Mteto Nyati on corporate culture
In this extract from his book, MTETO NYATI challenges politically correct ideas about corporate culture in SA
When I was about six or seven years old I heard raised voices coming from the room where some of my older siblings slept. I wandered in. They were all in there, having a meeting of some sort, but I couldn’t understand what it was about because they were talking in English. The atmosphere was tense. One of my sisters told me to “phuma” (get out).
I thought she was joking and asked: “Ngoba?” (Why?)
She said sharply: “Phuma! Ngoba awuzalwa nathi!” (Get out! Because you’re not one of us!)
I left, confused, and went to find my mother. I asked her why my sister had said that. She explained that sometimes there was friction in our household because my older siblings weren’t her children. They came from another mother and didn’t always agree with the way things were run. Noting my confusion, she reassured me that they were my family even though they didn’t share her blood. There were, she said, more things that were the same about them and me than were different. We had the same father, the same surname, and lived in the same house. It was my first inkling that there could be differences and similarities in
one unit and it shaped by views about diversity and inclusion.
The incident remained with me and I related it at a leadership strategy session a few months into my tenure as Microsoft MD. In sharing this personal story with the 15member leadership team, I made it clear how important it was to find commonalities and to make them, not the differences, the foundation. It relaxed the stiff start such interactive conferences often have and lifted the discussion to another level. My colleagues began to open up about their issues with a company they felt loyal to, but which they thought had lost its way. They wanted Microsoft to be more relevant to what was going on in their country, but government’s open-source policy and the perceived hostility that came with it had hit them hard. They seemed anxious and confused.
As IBM had done, Microsoft suffered from image issues. When he took over the reins from Steve Ballmer in 2014, Microsoft’s third CEO, Satya Nadella took a dig at a corporate culture in which “everyone felt the need to be the smartest person in the room”, a possible reference to founder Bill Gates, who had created the company in his image. Microsoft’s arrogant dominance, so prevalent in the ’80s and ’90s, no longer attracted customers.
It was a problem that even we in an emerging market felt, and it affected employees. Microsoft SA had an attrition rate of 29%. The previous local MD, Pfungwa Serima, had lasted only two years before “resigning”. Just before I joined, six members of the leadership team left at the same time. The company was rudderless.
Serima had left at the end of June 2008 and Fernando de Sousa, from the Turkey office, had acted as MD. Now, as I listened to my colleagues, I realised there were a few things I would have to “de-Fernando” — for example, the plan to build a boma to be used for inducting new employees. I found out who was driving it and suggested we find other ways to boost flagging staff morale.
The boma idea reminded me of Nampak in the early ’90s. Consultants such as Lovemore Mbigi used to preach the concept of creating an African village in a work environment. These concepts appealed to the politically correct, but in practice they were inherently divisive. Coloureds, Indians and whites were almost always quietly undermined by such initiatives. I was hellbent on avoiding a path to nowhere. My priority was to make Microsoft relevant to South Africa. This meant aligning our business strategy with the priorities of the country. We couldn’t exist in a bubble. We needed to step out of our bomas.
✼ This is an extract from Betting on a Darkie — Lifting the corporate game, by Mteto Nyati, which is published by Kwela, an imprint of NB Publishers. Nyati is CEO of Altron.
The boma idea and concepts such as creating an African village in a work environment in practice were inherently divisive