Tell me about your vision.
So it's actually over 30 years ago,
I worked for the largest company in South Africa
called Anglo American, which was a massive mining house.
And I was an engineer, I was a young engineer
and very impressionable.
And I got to fly on the corporate jet,
which you don't really get to do at 22 for most people.
And I was on the corporate jet, my very first trip
and I was in a T-shirt, I was an engineer,
I was flying to a mine site, T-shirt, jeans,
smart shoes, but boots in my bag.
All my fellow travelers arrived,
being dropped off by their chauffeurs
and they were all in suits, three-piece suits,
smart shoes and I thought, well, I was a bit out of it,
but got on the plane, I sat right at the back.
And I was sitting there contemplating this flight
because all these people were so much more senior
in the organization than I was,
but yet they greeted me like an equal
when we got on the plane,
wanted to know what I was doing there.
In the head office where I worked,
I was a certain level engineer,
which meant I parked at the third parking lot
away from the office.
If I was one level higher,
I would have parked in the second parking lot.
That's how hierarchical the business was.
So that's the backstory.
We get on the plane, plane takes off,
the pilot turns around and says,
okay, you can move around now.
And on the floor was an ice box on the plane.
There was no service on the plane.
So I figured I'm the youngest, most junior.
I got up, I opened the ice box
and I wanted to serve drinks to my fellow travelers.
I got a tap on the shoulder
and the joke I actually tell on stage
is that I'm glad it was from one of the directors
of the company, it wasn't from the hand of God
because I was at 40,000 feet.
Okay, so I didn't want to...
So the director turned around to me
and he said, please don't do that.
And I said, hey, I'm young and whatever,
I'm happy to do it.
He said, no, in our planes,
the most senior person serves the drinks.
Now you think about that from this hierarchical situation
where you were like literally,
you ate in this canteen, not that canteen
because of your status in the organization.
That's where my interest in culture started,
30 plus years ago,
because I said if a company that was that structured
could turn everything on its head
in the confines of its plane, there was hope.
And yes, over the years I built businesses.
Then I left Anglo-American, went to business school,
started my own businesses
and I listed my first business in 1996
on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in education business.
Went off to Inventure Capital for a number of years,
came to Australia, started another business in 2001.
But all through that, I've tried to create this culture,
this culture of togetherness,
of understanding the vision of where we're going.
It all came together 11 years ago
when I was training for a marathon
and I had two cardiac stents.
I almost didn't have a heart attack,
I just had two stents.
I had blockages.
But that really focused me on what I wanna do
and I wanted to share that vision with the world.
I wanted to share that vision of how do you create
these forward looking, amazing cultures
where everybody buys into the values and purpose.
And so that's what I'm driven by.
I'm driven by sharing the experiences
of listing companies on two stock exchanges.
Because when I was in Inventure Capital,
we listed a venture fund
on the Australian Stock Exchange as well.
And growing stuff from zero to,
one of my current businesses now has done
more than $3 billion of residential mortgages.
So it's that combination of entrepreneurship,
but also this deep, I guess, understanding of culture
from years ago that I really wanted to change
the world's culture.
And that's how the culture project came about.
You mentioned, thanks for sharing that, by the way.
I think that was a great story.
You mentioned that one of your highest director, right?
And he put a hand on each other,
he said, if you don't do that,
only the highest people that will do that, right?
Or senior, most people do that.
It was actually, and I go to church
and one of the things Jesus also did, right?
He was the being this most senior apostle
and he did that too.
He served people to the lowest to them, right?
Because that's why he came.
I think that's a great story that you shared with me.
I think that's amazing experience.
Thank you for sharing that out.
So is that what you say your vision kind of came from?
Yeah, so my vision, and then it morphed.
So I started off talking about being a culture futurist
and speaking about cultures.
And then I interviewed a company a couple of years ago.
So I've interviewed 85 companies around the world,
25 countries to try and understand
what drives their cultures.
And one of the companies had excellence as a value.
Now you see, I didn't talk about vision and mission.
I talked about value and purpose
because I think those are bigger cultural drivers.
And one of them had as a value excellence.
And I asked them to explain the concept of excellence.
And they said to me that excellence in their terminology
was that you can never be perfect.
But if you aim for perfection and you achieve excellence,
you've done really well.
And so that for me was kind of an eye opener
because I said culture is bigger than that.
Culture is excellence.
And I now define excellence as showing up
as the best version of yourself or your company every day.
So even if you and Australians are renowned for going out
and what they call going on a bender,
going out on the beers for a night
and feeling horrible the next day.
And when I talk to companies and I talk to staff
and particularly blue collar workers and I say to them,
if you've been out on a bender
and you are hung over to hell the next day,
but you're showing up at work and you're doing the best
you can despite your personal circumstance,
I'm not encouraging you to go out on benders,
but I'm saying then you are excellent on that day,
you're showing up as the best version of yourself.
And I said, so if you start at that level
and the days you're not hung over,
which is hopefully most of them,
then you've got a target to show up
as this excellent person every day.
And so that's part of this whole evolution
of what I now call the excellence project,
which will be my third or fourth published book
on excellence, on excellence in a broader sense.
And what I mean by that,
well, it's about optimizing culture, leadership and strategy.
So I've expanded from just culture
to both leadership and strategy
and how those really give an organization
the view of excellence.
Thanks for sharing that.
That's adding,
not a lot of people think like that.
There's a saying in first class business and vision pros
that people don't care how much you know
until they know how much you care.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And so, yeah, I mean, we have little things,
like tiny little things in our lives
that we don't really care about.
We have little things, like tiny little things
in my current financial services group.
Every Friday, the staff get lunch,
whoever's at the office get lunch on my credit card.
I've had staff in the past who have abused it
and they're no longer my team.
Not for that reason,
but it was a cultural problem that they had,
not understanding what being part of the team meant.
It's about, I don't care if there's two people
in the office on a Friday or 10,
they come to me at about 11 o'clock
and say, we're ordering lunch from sushi place,
pizza place, burger place, chicken place.
What do you want?
And then kind of have your credit card to pay for it.
That's awesome.
That's amazing.
Would you say that that is your why of your vision?
What is your why?
Why do you do what you do?
Um, well, I've been a professional, oh no,
I've been a speaker since I was 15
and my late father died,
my father died 25 years ago.
When I was 15, he took me to Toastmasters
and in 1984, I was South African Toastmasters champion.
And so I've always loved being a speaker.
And when I started my financial services group,
I spoke a lot and I've sold over a billion dollars
of mortgages from stage.
When I had my stints and I had to reevaluate
what I wanted to do with my life,
I decided that that's my why.
My why was to share the ups and downs, the learnings,
the bad times and the good times with audiences,
but with a very much a focused approach to them.
So although I have sort of standard talks that I do,
every single one is customized to the audience,
to the people I'm talking to,
to the experience that they are having.
And that's my why, that's what drives me.
When I see the lights come on in people's eyes
and the dots joining in their heads,
then I know I'm making an impact.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show
and thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.