Andre van Heerden
ANDRE heads the corporate leadership program The Power of Integrity, and is the author of three books on leadership, Leaders and Misleaders, An Educational Bridge for Leaders, and Leading Like You Mean It. He has unique qualifications for addressing the leadership crisis. Since studying law at Rhodes University, he has been a history teacher, a deputy headmaster, a soldier, a refugee, an advertising writer, a creative director, an account director on multinational brands, a marketing consultant, and a leadership educator. He has worked in all business categories on blue-chip brands like Toyota, Ford, Jaguar, Canon, American Express, S C Johnson, Kimberley Clark, and John Deere, while leadership coaching has seen him help leaders and aspirant leaders in Real Estate, Retail, the Science Sector, Local Government, Education, Food Safety, Banking, and many other areas.
How shall we orient ourselves in the social and political world? In what way can we best begin our inquiry? I believe that, in relation to politics, the first question to ask is: ‘What is it that holds authority...
Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.
–José Ortega y Gasset
How do you measure whether a person’s life can be judged a success or a...
To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case...
IN EARLY 13th CENTURY FRANCE, Paris and the lands under the direct rule of the king were in a bad way. The powerful position of Provost of Paris was always given to the highest bidder, and this had led...
"...and you shall see in him
The triple pillar of the world transformed
Into a strumpet's fool."
–Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Act 1 Scene 1
Mark Antony was neither the first nor the last leader to wrestle with the urges of sexual passion....
“No nation had ever before embarked on so resolute an attempt as that of the French in 1789 to break with the past…and to create an unbridgeable gulf between all they had hitherto been and all they now aspired...
Those who in fields Elysian would dwell. Do but extend the boundaries of hell.
–Michael Oakeshott in The Tower of Babel
In the long history of humankind, there is a lesson that rings out endlessly, though it is evidently never heard....
“Our five bodily senses make us adequate to the lowest level of being – inanimate matter. But they can supply nothing more than masses of sense data, to ‘make sense’ of which we require abilities or capabilities of a...
“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
~George...
Leaders who fail to seek wisdom end up embracing folly
“The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things – the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the...