By Dibussi Tande
Last Friday, December 10, 2010, I had the privilege of listening to a talk by former South African President Frederick W De Klerk about the transformative power of change.
The former president had been invited to Chicago to talk about “the important lessons of negotiation, management of change, and leadership that led to the peaceful end of apartheid under his leadership,” with a focus “on the risks and sometimes leaps of faith involved in this fundamental agreement to bring lasting peace,” and “how his success can be translated into any organization's business model.”
De Klerk began his talk by emphasizing that the ability to adapt to change was one of the key distinguishing features of humans. He said that when humans or institutions are confronted with change, they deal with it in three ways. They can resist change, let themselves be swept away by that change, or accept the change and harness its transformative power. He said these were the choices that South Africa faced when he took office in 1989; the country was isolated internationally, was facing a downward spiral of violence and repression, and its economy was going downhill. The Apartheid regime therefore had to decide which of the three options it would adopt.
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He was the right man for the time, just like Gorbachev in the USSR. It took a DeKlerk to accept change. The Botha man before would have stubbornly stood his ground until the country imploded.
Posted by: Oyez | Wednesday, 15 December 2010 at 08:33 PM