Peter Willis
Director (South Africa), The Prince of Wales’s Business and the Environment Programme , Responsible Business
I’ve been running senior executive seminars here in Cape Town as part of The Prince of Wales’s Business and the Environment Programme since 2003 and we have nearly 250 alumni scattered around the region as a result. Because it’s still the only seminar of its kind in Southern Africa we tend to get quite senior corporate leaders attending, which means it’s easy for me to attract very high calibre contributors and faculty. While putting together each seminar is painstaking work over many months (these people’s diaries are filled up at birth, it seems to me) when they happen the events are incredibly rewarding.
The discussions are invariably very challenging as delegates soon let their guard down and start thinking out of their business-as-usual box. Wherever they’re held (apart from Cape Town that’s five other places around the world each year) there’s something very special about the space that’s created at these seminars. While the purpose is understood to be deadly earnest – we are, after all, asking what it would mean if our businesses were to respond fully, not just defensively, to the major environmental and social trends that are currently emerging – there is always a lightness of touch in the way it is all done, with much humour and time for intimate conversations in amongst the hard-hitting presentations. I feel it’s all worthwhile when, maybe years later, one of our alumni refers to the seminar they attended as a life-changing event.
Do I think we’re revolutionizing the Southern African corporate world? Not quite. We work more on the principle of acupuncture, believing that revolutions take place because a handful of people act forcefully out of integrity at critical moments. I like to imagine that our alumni are like seeds planted in difficult soil. Every now and then one or two burst into prominent flower, but mainly they are good people who now have a wider sense of responsibility and whose time will come.
