Your role in fixing the mess we face

The message this week is personal. Having recently survived a head-on collision caused by another driver's reckless decision, I need to get a few things off my fractured chest. 

I worked in India as international advisor with their planning commission, and assisted them to develop an outcomes-based budget to maximise returns from their entire government spend. As the fastest growing economy over the past decade, my years in India taught me many lessons that are of value to us. If we as South Africans just stop shooting ourselves in the foot, there is no reason we cannot grow equally fast. More jobs, more taxes, more public investment. Our problem though is that the person who pulls the trigger ends up unfairly harming others.  

Uninformed, unconscious, incompetent “leaders” are steering our country towards a cliff. If we follow in apathy, we will perish. Where localised leadership vacuums exist, organised crime is increasingly taking over that role -- to say nothing of the oligarchs who profit from corruption and state failure. 

There are two key levers of change: underperforming leaders, and ourselves. We can course correct our own paths, to increase our influence over future outcomes. This is easier to do at provincial and municipal level, but much harder at national level.  

And while in the Western Cape we may have relatively good provincial and municipal leadership, we must ask ourselves if we are truly content with the state of our suburbs, industrial- and commercial nodes. I, for one, am not.  Escalating electricity tariffs, energy market inefficiencies, and persistent crime continue to suppress growth. 

According to widely-cited government and private logistics studies, inefficiencies, infrastructure vandalism, and bottlenecks across South Africa’s rail and port corridors cost the national economy roughly R1 billion every single day.  

As a conscious over-analytical introvert, aware of my own limitations, I never thought I was a leader. Until I realised that many of our confident leaders are unconsciously leading us astray. Those who can see the changes required need to step up, for it would be difficult to do worse.  

I am appealing to the quiet strategists, the analytical thinkers, and the business leaders who deliver tangible results every day: your expertise is urgently needed.  You lead your businesses today because your competencies have yielded real-world results.  

How can you make a real difference in a time-efficient way? Our economic decline means we need course corrections, in industrial and commercial nodes, and other economic clusters. Think how your insight and experience can contribute to course corrections. No need to become politicians. Just establish a mechanism that ensures the wise men and women, rather than others, steer communities towards the best place for all. The Chamber calls it a Lead Firm Consensus (LFC).  

You know what changes will make your business disinvest or invest more. The perfect strategy foundation for economic growth. The City of Cape Town and Western Cape Government are enthusiastically and gratefully responding to such wise input. 

If lead firms work together to steer our business clusters towards a better place, we strengthen the legitimate network governance capacity, instead of leaving it to organised crime. Drop me an email to get involved.  John@capechamber.co.za    

John Lawson, CEO of the Cape Chamber of Commerce and Industry