Podcast: Truly Human Leadership in South Africa

Imagine living in a community where crime is so rampant that it is the norm to have a wall and/or fence around your residence, an alarm system, and other measures to keep you safe. Once you arrive home after a day at work, you quickly retreat inside as it is not safe to be outside.

This is not the world that I suspect most of our readers live in. But even in 2017, in parts of the developed world, this is very real. What does this have to do with Truly Human Leadership?

On this week’s episode of the Everybody Matters podcast we hear from Mike Budden of Cebano Consulting and his colleague, Bryn Morse, of Coca Cola Peninsula Beverage in South Africa, graduates of our BW Leadership Institute (now Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute.) South Africa has many social and economic challenges and Mike and Bryn feel that business is the key to positive change in their country – change that can ripple outward to thwart the cycle of poverty and crime and change the very fabric of their society.

As Barry-Wehmiller has expanded globally we – over and over – are seeing much of the same thing in the people we meet and welcome into our family. We say it so often: Everyone wants to know that who they are and what they do matters.

After Mike visited Barry-Wehmiller for the first time and participated in Beyond Benchmarking through the BW Leadership Institute, he had this to say in a guest post on this blog:

I think underneath all of this, the most important theme is seeing the basic humanity in each of us, truly seeing each other as people and not objects. And this is what touched me most – it does not matter what context we are in, we all are and work with PEOPLE – everybody matters. Everybody is somebody’s mother or father, brother or sister, son or daughter and have the same hopes and dreams as we do for our own families.

You can hear Mike and Bryn talk about their journey to create a better world through business in South Africa on this week’s episode of the Everybody Matters podcast.