don’t want to start at a disadvantage.

On the other hand, Alan Knott-Craig*, founder and former CEO of Vodacom and when I spent time with him, the CEO of Cell C, said that wearing a suit never works. “I stopped wearing one long ago. First of all I couldn’t breathe, and secondly it’s a barrier. For someone who is not wearing a suit, it’s more difficult to speak to someone who is wearing one.”

Neither one is wrong. And neither one is right, though both Helsmley and Knott-Craig would defend their positions fiercely. That’s really the thing about Artefacts and all aspects of organisational culture: they are as distinct as the people who created them, whether deliberately or inadvertently.

When the new Head of Country for Tanzania at The New Forest Company took over, he inherited a team that had a history of


*Within days of publication of the First Edition of How to build a Happy Sandpit, Alan Knott-Craig sufffered a severe stroke which bore as one consequence, the requirement for him to immediately retire. He never returned to Cell C and the Knott-Craig family is keeping details about his health private. It must be said that when I last saw him, he genuinely looked to be in exceptional health, relaxed and tanned. It was a shock to hear 702 Talk Radio Business Journalist Bruce Whitfield make the announcement as I was in my car, on my way to speak about the book, on his show.

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instability and a generally poor attitude, which he addressed by altering one significant Artefact: a tractor engine that had been lying on the front lawn for nobody knew how long, looking untidy and he believed, making the statement that leaders had no eye for detail. Over the next few weeks, the engine was removed, the lawns restored, the plant pots and other decorative items around the building were repainted, and a cleaning policy was put in place for all of the company’s vehicles, which for the first time began to carry identical signage. The result? Attention to detail increased substantially, but so did employee dress awareness, time keeping and general respect for work premises and materials. The much-lauded Broken Windows Theory was first introduced in 1982 by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, who suggested through the metaphor that Artefacts inspire behaviour. In Tanzania, that appears to have been absolutely accurate.

Artefacts need not always be physical things. Spend time with Sage Pastel founder and managing director Stephen Cohen, and his determination to be counter-culture is evident in his tone and language. Cohen speaks freely, such that it was necessary to edit out much of his language, but he says it is in line with the agenda of authenticity he pushes across his company. He hates hierarchy, and to that end, he doesn’t even have a desk, much less an office. For months on end, he will work from an available desk in the sales department. When there is no desk available, he’ll simply pick a desk in the support area. “I suppose I’m lucky because that comes naturally to me. In saying that, obviously I know I am the MD and that is always going to taint whether people really dig me or not,

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but by being open plan, they can see I don’t think I am better than them. For me, it just allows people to feel I am accessible. I hate executive floors. I will answer a support call just like any other oke and that allows people to know that when I talk, I talk with credibility. Simply, it breaks the barrier to engagement,” he says.

He aims to lead by example for that matter; when Cohen has an early morning meeting, he asks one of his guys to make sure his bag and motorcycle helmet are on his desk so that there is never any question about whether he is at work on time, boss or not.

In a different way, the very name of the Jupiter Drawing Room, one of South Africa’s most successful advertising agencies, points to its founder Graham Warsop’s sense of self. When Warsop suggested to a university friend that he was going to scrap his law degree and try to make it as a writer, he was advised instead to get into advertising where he could make lots of money as a copywriter. Later, he called that friend to say he had decided to start an agency of his own; the friend congratulated him, but told him never to forget that writers who get into advertising are basically whores. Not worried about the insult, the conversation triggered an idea in Warsop’s brain.

“I remembered a short story I had read by Guy de Maupassant called Madame Tellier’s Establishment,” he says, “where there was this bordello in Normandy and on the ground floor all the tradesmen were entertained, but all the dignitaries and VIPs were whisked upstairs to the Jupiter Drawing Room and entertained there. So it was always a reminder that there was a side to writing that is associated with advertising.”


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Artefacts may also be actions. During his three-year tenure as CEO of insurer Zurich in South Africa, Guy Munnoch says he never once used the lift, choosing instead to climb the open-plan staircase in the middle of the building so as to be visible and to increase his chances of engaging with Zurich’s employees.

James Herbst, CEO of Huge Telecom, inherited a young, pretty personal assistant when he moved into that position. He rapidly offered her an alternative role in sales, replacing her with a 62 year-old, because he was not prepared to risk any perception of promiscuity that is common in many organisations.

At courier company Dawnwing, it is habitual for management and salespeople on the road to flash their lights in greeting when they see one of their marked vehicles; a sign of camaraderie; that they are all out on the road together, playing their part in building the business.

At electronic communications company Striata, South African managing director Alison Treadaway says points of culture have to be backed up with specific actions. Because appreciation is a big deal to her, once a week managers are expected to send an email to someone who has done something they appreciate. That’s an Artefact, which encourages behaviour, because it requires managers to look for things they appreciate. As a side note, Treadaway considers those emails a means of measuring how her leaders are living the Values. If they fail to send an email, they are not showing appreciation and not backing that Value and it is possible therefore to have a conversation specifically about how the Value is being lived.

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Artefacts carry different weighting. Some may be more visible than others. Some may be deliberate and some may be entirely accidental; the kinds of things that just happen without a plan, such as general untidiness in the office, personal photographs and artwork on cubicle walls, or in-jokes and vernacular which may be understood only by those inside the organisation.

You can learn much about why your culture exists in its current guise by examining your Artefacts. You can exert much influence over the culture of your organisation by altering the Artefacts. The filters your Artefacts create are powerful, which means you should treat them with caution.

But of course, as only one of the three levels of culture, Artefacts don’t stand alone.

ValuesSchein identified these as the second level of culture.

He describes them more grandly as Espoused Values, as in those that are supported, and it’s an important distinction because often Values are just a bunch of words to which groups of employees are asked to pay lip service. Consider the example of Enron, that opened this chapter. The process of selecting Values generally follows a similar path where in the beginning they’re often unintentional. The founder’s way of doing things is based on something that they may not entirely identify as a Value but which takes the form of an expectation of behaviour for the people they hire. It’s common therefore for those behaviours to be based on family Values, which


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are also almost entirely unstated. There isn’t a written mandate for how to behave at home, but families will generally share an agreement of expected behaviour, which is very granular: dinner is always eaten as a family around the table; church – whichever their faith prescribes – is attended or not, depending on whether a religion is followed; household chores either are or are not a thing, and payment for those chores, perhaps in the form of pocket money, either does or does not take place.

In all of that, families have an understanding of the challenges to even deep-rooted Values. Teenage children may suddenly develop a different view of where they want to eat dinner, for example, threatening the Value or at least some of the behaviours associated with an overarching Value of, say Family First.

The important role family plays in people’s Values makes it a natural place to look for commonalities and many company founders start precisely there. Rakesh Wahi, co-founder and vice chairman of CNBC Africa and Forbes Africa, relates a story from his days in the Indian army when he disciplined a soldier for misconduct, but later discovered that the soldier’s behaviour had been heavily influenced by stress he was under as a result of a family incident.

“We failed to see the emotional and personal side of his behaviour and his challenges while taking a decision at work. You cannot distinguish between those two, and leaders who fail to recognise the challenges that people face in their personal lives, while judging their professional competence, make [the biggest mistake] because they’re not taking everything into account. When

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I acquire companies, I go and spend time with the families of the people with whom I am looking to do business and sometimes I have walked away from transactions after meeting their families because it gives you a whole new perspective you would not otherwise know.”

Wahi isn’t alone in that view. Andrew Golding of Pam Golding Properties, Manny Rivera of Planet Fitness and Mike Greeff of Greeff Properties all mentioned the home lives of employees as relevant in the hiring and performance of employees and partners.

Few Happy Sandpit interviewees who had started organisations of their own could speak about their founding Values, which is unsurprising when the most pertinent thing early in a business is creating products that can deliver revenue. Discussions may be had about what kind of organisation you would like, but you probably don’t frame that discussion in any formal sense.

As companies evolve, they commonly get to a point where Values are established, which may involve the choosing of entirely new Values, often through a process of consensus-building across the business. There are many schools of thought about precisely how to form Values, how to make them stick, and how to choose people who match them, but too often, those deliver fundamentally pointless results. We’ll examine a more realistic approach in Chapter 12, which details work we’ve done at Happy Sandpit for client organisations, and a framework we believe to be effective.

It’s impossible to underestimate the importance of Values. In a personal capacity, you cannot act with any comfort if your choices contradict your Values, even though at times, they may


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in and of themselves, be problematic. Malcolm Gladwell, author of the compelling research behind books such as The Tipping Point and Outliers: The Story of Success, wrote about the part that Values inherent in South Korean national culture had to play in the downing of 11 Korean Air commercial planes over the 12 year period between 1987 and 1999. The normal expected causes such as old planes and poor maintenance didn’t apply to Korean Air, leaving Gladwell to theorise that the hierarchical nature of South Korean culture was to blame. South Koreans typically share the common Values of deference to their elders and superiors to which people in the west no longer subscribe.

The problem seems to have finally become evident during a crash on the Pacific island of Guam, when the pilot (the senior member of the flight crew) made an error and the co-pilot (a distinct hierarchical junior) did nothing to correct him, allowing the disaster to happen.

In another sort of crash, the near-death experience of IBM at the end of 1992 when it posted what was then the biggest loss in corporate American history of more than $8-billion, Values were once again to blame. D. Quinn Mills, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, wrote in the MIT Sloan Management Review in July 1996: “Is IBM the victim of a corporate culture that pushed the wrong type of executive to the top? Yes. IBM chief executives were too inbred, too steeped in the arrogance of success, and too certain of their own judgment in a time of challenge. IBM’s culture contributed greatly to each shortcoming.”

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By then, IBM was on the way back to health under CEO Louis Gerstner (hired in 1993, he was the first CEO to be hired from outside IBM since 1914), following a massive overhaul of IBM’s culture, which he described in his memoir Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? as “insular and balkanised”.

The origins of IBM’s troubles could be traced way back into the company’s history. In the 1960s, the Golden Era for IBM when it revolutionised the industry with its System/360 mainframe, IBM and its competitors were known as Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (the dwarves being UNIVAC, Burroughs, NCR, Control Data Corporation, General Electric, RCA and Honeywell). By the end of the decade, after numerous mergers and bankruptcies, only Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, Control Data Corporation, and Honeywell still competed for mainframes, earning the nickname BUNCH as in IBM and the other BUNCH.

My own Dad joined IBM out of the Royal Air Force in 1964, and growing up, he used to tell my brother and I about the rules and regulations that a cock-sure management felt free to impose. These were men who wore a dark (or gray) suit, white shirt, and a sincere tie, who worked for the organisation from which as lore would have it, nobody ever got fired for buying.

Assurance of success led to a loss of competitive spirit, which, coupled with IBM’s full employment practice, made the company a refuge for poor performers. And this was the pool from which executive management was promoted. The Values that IBM leaders held most closely in the bitter days of the 1980s, when the world eroded under it, made them believe that they were number


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one and had a right to be so, and that customers would inevitably move towards the technologies they picked. Those Values were wrong.

But if Korean Air and IBM can teach us anything, it’s that companies can come back. At the time of writing, Korean Air’s safety record had been perfect for 14 years and IBM is ranked by Fortune Magazine as the ninth most profitable business in the United States, both saved by a change of cultural fundamentals.

Nedbank is another excellent example. According to a case study published by the Barrett Values Centre, named The Role of Strategy, Culture and Leadership in the Nedbank Turnaround – The Tom Boardman Story, by the end of 2003, Nedbank was “about to go on to record full year results of Headline Earnings down 98%” and that it was “on a downward trajectory in direct contrast to the competitors’ upward trajectory.”

Boardman’s three-year plan from 2004 to 2006, turned the business around through a highly involved leadership process; no mean feat considering the lack of internal morale, the poor market sentiment and the dysfunctional organisational culture he inherited.

The real challenge of Values is that they are too often things that companies pick without adequate deep reflection, often using criteria that does little to support the task of identifying the organisation’s most fundamental identity. The result is words on posters and mugs that mean nothing, backed by nothing. Don Packett of 21Tanks*, an ideas lab which helps businesses work through specific problems, says that for the most part, companies

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are culturally not where they want to be or even where they think they are. “It’s difficult to grasp this stuff unless you can think about it more deeply, in a more complex way, because people aren’t simple. I literally sat there while [one of my clients at a major bank] told me she wants the employees to love the company so much they’ll tattoo the logo on their arms. I said that’s ridiculous, but she insisted that it ought to be possible,” says Packett.

In truth, it’s that kind of wishful thinking that holds the whole process up at many organisations. Leadership confuses its desire for things to be so, with its employees’ desire, or even their ability to belong to something they perceive as vague and spiritless. Barry Sayer, CEO of Continental Outdoor Media, suggests you’ve got to reach for a deeper meaning and that it’s beyond the means of an organisation which doesn’t drive commitment through a deeper cause. “I’m sure [Braveheart] William Wallace couldn’t have got his 5000 Scotsmen to go rampaging down a hill towards Stirling Castle without there being a belief, a spirit, an understanding that they stood for something greater than that one battle. It’s the same in any walk of life. If I was selected for the Springbok squad, when I put on that jersey, I wouldn’t be Barry Sayer anymore, I’d be a Springbok with all that has come before me and all that expectation and the pressure that I can’t let anyone down,” he says.

Such causes exist, but they’re usually very specific, such as Jason Lurie’s Building Africa which stood front and centre as the one Value


*21Tanks, which was a sister company to Missing Link, has subsequently been rolled back into Missing Link where Packett holds the role of Head of Perspective.

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he demanded from a business partner during his time as CEO of the Moyo group of restaurants. Lurie founded and at the time that he and I first met, still ran Moyo, and that Value continues to offer a very vivid insight into who he is as a human being. “[When I was growing up], I didn’t want to go to school much and so I met people in the streets and played guitar with the African guys when I was 14 and 15. My family, it was this South African thing where the maid, a black woman, became your mother. We adopted a kid and my family evolved and it changed.”

It’s not hard to see how Building Africa became the basis of Lurie’s* dream, but it was more than just a gesture of warmth toward the continent; it was a hard business demand. Moyo makes use of ingredients and spices only sourced in Africa though there are more economical sources for many of those. “If you don’t believe in that Value of Building Africa, you may start to use imported Indian spices because you can make a bit of extra money and that’s when you start to kill everything,” he says.

He describes the process of finding partners to franchise the Moyo name as “like kissing frogs” and says that the Value filter of Building Africa led to a ratio of around 50 to one that got turned down. “We have a lot of conversations. Hopefully fewer get taken to the third and fourth lunch because you don’t want to go that far. But there is definitely a courting process.”

*Lurie exited Moyo during 2013 as he became interested in a new field of research in biotechnology. Ever the entrepreneur, he has since formed BioTech Africa, which he runs as CEO.

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Building Africa shows that there can be depth to those Value words far beyond the words themselves because they speak to a cause rather than simply a siloed behaviour. Their ability to resonate will always, however, depend heavily on leadership’s ability to get employees to act on them willingly and with a sense that doing so achieves an important purpose.

On its website, under Shareholder Value, Comair, which operates British Airways and low-cost airline Kulula across South Africa, says: Optimise operating efficiencies and grow the profitability of the business. It’s corporate speak, but Comair CEO Erik Venter tells a story of how it reflects in the behaviour of Comair employees, setting their behaviour in stark comparison with some employees at the now defunct 1time. “The pilots talk. It’s a very close community and [the 1time pilots] would say openly that they didn’t care about how much fuel they used. That’s not the way it works at Comair; our pilots are determined to fly as efficiently as possible.”

An unstated Value at Syspro, a privately-owned South African software organisation with sales around the world, is that money isn’t a key driver. Of course the business has a requirement for profitability as any organisation does, but Phil Duff, founder and CEO has purposely resisted any urge to offer Syspro shares to the public. He says it’s that he’s not greedy. That there are only two or three reasons why a company like Syspro would become listed; one is that the founder wants to become mega-rich, and another is that they need to grow the company. Duff hasn’t seen the necessity to do that and says his fellow shareholders share that feeling. “We’re trying to build a world-class product here; that’s what drives me


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when I get up in the morning, not can I make another ten million dollars or something.”

That Value lends Syspro a peculiarity in that Duff spends his time writing code and the bulk of his direct reports are software development managers, not accountants. “I have others who think about the business and I concern myself with how customers respond to the products,” he says.

King Price’s Galloway says his team debated the Values of his business in the context of the actions they describe. One of those is what’s good for our clients is good for us, and dictates that although there’s less immediate money in it, clients who achieve a lower risk profile should see their premiums decrease; not common in the insurance industry where a good profile normally earns you only a smaller increase. “The logical business sense would have said increase that client, but we live by Values and culture and that is an example where Values played a role,” he says.

Paul Anley, founder and CEO of PharmaDynamics, is driven by a hatred of big, bureaucratic pharmaceutical companies and says going up against them is “fun.” A pioneer in generic drugs within Warner-Lambert, he found himself on the wrong side of the fence in 2000 when that company lost a hostile takeover bid from Pfizer, and was booed out of the room after a presentation in New York in which he tried to convince Pfizer executives that generics represented a great business opportunity in Africa. “I was called an intellectual property thief, so I left there knowing the business I was running didn’t have the support of its only shareholder, and it would only be a matter of time before they

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closed it or sold it. So I climbed onto a plane and convinced the [generic drug] manufacturers to terminate their supply contracts with Pfizer for products that were still in registration and relicense them to myself.”

The experience still stings, however, and it’s clear that a driving Value within PharmaDynamics is to take joy in outrunning the big companies.

Another interesting aspect of the PharmaDynamics culture and Anley’s own attitude, perhaps because of his experience in 2000, is that he says he runs his business democratically, soliciting opinion from all over and condemning what he sees as the template of autocracy typical in big companies. “I don’t mind taking risks and one cultural attribute that I drive down into the business is to delegate responsibility and find people who will run with it. I don’t tell anyone what to do. If I’m not happy we’ll spend a lot of time debating and hopefully I’ll influence their decision, but it is very seldom that I will overrule anybody. That gives us an entrepreneurial attitude because people know they’re able to get on with things. Having clever strategies is one thing but if nobody goes out and does it, what difference does it make?” he asks.

But what happens when Values are strong, but leadership changes? Most founders felt something of a chill at the notion of how their companies would evolve once they’re gone, and as they get closer to a logical retirement age, this is a topic that has begun to carry significant weight, for many. The Jupiter Drawing Room’s Graham Warsop offers some detailed thinking on the way he intends to handle that. “One of the companies I admire most in


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all the world was [the advertising agency] Lord & Thomas. When Albert Lasker sold it [in 1942], he said part of the deal was that the new owners couldn’t have the name. They asked, what are you going to do with it, and he said, I’m going to let it die. And they asked why, and he said, because it stood for something amazing and it always will. I’m not going to see it in 20 years, watered down to nothing and changed. And I’ve kind of got that view. If it can’t carry on the way it was envisaged, I would sooner say well, let it become something else.”

Something unusual about the model Warsop has chosen for his business is that the Jupiter Drawing Room has separated ownership of the brand from the operations, enabling it to offer its name to other agencies which may not be identical operationally, as long as they stand by the brand Values. “So it is a very purist ideal in terms of what we stand for,” says Warsop.

“I don’t see myself retiring so I don’t see myself having to confront that issue, because if we have an office that is performing so badly that it is dragging the name down, we’ll just pull the licence and it can carry on and be something else. I would be the worst person in the world if Jupiter Drawing Room was still there and the name got damaged and I couldn’t do anything about it. You can’t put in 20 years of your life with all the personal sacrifices you make along the way to build an agency and it costs you relationships, weekends, holidays and then say I don’t care. I can’t, anyway.”

In a way, had the handful of men at the top of Enron shared Warsop’s point of view, there may be less of a suggestion of flimsiness about Values. The blame doesn’t lie solely with Enron

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of course; the million well-meaning businesses that choose Permission-to-Play* Values also miss the point.

I can say without fear of contradiction that strong and relevant Values that are followed closely, and even against which employees are measured, are the stuff of the happiest of Sandpits.

Shared Basic AssumptionsSchein identified Shared Basic Assumptions as the third level of culture. These are the taken-for-granted behaviours that permeate an organisation, the origins of which may no longer be remembered.

These are undoubtedly the essence of culture because it is these that offer the most obvious insight into how new members of the team – whether they are employees or management – are integrating. As Mike Stopforth, CEO of Cerebra puts it: “Every person who is here can influence culture. If you want to know how the thirty-first person will be treated, just ask the thirty people before them. They will treat that person how they were treated.”

A scientific experiment conducted in 1967 by a researcher named Gordon R. Stephenson offers excellent insight into this. In his experiment, five monkeys were placed in a room in which a bunch of bananas sat atop a ladder. The room was sealed and the monkeys left to themselves, while Stephenson observed. Naturally, as soon as they felt they were alone, the monkeys competed to be first to reach the tempting fruit, but as they attempted to climb the ladder,


*See Chapter 12 for descriptions of the four most significant types of Values. When these are misunderstood, the results can render the whole notion of selecting Values in the first place, pointless.

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they were sprayed with high-powered jets of freezing cold water. Shocked, they abandoned their attempt and huddled together for comfort. Soon though, they regained confidence and one of them launched a second attempt. Again, the cold water was sprayed and again, they gave up the quest. Another attempt later and they understood that climbing the ladder earned them a freezing shower; that the potential for punishment outweighed the promise of reward; and phase one of the experiment ended.

Next, one of the monkeys was replaced with another that had no knowledge of the danger and of course as soon as the coast was clear, it attempted to get to the bananas. The others understood the risk fully, however, and attacked the new arrival to prevent it from bringing on another cold shower. The new monkey learned fast. Though it didn’t know the reason for its companions’ fear or anger, it connected the dots.

But then things began to get interesting. Another of the original group was replaced; the newcomer being once again oblivious to the previous experience. Of course, it attempted to get to the bananas and by now, predictably, the others prevented it from doing so, including the one among them that had never experienced an icy shower in the first place. It had adopted the behaviour without any understanding of the reason for it.

At the conclusion of the experiment, all five monkeys had been replaced so that none of those in the final group had experienced the cold-water punishment, yet they all knew that making a play for the bananas was taboo.

Changing those behaviours is no easy matter because it must be

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recognised that they exist in the first place. A sixth monkey added to that group of five would quickly learn the same behaviour. So would a seventh. If none of them ever questioned the assumption, it’s not only plausible, but likely, it would continue forever.

I’ve seen this myself. I once worked at an organisation where one of the collective habits employees had was to give the photocopier machine a hard smack before making a copy. I asked why everyone did this and was told that it was necessary or the machine wouldn’t wake up. I pointed out that it was a brand new machine and that it seemed to be operating perfectly well. The response: well, that’s just the way we do it here. I assume there must have been an older machine at one point, which it was necesssary to clout, but it was fascinating to me to discover that my colleagues hadn’t changed their behaviour even when the machine was replaced with a shiny new model.

The Tsogo Sun hotel group had an experience of learned and retained behaviour, which it found itself forced to address beginning in 2006. A legacy of its founder Sol Kerzner, the mercurial hotel magnate who formed the business in partnership with South African Breweries in 1969, was that management was autocratic and aggressive. Kerzner is said to have opened board meetings by saying “What the f**k is going on?” and banging his fist on the table to accentuate his point. That appears to have just been Kerzner’s style.

Raymond Ackerman told me how, some years ago, he and Kerzner met at Pick n Pay’s headquarters, to discuss a joint proposal to champion Cape Town’s candidacy as a host for the


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Olympic Games. Ackerman is a very eloquent man and says he could see Kerzner holding back, choosing his words carefully, out of respect. Eventually, he asked Kerzner to please just relax and speak freely, and from that moment, the air turned blue as Kerzner spoke his mind authentically.

Perhaps because Kerzner is so wildly charismatic, his style remained at Southern Sun even after it merged with Tsogo Sun, 20 years after he exited the business. As HR director Dlamini puts it: “[Those] who got the chance to move up the ladder and become managers couldn’t wait for their chance to bang tables and this culture permeated through the business. It persisted long after [Kerzner] and that was the culture we wanted to get rid of. People said they didn’t feel respected, didn’t feel that they were part of the business.”

In a broader sense, Corex’s Lu says South Africa is the worst place he has ever encountered to recruit service staff because of the generally poor national culture towards service. He recalls how his friends in Taiwan were terribly amused at a video he recorded of the staff at a fast food franchise in Johannesburg’s Woodmead who were so busy shouting at each other they ignored the waiting queues of would-be customers. He says the recruits that come to his organisation are often too relaxed about service when the job market dictates they should be fighting for survival. “For me, if you want to be successful in business in South Africa, you have to change that mindset,” he says.

We spoke about Shackleton’s 1912 recruitment ad in the previous chapter, but an even more momentous event in that same year

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shows how Shared Basic Assumptions can often be fated in their blindness. When Titanic, the grandest of all ocean liners, raced into icy waters, which generated a flurry of warnings from other ships on the North Atlantic that April night, it didn’t reduce speed, despite the lack of several basic safety requirements such as binoculars for its lookouts. The reason was an Shared Basic Assumption that it was unsinkable; a certainty placed in a new substructure design coupled with an impressive amount of contemporaneous British arrogance. As we now know, the assumption was proved sickeningly wrong. It, and the willingness not to question it, led to behaviour that contradicted common sense because even if the ship couldn’t be sunk, nobody said it couldn’t be damaged badly enough to take a major revenue-generating asset for its operator, the White Star Line, out of action for a long period of time.

That’s the real red flag here. While Shared Basic Assumptions can be harmless, or even benevolent, the unwillingness to question them, or the inability to detect that one is even present, may have very bad consequences.

The challenge of culture and in particular the challenge of culture change is therefore a difficult one because it is pregnant with the need to question everything. Anything that comes with an explanation that it’s always been done this way must be examined for its root, and there must be a willingness to accept that the root may be flawed or at least redundant. The effect of not doing so may not lead an organisation to a Titanic moment, but perhaps that’s just a chance one must be willing to take.


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The whole effectThe majority of the organisations of which I have experience – including the hundreds I have dealt with over the years outside of the Happy Sandpit research – show clear evidence of a discernible culture. It is so clear in many cases that it is possible to refer to the whole organisation as a collective noun. As a new employee of a company called ITP, in 1995, I recall a conversation with a company veteran who asked: “Are you an ITPer?” I had no idea what he was talking about and he couldn’t elaborate, saying only that I’ll know it when I become one.

Years later, that conversation was revisited and I was intrigued to discover that I was indeed an ITPer, except that I wasn’t any more able to put my finger on what that meant than my interrogater had been. I simply realised that I was very much like my colleagues in speech, thought and action. In particular I had come to accept some of the Shared Basic Assumptions such as that it was normal to treat almost everything with a sense of sarcasm. It wasn’t negative so much as a collective unwillingness to be out-cooled by anything. It served as a hyper-efficient filter for hiring; we always knew when a non-ITPer walked among us, and they very rarely lasted more than a month or two.

It’s that sort of thing that is difficult to explain fully. Missing Link’s Mulholland says he is even more proud of how his company does things than of what it specifically does. He expressed a belief that if he was to radically change Missing Link’s core business from presentation strategy, to the manufacture of speedboats, he would likely retain a number of customers simply because they have so

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deeply bought into the way that Missing Link solves problems, almost to a greater extent than to the specific problems it solves.

So when does a culture become recognisable? There isn’t a clear answer to that. The only real unequivocal agreement seems to be that it usually follows a process of evolution. “Culture is an animal of its time. You can’t define culture if the company is only three years or five years old. Young companies simply can’t realistically identify specific things about culture,” says Corex’s Lu.

Moreover, especially with South Africa sporting a complete change in national dispensation only around a generation ago, it’s an unproven, but compelling idea that newer companies have an easier time creating a culture based on relevant contemporary mores than those that were formed pre- and during-Apartheid. Michael Allschwang, managing director at Vodacom Business, suggests that because that company didn’t exist prior to 1994, it’s had a simpler job of building a culture that is relevant for today’s climate because in an era in which companies struggle with the government’s requirement to transform – to have a mix of black and white employees that reflects the populace – Vodacom was able to create diversity from its inception. “We were born into a shifting landscape, into a new South Africa and what happened was we were complying with the new reality of this diverse and shifting culture from the outset,” he says.

However it happens, there is broad agreement among company founders that culture is a key differentiator which either helps the organisation or hinders it from achieving success. “It’s an incredibly valuable asset,” says Brand Pretorius, a 16-year


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veteran as CEO of McCarthy Motor Holdings and later the holding company, McCarthy Limited, and the man who saved that company from bankruptcy early in his tenure. “The cultural capital of an organisation should be listed on the balance sheet. If the cultural capital is healthy and sound and well defined, it provides a potent competitive advantage because then you have the breeding ground for change and innovation and a sense of commitment and ultimately for high performance. The other side of the story is a culture that is lethargic, that resists, that sabotages and holds organisations and people back.”

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