Some South African leaders took advantage of the power they suddenly acquired in the heady days after Mandela's release, as the country moved towards democracy. One religious leader stole from his church and cheated on his wife, a smart TV presenter. She found love again with Adam Kahane who I met in the nineties when I was doing strategy with a fast growing South African bank. Kahane did a superb set of scenarios for the future and the whole country picked up his themes when discussing possible futures and the impact on business.
Now Kahane has published a book on love and power. He certainly saw first hand in South Africa those who used power but without love or respect for their constituents. This balance is something Adam believes is needed in business. Adam works with NGOs and Not for Profits and I know he began in Shell Oil where they did put ethics very high up on their list of values. He manages to articulate this tough balance very well and I recommend his book. Here in Canada, when I think of the senior bank people in TD or RBC, I have certainly seen that blend of patriot more than the mercenary. However, that South African bank where I was working when I met Adam was pure mercenary, and they are now a global bank with a solid bank balance. Their culture has mellowed and I am hosting one of their strategists in a few weeks here in Toronto. They are far from the polite Canadian bank culture but I would place my long term money on the South African, mercenary bank over the nect 30 years.
Here is more on Adam Kahane:
Adam Kahane’s book Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change(Berrett-Koehler, 2010) opens with a quote from one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speeches, his last presidential speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “Power without love,” said King, “is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.”
This is a concept that business leaders need to understand, because in times of crisis (and afterward), the people of an enterprise are put under a great deal of stress. Many people in major corporations today are still wondering if they will lose their jobs. A system that follows only the impulses of compassion and solidarity (which Kahane calls love) will lose its competitiveness; a system that follows only the impulses of resolve and purposefulness (which he calls power) will sacrifice its people heedlessly and risk its capability for growth and recovery. A mix of power and love, however, becomes a stance that a leader can hold, and this stance may, in the end, be the single most important factor in enabling a leader to accomplish great things.
Despite the success of his South African efforts, many participants at Mont Fleur, and in the discussions that followed, found the premise of basing policy on harmony naive. As one African National Congress leader put it, “The only birds that matter here are [not ostriches and flamingoes but] hawks and sparrows!” It turned out that love-oriented solutions are almost impossible to sustain in the predatory atmosphere of any political or competitive power structure. To really make change happen, you need to balance love and power. During the following years, Kahane came to recognize the tension underlying this reality, and to develop some ways to resolve it. That is the basis of the courses he teaches on social change — for example, at the Alia Institute’s annual summer Authentic Leadership in Action program, where he and I are both on the faculty. Kahane sat down with me at last year’s institute, in June 2010 in Halifax, Nova Scotia; he is repeating the course this summer, at the 2011 Alia Institute in Columbus, Ohio.
