Unreasonable Leadership in Uncertain Times: Turning Traditional Thinking On Its Head

Tuesday 24 November. 12:00 Johannesburg / 10:00 London. Sixty minutes, live on Zoom.

George Bernard Shaw said the reasonable man adapts himself to the world, while the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. And therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Most leaders are trained to be reasonable. Adapt, absorb, wait for clarity. It is the career-safe choice and, more often than we admit, the strategically fatal one.

Bruce Whitfield has spent nearly three decades studying the people who refuse to do that. He is an award-winning business broadcaster, bestselling author of four books including The Upside of Down, Genius and It's About Tyme, and the 2026 Best Inspirational Speaker at the UK Speaker Awards. He has interviewed more South African founders and CEOs than almost anyone alive, and he now advises and speaks to boardrooms and global audiences on how to decide well when the ground keeps moving.

He is also someone who did the unreasonable thing himself. He walked away from one of the biggest business audiences in the country to start again as a business of one, selling ideas into rooms that had no idea who he was.

In this session I am going to ask him what he has learned from both sides of that microphone. What separates the productively unreasonable leader from the merely reckless one. Why chaos is raw material rather than a threat. What a global audience sees in South Africa that we cannot see from the inside, and what we are too embarrassed to say we are good at. And what it actually takes to make a hard call when the evidence is still incomplete.

If you are leading through uncertainty right now, and quietly wondering whether being sensible is costing you, this hour is for you.

Hosted by Colin Iles. Sponsored by FDC.