This book explores a century of business development of The South African Life Assurance Company, from a specific local focus to a national conglomerate expanding into global insurance markets. Established as a strategic vehicle to address Afrikaner economic marginalization and abject poverty at the beginning of the twentieth century, Sanlam has displayed both path dependence and a dynamic adaptability to complex changing contexts to become a global player. The strategic convergence of economic empowerment through the mobilization of savings into insurance products, as well as Afrikaner nationalism, assisted this growth. Sanlam has played an a-typical role in the economic empowerment of an ethnic entity through extensive investments into the industrializing South African economy. This strategic diversion created operational limitations that were only resolved early in the twenty-first century. As globalization, financial deregulation, and weakened Afrikaner political and social hegemony manifested, strategic change management relied on the path dependence of empowerment strategies to address new markets with similar needs to those of the early stakeholder market of 1918. The former mutual life office demutualized operations to become a diversified financial services group of companies operating across almost the entire African continent, as well as in India, Malaysia, and the UK. This volume presents a business history of strategic management of an insurance enterprise, and its transformation from a defined cultural context into an international empowerment strategy through innovation on all levels of business operation and organization. This book is an Open Access publication, available online under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

Leaders are not just born to the role. They are born, then made - and sometimes unmade by their own actions. A leader who is not attuned to his or her followers soon becomes a leader in limbo and invariably then fails. Connectedness, compassion, empathy, integrity, humility, reasonableness and a determination to be effective are the keys to attuned leadership. An attuned leader can step boldly into an uncertain future with the certainty that followers will lend their support. In this richly reflective discussion of leadership and transformation the author provides a guide to what constitutes ethical leadership in local and global contexts, for business, politics and government. In a world where tyrants abound in corporations and in states, Attuned Leadership provides a compass for the direction of ethical leadership. Central to this perspective is that the philosophical traditions of Africa offer an important contribution to the theory and practice of leadership in the world today. African humanism or Ubuntu, evokes both reason and empathy as the basis for ethical leadership. Ubuntu - articulated in the Zulu proverb Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu - means that a person is a person because of other people. The author contends that the reciprocal relationship between the individual and the social collective stimulates caring and progressive thought and action. Nowhere is this more apt than in the relationship between leader and followers.

Jones, Barry Owen (1932- ). Australian politician, writer and lawyer, born in Geelong. Educated at Melbourne University, he was a public servant, high school teacher, television and radio performer, university lecturer and lawyer before serving as a Labor MP in the Victorian Parliament 1972-77 and the Australian House of Representatives 1977-98. He took a leading role in reviving the Australian film industry, abolishing the death penalty in Australia, and was the first politician to raise public awareness of global warming, the 'post-industrial' society, the IT revolution, biotechnology, the rise of 'the Third Age' and the need to preserve Antarctica as a wilderness. In the Hawke Government, he was Minister for Science 1983-90, Prices and Consumer Affairs 1987, Small Business 1987-90 and Customs 1988-90. He became a member of the Executive Board of UNESCO, Paris 1991-95 and National President of the Australian Labor Party 1992-2000, 2005-06. He was Deputy Chairman of the Constitutional Convention 1998. His books include Decades of Decision 1860- (1965), Joseph II (1968), Age of Apocalypse (1975), and he edited The Penalty is Death (1968). Sleepers, Wake!: Technology and the Future of Work was published by Oxford University Press in 1982, became a bestseller and has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Swedish and braille. The fourth edition was published in 1995. Knowledge Courage Leadership, a collection of speeches and essays, appeared in 2016. He received a DSc for his services to science in 1988 and a DLitt in 1993 for his work on information theory. Elected FTSE (1992), FAHA (1993), FAA (1996) and FASSA (2003), he is the only person to have become a Fellow of four of Australia's five learned Academies. Awarded an AO in 1993, named as one of Australia's 100 'living national treasures' in 1998, he was elected a Visiting Fellow Commoner of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1999. His autobiography, A Thinking Reed, was published in 2006 and The Shock of Recognition, about music and literature, in 2016. In 2014 he received an AC for services 'as a leading intellectual in Australian public life.