Personal Growth, African Style by Barbara Nussbaum, Sudhanshu Palsule and Velaphi Mkhize takes an approach to leadership which offers a path to personal development, dealing with leadership as a process of self-discovery and a journey to the centre of oneself and one’s origins.

It inspires leadership through the individual’s reclaiming his or her wholeness as a human being, as an African, as a global citizen. It seeks to regenerate and ignite the less tangible aspects of leadership: those linked to higher purpose and self-awareness and to the good of a broader community.

Personal Growth

While focusing on personal growth, this approach not only calls upon you, the individual, to expand the level and depth of your self-awareness, but to honour and enrich the potential of those whose lives you touch.

The book does this by exploring the philosophy of uBuntu through being (uBulandu), becoming (uKuba), knowing (uKwazi), doing (uKwenza), and living and learning together (uKufunda). This is supplemented by readings, tools and written exercises to help you grow personally and encourage you to begin to see yourself as a person who expresses the values, knowledge and behaviour which consciously embody uBuntu.

Leadership Guide

Personal Growth, African Style is not just about the individual, but about leadership in an increasingly disconnected world. It is critical that we make a shift to a new kind of global leadership. Such a leadership would be born out of a deep sense of interconnectedness. Never before has it become more urgent for us to choose leaders and to become leaders who possess greater awareness and humanity. In this context, Africa has a vital role to play.

Africa’s gift to global leadership lies in its roots – in communally expressing humanity inspired by the collective wisdom and actions of all human beings. It takes the human being as the starting point, emphasising the dignity and worth of all, and relying on the philosophical constructs of uBuntu and iSintu. These ideals call for all of us to be the kind of leaders who know that we are who we are because of other people.

The book thus seeks to give us the means to reclaim the possibility of a more human style of leadership. Not only for Africa, but for the world.

Not Another Self-Help Manual

When I first received this book to review my instinct was to throw it in the bin. We are inundated with self-help books and leadership manuals. Most of the personal development books available are nothing more than simplistic pop-psychology that at best do no harm and at worst make the reader feel more desperate at their less than perfect lives.

Even worse are the leadership texts that teach managers to be heartless in their pursuit of profits at the expense of people and the environment. We only have to look at the global financial crisis to see where this sage advice has led.

An Alternative View

But Personal Growth, African Style is different in that it is an alternative view to personal growth and leadership in all spheres. As Dr Mamphela Ramphela says, ‘This book speaks to a style of leadership that could be Africa’s gift to the world.’

It is published by Penguin Books and we recommend it highly – especially our own and future leaders who each day seem to become more disconnected from our society and its needs.