Dive into leadership

BOOK: THE ONE THING’ DELVES INTO WHAT'S NEEDED TO FIX COUNTRY

- Hein Kaiser

Imagine that you were the president of South Africa.

Now, put yourself in the corner office of the country and decide to simply change one thing. One thing only. And what would that be? That's the question Bruce Whitfield asked a hundred business leaders and influential South Africans.

He then put a book together based on their responses.

The One Thing is not just a book; it's a compendium of ideas, an exploration of notions and almost, an intellectual funnel of thinking that's more relevant than ever to every South African.

The idea for the book came from a line in a speech he had heard. The speaker told the audience: "When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority." The realisation dawned on him that there was a need for prioritisation in South Africa, because the laundry list of what needed to get done, could be somewhat intimidating.

"You can't do everything at once, so you must make tradeoffs. But how do you do it?" This thought led to the core of the book: if you had half an hour as president, what would be the one thing you'd do? Whitfield asked them all: what's the one thing we need to fix to unlock South Africa's potential? "I sent out 120 WhatsApps to various influential people and business leaders and got over 100 replies," he said.

These responses formed the narrative backbone of the work, and while the answers varied, one theme emerged consistently: leadership.