Minter Dialogue with Willie Pietersen

Willie Pietersen’s Background and Leadership Journey

– Pietersen describes his upbringing in apartheid-era South Africa, witnessing Nelson Mandela’s leadership.

– Transition from law to a commercial career, including a CEO role at Unilever, and later becoming a professor at Columbia Business School.

Influence of South African Experience

– Pietersen reflects on how his South African experiences shaped his leadership style.

– Discusses the impact of racial segregation and the transformative influence of Mandela’s leadership.

Leadership and Personal Growth

– Pietersen shares insights on mental imprinting and the importance of challenging ingrained beliefs.

– Emphasises the role of self-awareness and personal leadership in effective leadership.

Strategic and Interpersonal Leadership

– Introduction of Pietersen’s Venn diagram model for leadership: self, strategic, and interpersonal leadership.

– Discussion on the necessity of integrating these domains for comprehensive leadership.

The Role of Feedback in Leadership

– Importance of seeking specific feedback on personal, strategic, and interpersonal leadership.

– Encourages leaders to ask targeted questions to gain valuable insights.

Nelson Mandela’s Leadership Example

– Pietersen highlights Mandela’s personal leadership and moral courage as pivotal.

– Discusses the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a strategic move for national healing.

Ethics and Moral Courage

– Pietersen shares personal anecdotes illustrating the significance of moral courage.

– Discusses the challenges of maintaining ethical standards in leadership.

Philosophy and Leadership

– Pietersen’s interest in philosophy, astrophysics, and evolutionary science as influences on his leadership thinking.

– The importance of philosophical questions in guiding ethical leadership decisions.

The Role of Play and Humour in Leadership

– Discussion on the value of play and humour in leadership, referencing Jordan Peterson’s ideas.

– Pietersen shares personal experiences with his grandchildren to illustrate the concept.

Intergenerational Leadership Challenges

– Addressing the complexities of leading across different generations.

– Emphasises the need for ethical principles and shared purpose in leadership.

Purpose and Strategic Leadership

– Pietersen discusses the importance of a shared purpose grounded in ethical principles.

– Highlights the need for enrolment and participation in defining a company’s purpose.

Please send me your questions — as an audio file if you’d like — to nminterdial@gmail.com. Otherwise, below, you’ll find the show notes and, of course, you are invited to comment. If you liked the podcast, please take a moment to rate it here.

To connect with Willie Pietersen:

• Check out Willie Pietersen’s eponymous site here
• Find/buy Willie’s book, “Leadership—The Inside Story: Time-Tested Prescriptions for Those Who Seek to Lead,” here
• Find/follow Willie Pietersen on LinkedIn
• Find/follow XXXX on X (formerly Twitter)

Further resources for the Minter Dialogue podcast:

Meanwhile, you can find my other interviews on the Minter Dialogue Show in this podcast tab, on Megaphone or via Apple Podcasts. If you like the show, please go over to rate this podcast via RateThisPodcast! And for the francophones reading this, if you want to get more podcasts, you can also find my radio show en français over at: MinterDial.fr, on Megaphone or in iTunes. Music credit: The jingle at the beginning of the show is courtesy of my friend, Pierre Journel, author of the Guitar Channel. And, the new sign-off music is “A Convinced Man,” a song I co-wrote and recorded with Stephanie Singer back in the late 1980s (please excuse the quality of the sound!).

Transcription courtesy of Flowsend.ai, an AI full-service for podcasters

Minter Dial: Willie Pietersen, brilliant to have you on my show. Thank you for indulging me. When I canceled one of our interviews, I fell upon your book. I’m not exactly sure, but it really resonated me. The inside story, time tested prescriptions for those who seek to lead all around leadership. And it really felt like some very parallel or resonating stories for me. In your own words, Willy, how would you like to describe who is Willie Pietersen?

Willie Pietersen: Okay, greetings to you. Thanks for having me on. Well, I’m, I guess, a little bit of a mongrel in many ways. I was born and raised in South Africa, grew up during the apartheid era. There, experienced the awful scene of racial segregation, saw the rise of Nelson Mandela, was inspired by his leadership leading that country into a peaceful transition to democracy. Started life as a lawyer, and then went into the commercial world, joining Unilever to begin with. Had an international business career, was the CEO of various companies over a period of 20 years. I’ve now been a professor of the practice of management at Columbia Business School in New York, which I very much enjoy.

Minter Dial: A lovely journey. Willie, let’s start with your upbringing. You mentioned Mandela. I mean, funnily enough, I’ve been arrested because of South Africa. I got engaged in South Africa, and I went bankrupt because of South Africa. So I tried to do a concert in Johannesburg in 1991 that was entitled the Peace Concert with a stunning lady. And we got blacklisted by the British Musicians Union. And that ended my desire or my ability, anyway, bankrupted me, and I wasn’t able to continue. So that’s lots of stories about South Africa. But what is it about your experience in South Africa that you think shaped or formed your life and your style of leadership?

Willie Pietersen: I learned a lot about mental imprinting, I’ll tell you that background. You know, born and raised in South Africa, I was surrounded by authority figures, parents, teachers, politicians, who reinforced the idea that racial segregation was the way the world worked. I had no other point of reference, no other point of comparison. So I assumed that that was literally the true world and that there was no real alternative. And then progressively through various experiences, I began to develop different perspectives. And it reminds me of the wonderful statement by Margaret Wheatley, the complexity theorist, who said, you cannot change a living thing from the outside. You can only disturb it so that it changes itself. And I had a number of disturbances that helped me change my point of view. First, going to college in South Africa, studying law, debating various points of view, beginning to feel the inklings of challenging what I had been taking for granted then went to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship and saw South Africa from the outside in. And with that kind of perspective and the benefit of distance began to really, really challenge my assumptions about this. I returned and practiced law. And then the great transitional experience I had. There was a board, a government board called race Classification Board, where people of questionable racial identity were examined like laboratory specimens to determine their race. Because depending on your race, you could not cohabit, you could not marry across the colaba, you couldn’t live in the same areas, go to the same schools. And so if you were found to be of a different race than you had thought you were, you were sent off and told, you have to live somewhere else or you couldn’t marry. It was illegal, people you were married to. It so happened that a number of people who were subjected to this awful routine engaged me as a lawyer to represent them. And I looked at how these board members examined these people, put a pencil in their hair and turned it around to see it test its kinkiness, examined the texture of their skin, and muttered amongst themselves about, is this a brown person? Is this a white person? And then they would make a finding. And people were, you know, confronted with this awful thing that half of their family, half, two of their kids would go to a white school and the other two were told to go to a black school, etcetera. For the first time, I saw it at the individual level. And now you begin to realize that stereotyping is a way to kind of create distances. To say, this group of people is unfortunate, they’re being treated an unjust way. It’s only when you see it at the individual level and the deep inhumanity and indignity that was being imposed on these people that the sheer horror of the situation sinks in. And my mental imprinting was obliterated and replaced by a new perspective. And it was that experience that caused me to leave South Africa. I spoke to my wife that night and said, we can’t raise a family here. This is objectionable. It would never make us happy. And that’s when I joined Unilever. I left the law and through Unilever, had an international business career and eventually became a United States citizen here. Posted by Unilever to the US to run their foods business here. So that’s the story. And then associated with that, while I was in the US, I watched the rise of Nelson Mandela, who’d been imprisoned for 27 years, well, actually was sentenced to life imprisonment and then ultimately released after 27 years to negotiate a peaceful transition to a multiracial democracy against all the odds. When we left, we thought, this is inevitable. It’s a powder keg. It’s going to be some kind of an explosion that’s going to be ugly. It’s going to be bloodshed. I looked at Nelson Mandela as the ultimate role model of what leadership is really about.

Minter Dial: Nonviolence. Yeah, I. In fact, if you were to visit me, Willie, in my home in London, you would see in our living room, the main piece of art is a photograph that I took blown up 30 by 20 inches. And it is my photograph of Nilsen Mandela, actually. His fist is all I see. Or no, sorry, his head is all I see, which is of the ticker tape parade when he visited New York. And much was that also happened to be when I was working in an investment bank right beside the twin towers. So for me, there were multiple things going on in that photograph, which include my experience of living through 911 in Manhattan and seeing it happen in front of my window. So thats that story. And then as far as South Africa is concerned, funny story. My friend Dell, he worked for Unilever in South Africa before working in China. So that’s something I’ll have to ping my good friend Dell on. But you talk about stereotyping and bringing things down to a personal level for reference. For me, one of the things I thought about history, which is so numbing about history, is it seems to be all about facts and figures, and 10,000 people were killed on such and such a hill. Oh, by the way, my favorite house master was a history teacher, and he went on to become the headmaster of bishops before getting expelled for trying to make it a mixed school. So, further things that you probably understand absolutely quickly, but this idea of history and making personal stories makes history come alive. Yet when you are the CEO, you can’t spend all your time on anecdotes and on specific. One client complains. Is that enough to base a story of a complete change or not? How do you reconcile the challenge of dealing with large numbers and making big decisions with the micro, the mini stories?

Willie Pietersen: I think the understanding that is the departure point for all thinking about leadership is that it’s about people. I’ll tell you a formative story. Early on my first role as a CEO, I was young, I was 36, I believe at the time. These days, there are heads of countries that are younger than that. But at that time it was regarded as being rather young for that role, and I felt a little unprepared for it. It was to run the foods business for Unilever in South Africa. I came to that role with the idea that leading a business was a bit like playing a game of chess, making all the right moves based on the right logic and analysis, financial analysis, looking at the balance sheet, seeing what’s wrong, what’s missing, brand positioning issues, et cetera. A very analytical approach to it with the belief that if the logic was clear, don’t forget now, I practiced law before this, so I talked earlier on about mental imprinting. This was a kind of an influence of the way I thought logic will carry the day, explain everything in a logical way, and people will follow and so will their passion. Well, that was the way I started thinking about leadership. After three months, my boss, the chairman of the group, a guy called CJ Fanias for a very influential mentor in my development, called me into his office and said, tell me, Pietersen, youve been in the job now for three months. What has surprised you in this role? And I said, well, whats really surprised me is how much time ive had to spend on people issues. Ive been trying to develop the logic, but people are needing to be recognized, to be inspired, to be motivated, to be understood, and that takes a very long time. And its really occupied probably the majority of my time and energy. And he sort of looked at me in a lingering way and said, Pietersen, welcome to leadership. There’s kind of a big realization. Work happens through people and great work happens through inspired people. And that’s just the way it is. We talk about new developments like AI, and of course, it is a monumental shift in the tools that are available to us, but it’s about how we as people apply those tools at the end of the day, that really matters. So I developed, based on that idea, I developed a Venn diagram to help me think clearly about the structure of leadership. And it has three domains. In my view, leadership does. First domain is leadership of self, being completely self aware, deep self awareness, having a clear set of values and principles that guide our actions and inspire others. That’s where it all begins. Who are we? What do we stand for that makes us transparent? Second domain is strategic leadership is providing a clear sense of direction and the right priorities and a winning way for the organization. And the third domain is interpersonal leadership is bringing out the best in others. The way I see leadership is that we need to integrate those three domains so that we become integrated leaders. And if any one of those is underperforming, it undermines the totality. Now, I find this helpful because it gives us a way to examine our own performance. We’re always confronted with new challenges and we always need to put the pressure on one or the other of those three domains depending on the needs of the moment. It also helps us reflect on our own effectiveness and get honest feedback. We all need feedback as leaders. We get very remote from where the action is and we need honest feedback. And I think the worst kind of process of feedback is to go to a trusted person and say, how am I doing? Like Ed Koch would do, roaming the streets in New York saying, hi, how am I doing?

Minter Dial: Imposing figure that he was.

Willie Pietersen: Yes, you know, that’s a useless question. It’s much better to say, well, look, I’ve got these three dimensions I’m trying to pursue and learn more and more by way of improvement. Tell me, how am I doing on my personal leadership? How am I doing on my strategic? How am I doing on interpersonal? That gives you much richer feedback. It makes it more specific and helps you integrate those three. So that’s a kind of a philosophy that I have about this. And it brings the strategic, which is kind of the macro, directing the organization in the right way, and the human and personal, both our individual, who we are, and the interpersonal, interplay and in combination in a synergistic way.

Minter Dial: So, first of all, what I like about your model, Willie, is that there are only three. One of your chapters is about how five is a silly number. And I absolutely laughed out hard about that. You talk about strategy and obviously how important that is. And obviously the way I talk about strategy is it’s about choice, making hard choices. And so when you come up with five values, drop it to three, make the choice, make the intentional decision to drop down to three, and that, and therein lies the great work. The interesting thing I was thinking about, your question is, how am I doing? You talk about how having the right question or how the wrong question can really kill your feedback loop. But maybe it’s to even go further, say, well, where am I not as good at?

Willie Pietersen: Yes.

Minter Dial: In other words, allowing for the criticism to come, because too often people will tell the leader what they want to hear.

Willie Pietersen: Yes.

Minter Dial: Especially if you have authority, you’ve been in the job for a while and, you know, you’re cranky, embedded self. And people just say, oh, you mean Willie? No, you’re doing very well, you know, great for you, Lalida.

Willie Pietersen: And suddenly your jokes have become a lot funnier too.

Minter Dial: So true. So you talk about personal, interpersonal and strategic. And I was going to try to push you to say which one of those three, do you think is actually the sine qua non?

Willie Pietersen: You know, it’s a difficult question because leadership is a situational issue. We’re confronted with different challenges that call upon different aspects of our leadership. So there might be situations that we face, crisis situations or whatever it is, where the strategic dimension becomes determinative of your success. So I think we’ve got to look at it in that flexible way that we’ve got these three domains working in combination and understanding where we need to put the pressure at any given moment. Having said that, and taking the broader and longer view of leadership, I believe that personal leadership is the essential starting point for it all. It’s what Marcus Aurelius, the roman philosopher, called our command center, our internal command center, and it all really begins there. And the interesting thing we talked earlier about Nelson Mandela. I have a picture of him hanging around the wall here, too, and we talked about him. The most majestic thing that he did was the leadership of self. He was consumed, obviously, by anger and by resentment and by a sense of injustice. He was subjected to indignities for 27 years and always held his head up high and looked for the high ground and preserved his dignity to the extent that when he got inaugurated, one of the guests of honor that was sitting amongst the dignitaries was his chief jailer, somebody who had gotten to admire him for his personal. So the first thing he had to do, somebody, it was Bill Clinton went to visit him at one point afterwards, and Mandela took him to where he’d been imprisoned on this island. And after he’d gone on this tour, Bill Clinton said to him, my goodness, weren’t you consumed by resentment and the feelings that you needed to find retribution for all of this indignity to you and all of your kindred spirits? And he said, no, because if I had harbored that anger, I would have remained in prison, but it would have been a prison of my own making. Now, for me, that’s this great example. He led this process in South Africa, remember? Now there was this mutual racial animosity that was almost exploding. You can’t just ask people and just say to them, look, I want you to reconcile. I want this to be a rainbow nation. I want forgiveness to take place. You can’t just call it in like that. First thing you had to do is demonstrate it for himself and live that example. And then one of the things he did, I thought was brilliant, along with Desmond Tutu, is to launch this process. That was the National Reconciliation Commission, which allowed people to give evidence before a board and if they admitted what they had done, they would be forgiven for it. If they admitted it and expressed remorse, but if they denied it, then they were put on trial, and if they’re found guilty, they were imprisoned in the normal way. He gave people a process to cross that bridge of reconciliation and forgiveness and literally began to build this rainbow nation. But it started with his own example, and he lived that example throughout. So that truth and Reconciliation commission, I think, was a major part of it. It was a thoughtful process of not just asking people, but to get them to go through a process themselves, a healing process. So I think that’s a demonstration. He needed also to have a strategic direction for the country. He needed to have the interpersonal skills to negotiate a peaceful settlement. So you see these things coming into play. And if I were to give him a score sheet, which is pretty arrogant, I think. But if you look at it objectively, I’d give him the highest marks for personal leadership and interpersonal leadership, that deep sensitivity to others. And I gave him a b for strategic leadership for the simple reason that he didn’t really strongly close those gaps in poverty, in housing and healthcare. No leader is perfect, and unfortunately, his successors have aggravated the situation somewhat. But there we are. That’s my score sheet and most humble way. But I give him an a for personal, I think without that very strong kind of example that he set as a role model based on his own experience of I’ve got to first of all learn to forgive on my own and then ask others to do it. He was led by the Gandhi statement, first be the leader. That be the change that you wish to create.

Minter Dial: Yeah. Take the log out of your eye before trying to fix the twig in the world. Of course, the situation in South Africa certainly belies the or, you know, it’s confounding compared to how he’d set it out. I was just there and in Cape Town, we were talking about how he was imprisoned in five places he spent time in. And he obviously has marked so many people. Being the same thing or following his path is a whole different story. And in the way you talk about the mental imprint, though, the way you were stimulated to change in the idea of a personal leadership, one would naturally have to bring in your personal experience, your personal beliefs and moral compass. And the challenge in so many leadership positions is actually balancing a moral compass, more or less strict and stubborn with performance, because just sometimes you need to piss off people, sometimes you need to push the bounds of legality. It might be legal, but is it the right thing to do when you’re faced with those. And I wanted to pick up on the word complete. You talk about complete self awareness. I feel like there’s always going to be an incomplete part of you. And how do you reconcile that inevitable challenge?

Willie Pietersen: We’re always wrestling with issues like that. We’re always pushed, I think, in a particular direction to get things done, even though it might be questionable ethically. And unless we’re well grounded and know our own boundaries, etcetera, and are transparent to others, we can be pushed into the gray zone very easily. I’m an avid reader of philosophy, and along those lines, I read very few business books. I do read some. I skim through a lot of them. When I find a really good one, I dwell on it. My main reading is in philosophy. It’s in astrophysics, and it’s in evolutionary science. And these have informed my thinking. Now, philosophy, for me, helps to answer the three great questions that we need to be able to answer to lead productive lives. What’s true, what’s important, and what’s right. And the toughest challenges we confront are not the choice between right and wrong. That’s easy. Our teenage kids can do that. The toughest choices are between right and right. And then we loop back to, well, what’s important. But if we don’t start with what’s true, obviously we’ve lost track, completely derailed our own thinking. So those are the kind of rigors I think we need to be, need to bring into play in thinking these things through and helping our people think in those same ways is what’s truly important here, and not just in the short term, because that’s a very attractive thing to do, is the quick hit. Okay, this is great. I know we’ve compromised a little bit, but we’ll recover from that. Well, actually, we don’t, because erosion is a slow, seductive process. The moment you’ve crossed that line once and you say, well, I take my foot back again, I won’t cross it again. You’ve given yourself permission, and you’ll probably do it again, and you’ll step more deeply into the mire. So I honestly believe there are very tortured situations that are extremely difficult to determine between right and right. And sometimes you say, well, one of them, you know, really deals with what’s truly important to us, but it begins to stray a little bit begins to stray a little bit into that kind of zone. And I’m just a strong believer in drawing fairly hard lines and saying, perhaps I’m wrong, but I’d like to be wrong in the right way.

Minter Dial: Let history be the judge. Have you come across Jonathan Haidt?

Willie Pietersen: Yes. Well, not personally, but I’ve read his material and talking about business books, of course. He’s a psychologist. I think his thinking is profound. It truly is so very revealing.

Minter Dial: Yeah. There are two subjects I want to think that Haidt can help us with. One is this notion of the righteous mind, which the legal mind might maybe grapple with. But he talks about the power of intuition to dominate the rational, the logic that you were talking about initially. And I’m wondering, where do you put the intuitive sense in all this, in this leadership style?

Willie Pietersen: Whoa. That’s an interesting one. I think it’s about our. I go back to mental imprinting in some ways, because it’s really about the biases that we all have, and nobody’s immune from biases. You know, we like to think we’re objective. And one of the biases we have is we think that everybody else is biased except us. The truth of the matter is nobody is absolutely objective. We’re not wired that way. And some of these impulses that we talk about and instincts we talk about are survival measures. If you’re walking along a pathway and you hear a rustle in the bushes and you don’t know what it is, you’ll step away pretty quickly. And now you look behind. That’s an impulse. Now you look behind you, and there’s a little rabbit, and you feel a bit silly. The next time you hear a rustle in the bushes, you’ll jump away again. You won’t assume it’s a rabbit. So we’ve got these biases now. This is really all about how we address problems and make decisions. Now, I think Jonathan Haidt has been very, very informative about this. I also like a book called thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman, who is both economist and a psychologist. And I think it’s being aware of our biases that’s really important. There are four that I think are very prominent in the way we as human beings approach problems. One is the confirmation bias. That’s the tendency we all have to approach an issue with a preconceived idea of what’s true and then selectively look for evidence to confirm what we already believe and reject anything we don’t believe in. We don’t come to the world with a blank slate. This could lead to pretty poor decisions. Then we have the status quo bias, which is very, very strong. It’s where we find safety and where we find control. And going from that zone of safety to something that’s totally new and threatening is not something that we welcome. There’s denial. If something is too painful to deal with, we’d rather shove it away and say, it’s not true, and so on. Now, I tell you, let me give you one example of how powerful these biases can be, and that’s the status quo bias. Now, Kodak, at one time, was kind of one of those business icons, the king of the heap, if you like, on photography. And at its height, it was the fifth most valuable brand in the entire world. It had 85% of the camera market, 90% of the photographic film market. It looked to be invincible. Well, it wasn’t invincible because Kodak went broke. And you turn around and say, how is that possible? If I were told that in 2005, because it went broke in 2012, I believe I would have said, that’s crazy. It’s not going to go broke. I’m going to invest in the stock exchange. Why did it go broke? It was overtaken by digital photography. Okay, that’s understandable. Now, next question is, who invented digital photography? Who was the one who came away and took their market away? Kodak invented digital photography. An engineer at Kodak called Mike Sasson invented digital photography, and he gave an interview to the New York Times and told the story so I can quote him. He presented this digital photography to the leadership team. First thing they said is, well, I mean, it’s not very clear. It’s not as clear as film. The resolution is a little bit fuzzy. He said, oh, that’s something we can fix through development. That’s not a problem. The next thing they said is, well, if we introduce this, it would cannibalize our existing and highly profitable business with its monumental cash flow. And he said, well, that’s true, of course, but if we don’t do it, somebody else might. And they said, not if we don’t tell them, Mike. Now, here’s what they actually then said to him, and he quotes this to the New York Times. Mike, that’s a cute idea, but don’t tell anybody. He didn’t tell anybody, and they went broke because somebody else applied digital photography. There’s a story of a status quo bias where a company was killed by a technology that they themselves invented simply because of the status quo bias. Now, it probably simplified the story, probably more drama behind it, and a little more subtlety in the discussions. That’s the essence of it. That’s the true essence of that story.

Minter Dial: It reminds me of the status bias where the highest person paid person’s opinion is always most valuable.

Willie Pietersen: Sure.

Minter Dial: In Jonathan Haidt’s notion of the righteous mind, there’s also this morality story. And I’m wondering now at your, with all your experience, to what extent you have unshakable morals, unshakable values and an unshakable moral compass. To what extent, you know, you talk about complete self awareness. Do you feel that it is possible to get to complete self awareness?

Willie Pietersen: No. We’ll always have blind spots. But I think where we need to be complete is the definition of the principles whereby we will lead our lives. We need to write them down. We need to be thoughtful about them. They need to be authentic and they need to be the way we behave. Words alone will never do it. I’m a great fan of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s quote where he said, what you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say. Now, I’ll give you an example of one of my rather more unshakable beliefs. That’s the importance of moral courage. In the second world War in South Africa. We were not involved in it. It was 6000 miles away. My father was a very humble man. He was a station master in the railway system. And in 1943, the allies were losing rather badly and there was no conscription in South Africa. He decided to volunteer and enlist and go and fight on the side of the allies. Now, there was a huge decision for this humble man to take with two young kids and go far away to a war not knowing whether he’d come back or where he would be deployed. And I remember vaguely at that stage, I was six years old when he made that decision. A conversation at the kitchen table where my mother said, well, the war is not here and it doesn’t threaten us. Why do you feel you have to do this? And he was a man of very few words. And he just said, because it’s the right thing to do. He actually had. He had to go to get an eye test. He had a weak right eye. So the tester said, oh, cover your right eye and see what you know. So he used his left eye and he could read it and he said, now cover the left eye. And he just changed hands. And he fooled the tester that way. He was that determined to sign up. So he went with this weak right eye. I actually do remember vividly the train pulling out of the station where he was going to this, to the seaport that would take the troops on a boat to they didn’t know where. And being a little kind of afraid sense of loss, a sense of confusion. And I do remember tugging at my mother’s skirt and saying, why is he doing this? And she said again, because he thinks it’s the right thing to do. Now he came back safely. But it’s an interesting thing that that lesson, and I’ve deepened my understanding of the lesson subsequently. I just thought at the time, he’s a brave man. Now I understand the difference between physical courage and moral courage. Physical courage is skydiving and, you know, adventurous things, helicopter skiing, there’s nothing wrong with it, but you’re doing it for the thrill of it. You’re doing it to satisfy some kind of an internal urge to enjoy yourself in some kind of way. It’s not about others, it’s not about principles. Moral courage is standing up to do the right thing regardless of the consequences. And sometimes the consequences are pretty harsh. Unpopularity, loss of power, whatever the case might be. Now I now have a fear. I don’t know. You’re right. You know, complete perfection doesn’t exist, as Virginia Romati likes to say, celebrate progress, not perfection. So I would just say I have a very robust belief in the importance of moral courage. And where I feel I’m offended by the behavior of others and repelled by the behavior of others is where they show a lack of moral courage, particularly when they know whats right and still dont do it because theyre afraid of the consequences. So I tend to cling quite fiercely to that particular principle.

Minter Dial: Yeah. In your book you talk about this moral courage in relationship to life changing decisions. And that obviously could have been, presumably was anyway a life changing experience for your father. And, and I thank him in retired for his service because this is a topic of course near and dear to my heart. So when we’re talking about personal sense of self and bringing your full person to work, I wanted to bring in another Pietersen from across the border in Toronto, Doctor Jordan Pietersen. I’m not sure to what extent you’re familiar with his work. And he talks a lot about the importance of play, which in the grand scheme of sort of big things and important things tends to be rather diminished. You know, let’s fix the planet, let’s fix hunger play he said in one of so he talks about the importance of character as part of being a leader. And I quote him. Jean Piaget’s ethical claim, ethical, analytic claim, was that again, everyone plays voluntarily is more sustainable and productive than one that people have to be forced to play. We’d love for you to just react to that. And the notion of play as part of leadership and trust.

Willie Pietersen: Yes. I’m not exactly sure what he means by play. Probably it’s a deeper meaning than the one I’m addressing here, but I believe having a sense of humor is an important human characteristic. I find that in my teaching, I’ve been doing that for 26 years at Columbia business school. Just having a little bit of levity from time to time. So people are able to laugh. It reduces barriers. It humanizes us. It’s about life and our foibles and our imperfections as human beings. Having that sense and that sort of sense of playfulness is humanizing in a leader as well. I think that leaders that are constantly serious are not really able to laugh and enjoy the small things, not just the big things, the everyday small things, and share that kind of humor with people is very humanizing, and I think it creates stronger human bonds. Now, you might be talking about something deeper in terms of we all play the same game. That’s a bit like a sports team in a way, having a game plan that we all are invested in. And maybe he’s talking about those sort of deeper games based on a share set of values. I’m not sure.

Minter Dial: Well, to be specific, he talks a lot about the role of play in a child’s life.

Willie Pietersen: Oh, yes.

Minter Dial: How it’s a way to understand your boundaries, your body, and you test things and you do things with others in a playful spirit, which is a test. And if we were to bring it into this, obviously sports, I’m still deeply trustful and mindful of my other, well, all my other rugby teammates. Rugby being a specific sport today, I coach paddle tennis, and I use it as a way to bring individuals to meet at a different level by sweating and with that sort of fast reactions where you can’t hide behind a mask, you have to ooh and ah and scream and challenge and sweat and deal with the screw ups. That’s the type of play I think he’s more interested in somehow than necessarily sports strategies and stuff.

Willie Pietersen: Yeah, it’s the shared experience, and it’s formative in many ways, although we don’t realize it at the time, but it’s formative. I have three young grandkids.

Minter Dial: Congratulations.

Willie Pietersen: Thank you. The youngest is seven. They’re twins of age ten, born a girl. Now. We spend time together. They come down to. I have a winter home down in Florida. They come down for Christmas, holidays and so on. We spend time together. And I’ve started a little game with them that in the mornings of breakfast, I constructed a set of helpfulness, courtesy, joyfulness, sense of humor, etcetera. And ive written them down and then said, well, lets pick a word for the day, and then lets try and practice that word as we go through the day together, were always doing little activities together. This kind of evolved. And the girl twin, Olivia, said, can I enter the list? Can I make it? And she drew up a chart, and then each one got a turn in the mornings to pick a word. And we had a lot of fun with that. But what they didn’t realize, in many ways, what I didn’t realize is what we’re really doing is kind of examining ourselves in some kind of way. Are we able to really express these things and make it part of our belief system and character and behavior? And in many ways, somebody once said, we don’t always think ourselves into a new way of behaving. We can also behave our way into a new way of thinking. And I think this little game, and I saw them just recently, I went to Connecticut to visit them, and they said, grandpa, when we spend Christmas together, can we play that game again? Now, that’s a kind of a playful way. Instead of saying, you must be courteous, you must learn to respect other people. Now, listening to, you know, a grandpa saying those things, oh, yeah, okay. You were giving me instructions, but I gave them a sense of involvement in developing these things, and they had fun with it. Maybe that’s along the lines of what Jordan Pietersen is after.

Minter Dial: Indeed. And when I was running Redken, we had a rather large budget in education. And one of the things that made our education so effective was the inclusion of play as a learning mechanism. There’s so much more I wanna talk about. I’m gonna have to try to limit myself. Cause strategy, apparently, is important. And I do need to talk with you about your role at Columbia business school. And we have mentioned Jonathan Haidt, which is the second book about the coddling of the american mind. Many leaders today, certainly as we get on, you and I, we were brought up in another way than the way. Today, we talk about the challenge of leading intergenerationally. We can talk all we want about how wonderful it is to have intergenerational diversity in all this. But there comes a time when sometimes conservative thoughts, or pushing back and. Or being a little bit more, or rehabilitating some older values, like courage, that you mentioned before, and some of the other values, like honor, that I think are inherent in the greatest generation, but seem to be sometimes, let’s say, dissolving, or you use the word erosion in today’s world. So you 27 years of dealing at Columbia, I went to insead myself, but dealing with these younger generations, what’s your viewpoint today in applying your leadership? If you were running a company and you had 50 year olds around you, 40 year olds, 30, 20 year olds, how does one reconcile that hostage or mixture of types of people to have to lead?

Willie Pietersen: There are various movements over time in society. There was a civil rights movement here, as you well know, in the US. Very strong movement, without which the legislation under President Johnson would not have happened without that kind of pressure, pressure to do the right thing based on a set of principles. And then sometimes the pendulum swings too far and sometimes it becomes, if you like, permissive, that anything is okay, that you can just protest if you don’t like something, and that’s okay. Now the trouble with that is that we become unmoored from any principles at all. And it all becomes a question of pursuing my own individual self interest. Now, you know, I’m an avid reader of philosophy and I, ive taught a few sessions on ethics. Now Plato defined ethics in a way that nobody is improved upon. And I always put this chart up and say, heres Platos definition of ethics. Critique it, tell me how we can improve on it. And here it is. He says, ethical behaviour is behavior in the public interest, regardless of who is watching, without the fear of punishment and without the expectation of a reward. Now for me, that’s ethical behavior. And ethical behavior is acting in the public interest. What’s best in the public interest, not just in your own self interest. And I think we’ve begun to pander a little bit. And there’s a permissiveness that says, well, any belief is okay because there’s freedom of speech. Well, I don’t agree with that. I think the beliefs that are important are ones that are based on principles, and those principles are anchored in ethical beliefs. So I think we need to find our boundaries. And I sound a little bit like I’m just an old guy with these kind of traditional beliefs, etcetera. There’s nothing wrong with traditional beliefs. And I dont think we need to abandon them just because the world has changed. I think we need to apply our existing moral framework and principles to address new problems, not abandon them.

Minter Dial: My great grandfather was a senator from South Carolina, and one of his last speeches he made on the Senate floor was how abrating Washington and how he observed in the 1920s that how self interest dominated over national interest. And in this challenge of finding limits as a couple of things, one is the contrast or somehow the friction between truth and reality, where my truth is what counts? So this quest that you mentioned before about what’s true, who’s to be the judge of that? And when you talk about community, this is the second point. Or for others? Well, look at me. I’m performatively doing well for this large community that’s worldwide and global. And reality is, as a strategic thinker, is that resources are limited. One cannot spend all our time, all our money trying to fix all the problems. Maybe you found your community and your problem, but let reality sink in that you might also need to think about your community as the people on your street or in your town, rather than this amorphous global community, which, as lovely as it might be, isnt grounded in reality.

Willie Pietersen: Yeah, it was Nietzsche, I think, who said there are no facts, there are only interpretations. And we come back to the confirmation bias, as you said earlier on, I come with a preconceived idea of whats true or whats important to me or what I want to believe, and I look for evidence to confirm. And if those beliefs and those needs are purely selfish, they’re for me. I don’t care about anybody else. That’s highly corrupting. So I just come back to Plato. It’s acting in the common interest. And as you say, the common interest comes right down to your streets, into individual people’s lives. It’s, you know, maybe you’ve got a grand theory of how the world should work, that’s fine, but bring it to the ground. It comes back to. It’s kind of like the everyday things that need a change. If you have a grand, sweeping kind of set of policies, make them rel so that people feel the impact of those policies. And that’s true in leadership. In an organization, as you know, you’ve been a CEO. There’s a thing I call the curse of success, the curse of power, and that is you’re so high up, people believe everything you say is automatically true because of your status. And that’s nonsense. You have to have ways that people can challenge you. You very far from the ground level, where actual competition happens and the facts are on the ground, not up there in the executive suite. The executive suite doesn’t do anything. It steers the organization. The organization does it, and it happens at ground level. So I take your point completely, is having a strategy is fine. There are always three questions in the minds of employees is what are we striving to achieve and why should I care? Making them care is a very important thing, where does my department fit in, and what’s expected of me? And the third one is, how will we measure success, and what’s in it for me? And very seldom is it money. It’s fulfillment. It’s the feeling that I can dedicate myself to a cause larger than myself with the opportunity to make a difference to the outcome. That’s the ultimate motivation. But I find those three questions are helpful in understanding that we have to translate grand strategy into everyday action.

Minter Dial: I love that. Willie, I want to sneak in one last question, based on what you just talked about, which is the role of purpose. And weve got this idea in France. We call it raison d’etre. The idea of having a purpose for your company that becomes that sort of bigger idea. And yet so many purposes are full of shit or are far too large to be real. They’re not based on some kind of more concrete, practical reality. To what extent do you think purpose is necessary in a business? And what constraints are consigned? You know, how do you configure a proper purpose?

Willie Pietersen: A purpose can’t be imposed. It has to be a shared purpose. And people need to be enrolled in believing in that purpose. And I think, thinking strategically, the big issues for us is what’s happening out in the external environment. How can we adapt and successfully compete in that external environment? And that means we can satisfy our customers and outperform our competitors. We start there, and from there we rise up above it and say, what’s the shared purpose that we’re all going to share in the interests of making all these things happen in the right way, based on a set of ethical principles. Now, that’s when a purpose is grounded in something. And it’s not just a statement that we put up against the wall in the conference room and say, look at that purpose. Please believe in it. You can’t just call it in that way. Here’s our purpose. I’ve defined it, and I want you to believe in it. That’s not the way that belief sets in. There needs to be some participation in it through enrolment in it. And it needs to lead to a winning way so that it’s grounded in.

Minter Dial: Something concrete on these most practical terms. Willie, I must conclude, I’m so thankful for you to spend an hour with me. I loved listening to you. I actually had about another 40 questions I certainly could have gone on with. It was a pleasure to meet you. How can people follow your work? Get your book. What sort of actions would you like them to do? Once they’ve listened all the way to here.

Willie Pietersen: Okay. Well, my website is williePietersen.com. p dash I e t e r s e n. It’s the old dutch spelling.

Minter Dial: Indeed.

Willie Pietersen: And the book is available on Amazon leadership, the inside story. So if you’re interested in it, it’s available there also on Kindle. But thank you for mentioning my book. I appreciate it.

Minter Dial: Of course. It has been my pleasure. And the reason I have you on my show. Willie, many, many thanks. I do hope one day we can actually have an in real life sharing of stories and shaking hands and maybe even a beer. Many thanks, Peter Willie, that would be a pleasure.

Willie Pietersen: Thank you very much. Manta.