OK - I know its a tough title to get your tongue around!  Ask Clint!  He’s been trying to sell my new talk to clients for the past few weeks. But when you look at how hard it is to be a manager of people in South Africa in 2008, then saying the title is a real doddle, actually!

“People are like teabags. You only know how good they are when you put them in hot water!”

Living in South Africa in 2008 is not for sissies! After over a decade of good news – 2 out of 3 Rugby World cups, Madiba magic, an economy on full throttle, and a housing market that gave us all a licence to print money, you could forgive us all for starting to believe that life is always like this (besides, of course, that niggly little crime issue)

The wake-up call of the Zuma jive plus the Triple Whammy of interest rate hikes, oil price and Eskom crisis gave us all was enough to make every South African head (with a passport) spin in the direction of greener shores!

In fact, there is a generation of managers who have never experienced an economic downturn in their adult lives before. Not in their personal financial adult memory, or their professional careers have they had to face the realities staring them in the eyes right now. You could almost say we’ve become soft with managing through the good times to the point of us not really building the resilience or the capacity to take us through the tougher times.

This talk will take everyone through the good things SA has offered us, and also look at lessons learned over the past decade when tough times have been faced. We’ll remember that these turns are cyclical, and that the issues have been survived before, and can be survived again. We’ll look at what it’s going to take for individuals to turn their realities around from the ‘fight or flight’ reaction to the changes in South Africa, and examine what can be done to take their teams from ‘Survival’ to Thrival’.