What enables an organisation to remain relevant, competitive and useful over generations? The answer is not longevity alone. Organisations do not last because they preserve their original shape. They last because they know what must remain constant, what must change and how to build the capabilities to manage both.
The pattern is visible in South Africa’s own corporate history. At its peak in 2001, the JSE listed around 600 companies. Fewer than 300 remain today. Some were acquired, some went private, and others ceased to be viable as listed businesses.
That question sat behind a recent panel discussion held in Johannesburg, as Kearney marked its 100th year in business. The discussion brought together three leaders: Claudio Campanini, Kearney’s Middle East and Africa Region Chair; Fundi Sithebe, former Chief Operating Officer of Airports Company South Africa and former Chief Executive of 4Racing, now Chief Operating Officer at Sizekhaya; and Dr Thulani Dlamini, Chief Executive Officer of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.
Drawing on their experience across professional services, airport operations, business and research, the panellists explored what it takes to build organisations that can adapt through uncertainty without losing their sense of purpose.
Success can become a constraint
One of the hardest leadership judgements is recognising when an organisation’s strengths have started to hold it back. Proven processes, established relationships and experienced leadership can all support performance. Over time, however, they can also make it harder to see what is changing outside the organisation.
Campanini offered a practical test for organisational resilience: “Organisations are strange and complicated creatures. They carry constraints and legacies with them everywhere they go. My own test for a great organisation is a simple one: could you change every single manager, and would it still be standing there, doing the right thing?”
His question points to a distinction between an organisation that performs well and one that has built the institutional strength to endure. Dependence on particular individuals, established habits or historical advantages can become a vulnerability when the environment around the business changes.
Strategy only matters when people can act on it
The panel also highlighted the distance between approving a strategy and making it real. Transformation cannot sit only with the leadership team. People across the organisation need to understand the priorities, decision rights need to be clear, and performance measures need to reinforce the behaviours and outcomes the organisation now wants.
Sithebe brought the point to life through her experience of running airport operations: “Strategy has to be simple enough that someone on the floor at the airport can tell you what it means for the person they’re serving that day. If it isn’t, it’s not a strategy people can execute. It’s a document.”
Her observation points to an often-overlooked part of strategy: whether people throughout a business can translate an organisational ambition into the decisions they make every day. The test is not simply whether the strategy is clear to those who developed it, but whether it can be understood and acted on across the organisation.
Strong institutions outlast individual leaders
A lasting organisation cannot depend on one exceptional leader to hold its knowledge, relationships and judgement together. It needs systems that turn individual expertise into organisational capability, and a culture that gives people the opportunity to develop judgement through real responsibility.
Dlamini put it directly: “We need to invest in capability, systems and functioning institutions, not in individuals.”
Dlamini’s point also reframes succession. It is not only about identifying who will take over from a particular leader. It is also about whether knowledge is being transferred, whether the next generation is being given meaningful responsibility, and whether the institution itself is becoming stronger over time.
The next century will be built, not inherited
A hundred years tells you what an organisation has been able to carry forward. It tells you very little about what comes next.
The organisations that remain relevant will be those that continue to develop their people, renew their strategies and adapt their operating models as the environment changes. For African organisations, those pressures are already taking shape through demographic change, technological development and increasingly complex markets.
The challenge is therefore not simply to preserve what has worked. It is to distinguish between the things that give an organisation continuity and the things that need to change.
Perhaps that is the more useful lesson of a centenary. Longevity is not proof that an organisation will remain relevant. It is evidence that it has already had to change, and that the work of doing so does not stop.
By Theo Sibiya, Partner and Managing Director, Africa, Kearney