Meet Jonathan Wilson

Jonathan spent much of his childhood and teens in the wilds of New Guinea, where his parents worked in the Yali tribe. These were years of extraordinary life and adventure. They formed in Jonathan a deep love for wilderness, a passion for exploring hidden valleys and forests, realism in the face of hardship and disaster, and a keen awareness of the power of community.

The Yali approach to life, in a vast world of mountains and jungles and unseen powers, taught Jonathan about friendship and community in the face of odds. Thay taught him the power of story to root a community, and the need for humility before mystery. Mastery is not the key to a good life.

Life in a remote tribe, rich in so many ways, was also fraught with risk. In the early years, inter-village warfare persisted. The Yali faced disease, crop failure, and natural calamities. Jonathan and his family and friends lived through all these, including warriors threatening Jonathan’s dad (in the early years), constant bouts of tropical disease, food shortages, and major earthquakes that shattered the existence of thousands. Life and death taught Jonathan’s family to be realistic about what we are up against when we want to change the world.

After an educational detour through the UK and Canada, and in possession of two entirely unrelated degrees, Jonathan found himself in South Africa. This began his career in serving leaders, right at the time of South Africa emerging from Apartheid. His boss, Michael Cassidy, threw Jonathan into the deep end of political mediation and facilitating large-scale change processes — including secret negotiations with politicians embroiled in violent conflict (such as Sifiso Nkabinde, centre, photo above). The work was fraught with risk, strung with tension and overshadowed by death.

Too often leaders are driven by a narrow vision of victory, one focused on competitors and not on impact. Working with leaders bent on a hollow victory built on violence, Jonathan learned to navigate the tricky path of multi-stakeholder engagement under the invaluable mentoring and support given him by Michael Cassidy. Michael demonstrated magnanimity with even the most difficult leaders, and in doing so often got the best out of them. Jonathan witnessed sometimes astonishing transformation. Michael led with tremendous wisdom and savvy, which flowed from his years of socially and politically transformative work with politicians and civic leaders: including, in South Africa, with Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, F.W. de Klerk, Mangosuthu Butheleizi and  others.

Jonathan was then tasked with developing leadership development processes that supported “nation-building”, initially in South Africa. With a team of in-house and outsourced first-class trainers and thinkers, Jonathan developed the Ascent leadership programme. This saw an exponential increase in intake over four years. They knew they were on the right track when a participant said, “I came because of the change I saw in my boss who attended last year.” In 2003 Jonathan was appointed to the international executive and given oversight of leadership development initiatives in eleven countries spread across the vast African continent.

Jonathan worked with leaders from various sectors: not-for-profit, aid and development, commercial and government. Travelling and engaging leaders across Africa convinced him, more than ever, that too much aid and development work undermines socio-economic progress (as he observed while growing up in SE Asia). It didn’t fit African culture and it was accountable to the wrong people — the donors instead of the end-users. Good vision often arises first out of a negative reaction, a reaction to what is wrong. In this way, a vision was birthed in Jonathan.

Jonathan had always been passionate about African development in which the best of the world’s socio-economic systems were employed but retooled in authentically African terms. As he witnessed micro-enterprise (see photo) and other social entrepreneurship initiatives, he became increasingly convinced that a crucial, central piece of authentic African development had to be commercial. In particular, Jonathan envisioned the rise of leaders who understood that the potential of the marketplace for big change, because the marketplace is the primary vehicle by which society makes life work. The marketplace fosters innovation, scale and the proving (or failing) of useful services and products. Thus began his passion to work for the transformation of capitalism: to work for the creation of value by people, for people, in a manner that is culturally rich, facilitates flourishing within the business and without, leading to lasting, constructive impact.

An unexpected detour led Jonathan to take on a temporary role as CEO for a Canada-based organization working on all five continents. He then began the consulting practise, Soul Systems, to encourage authentic leadership practises and corporate strategies that lead to flourishing for all. He and his team worked with small, medium and Fortune 500 companies in Canada, the US and globally. Not long after Jonathan started Soul Systems, the “Great Recession” bit. It taught harsh lessons, and opened up, through the crisis, a whole new horizon for business. There was now an appetite to completely rethink how we make life work through the marketplace.

Through Soul Systems, Jonathan and his team worked to enable men and women to lead their organizations with wisdom and skill, releasing their teams to create value that extends far beyond the bottom line in both impact and duration. In the details this is nothing more than employing the tools of business model innovation, strategy, effective governance, identification and use of strategic information, stakeholder engagement and so on, all within the four dimensions of leadership: leadership that unlocks a team’s power to create lasting value through deep self-understanding, clear and unwavering purpose, rigorous discipline, and the constant nourishment of trust.

Leadership ends with legacy. Between vision and legacy is unrelenting action — acting on your vision, again and again, day after day, with resolute focus, with dogged determination, relentlessly, for years. All great achievements — the building of value-creating companies, the abolition of the slave trade, the ending of Apartheid — were the result of what the philosopher Nietzsche called “a long obedience in the same direction”. In fact, they typically take 30-50 years. It’s early days on the road to a transformed marketplace, but it’s a road worth walking. Now based back on the African continent, Jonathan takes this road with his colleagues at ThirdWay Capital, where they invest in companies shaping Africa’s story.

P.S. When Jonathan can, he returns to his heart’s home and his tribe, among the Yali in Papua, Indonesia.