In this special edition of Acumen we focus on the relationship between India and South Africa; a partnership that spans industries, emerging and established technologies, trade, tourism, and knowledge-sharing. Deep cultural roots also unite our two countries through time, meaning that business between India and South Africa is not just about trade, it’s about innate social and human connections.
Building on this firm foundation is India’s rising global influence on the world stage. The country increasingly has the legitimacy, scale, and complexity to authentically claim its place among the world’s superpowers. South Africa, meanwhile, remains a catalyst. While our claim to being a bridge or access point into greater Africa might have waned somewhat, we are still among the most advanced economies on the continent. For this reason, South Africa continues to attract Indian companies keen to trade, engage, and advance with Africa.
What unites our two countries are our people, the human talent needed on both sides to take full advantage of a host of opportunities. It is for this reason that the development of talent is a key driver for both Indian businesses in South Africa and South African companies seeking to do business in India.
There is no excuse for poor educational outcomes to hamper this potential – certainly in a South African context – and where gaps exist it is our job as business to find innovative and sustainable solutions.
As a business school focused on the development of human and leadership potential, we spend considerable time and effort exploring the core competencies it takes to be impactful in business. In their now-vintage 1990 article, CK Prahalad and Gary Hamel explored how leaders of this period would “be judged on their ability to identify, cultivate, and exploit the core competencies that make growth possible”. This seminal strategic management perspective challenged leaders to consider the “portfolio of competencies” that made up an organisation and to actively build these abilities.
Hamel went on to co-author the 1994 book Competing for the Future with his mentor and continues to garner global recognition. Prahalad, who passed away in 2010, turned his attention over the years to the role of business in affecting social change (The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits). He also wrote about how organisations can develop capabilities to ensure ongoing innovation, relevance, and change (The New Age of Innovation, with MS Krishnan).
As an acclaimed Indian-American academic and thinker, Prahalad was a beacon of human-focused, emerging-market thinking. As he noted in 2009, “The capacity to get people from different parts of the world – from China, India, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Brazil – all to work together requires the ability of a good sheepdog. How to talk to people constantly, how to motivate them, how to get them to see the tasks on hand, and how to reduce the frictional losses in pulling people together from multiple cultures. That becomes the dominant theme.”
Both India and South Africa have other sterling examples of human-centric leadership that inspire and transform the world. Despite being from different generations, Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi were shaped by the same soil. In 1962, Mandela was held as an awaiting-trial prisoner at the old Fort in Johannesburg. Fifty-four years earlier – in 1908 – Gandhi served his first prison sentence at the Fort, which today is South Africa’s seat of justice on Constitution Hill.
These two visionary leaders went on to change the course of history for their respective countries and the world in general. While they never met, the bonds that link our nations remain strong.
