Tag Archive for Travel

Greetings of the Season!

December 23, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds Business

From our holiday newsletter…stay tuned for more from South Africa.

Dear Friends,

As we approach the final days of 2011, the sense of satisfaction of a year well-lived is upon me. 2011 has certainly been a big one at RRC, full of milestones and new ventures.

First, the company turned 20, an achievement that snuck up on us in all our flurry of activity! Then, in February, I began a sabbatical to explore who and what is on the cutting edge in leadership, and planned travel to Aspen, Boston, Colorado Springs, D.C., and New York to participate in a wide range of leadership events. I also started this blog to share my experiences and reveries along the way – and have been so gratified by your readership and comments.

The culmination of my leadership sabbatical was a three-week trip to South Africa. I traveled there to take part in Aspen Institute’s Global Leadership Initiative with 60 leaders from around the world. My itinerary also included individual meetings with prominent South African leaders, tours of the country’s rich history and culture, and finally, safari in the famed Kruger National Park area. It was a “trip of a lifetime”, opening my mind to new ideas and grand possibilities with amazing people.

Following are some tidbits from my travels, illustrated with a few of the more than 2000 pictures I took while there.

It is indeed a year for gratitude at RRC – for the bounty of what the year has brought, which includes our relationship with each of you.

Season’s best to you and yours,

Lessons from Safari

Spending time in the bushveld of South Africa’s Mpumalanga province affords not only incredible wildlife viewing, but also some quiet lessons. First, the word safari is Swahili for “long journey,” bringing new meaning to what a safari portends. Next, the hours spent on game drives watching animals in the midst of their daily lives – taking a drink, preening, knocking down trees, nursing, rolling a matrimonial dung ball, or slithering across the road – bear witness to how great are the gifts each of us is given.

Every animal, no matter how small, has its ability, its camouflage, and its distinct role in the order of things. And they are, surprisingly, adept communicators: the impala snorts at the leopard, telling it that it’s been seen. The leopard grunts back, “Ok, relax, I’m not hunting you.” Simple, straightforward messages are key to getting along.

And finally, despite the enormous power of these animals to harm, there’s an understanding that allows humans such privileged access. The bush: an uncommon place for leadership learning.

RRC Celebrates 20

RRC is in its 20th year – yes, that’s right, 20 years of partnering with our clients to achieve great things though visionary, collaborative processes. To celebrate, we launched our new homepage, that features images that reflect the enormous breadth of our work over the past two decades: buildings built, watersheds cleared, balance sheets balanced, homeless sheltered, performances sold out, forests renewed, refugees protected…and so much more. Many of you will recognize photographic representations of your projects!

2011 also marked new levels of RRC involvement in a wide range of organizations doing good in our world: Colorado Public Radio, Boys and Girls Clubs, and the Museum of Nature and Science, to name a few. We are indeed grateful for this rich and varied history, and look forward to the next two decades of dreams becoming reality!

Leading from the Boma

Aspen Institute’s Globalization Seminar took place in Stellenbosch, just outside of Cape Town, assembling 60 world leaders in dialogue. Three groups of 20 convened in a boma, an open air, thatch-roofed structure indigenous to Africa, that allowed the breeze to ruffle paper and billow minds. The topic was leadership in the age of globalization, which was addressed through a series of readings from Seneca to Conrad, Thomas Friedman to Desmond Tutu.

What the immersive conversation showed was that, although the challenges are great in this time when the world is truly becoming one, there are far more similarities among us than might be expected. Economic prosperity, environmental justice, cultural expression, resource sustainability, and social well-being are priorities no matter who is talking. The question is, how will we create a new model of global governance through which these shared priorities may be realized equally for all?

Cape of Good Hope for 2012

Standing at the bottom of the African continent (okay, actually Cape Agulhas is the most southerly point) is a place conducive to historical reflection.

The first European to name the rocky point was Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias, who called it Cape of Storms in 1488. But later, John II of Portugal changed it to Good Hope. Dias must’ve encountered the vicious weather that prompted the namesake. And perhaps, the name also aptly described his mood since his crew forced him to turn back before he could proclaim the spice route for Portugal.

For King John, on the other hand, Dias’ adventure proved that the King’s tremendous investment in exploration would, in fact, pay off – he had plenty of good hope for a future maritime voyage to India. The cape’s name, then, is a case of perspective – and the optimist’s won the day.

As we stand at the end of 2011, gazing out to the open seas of 2012, let us appropriate the name for the coming New Year. 2012: the Year of Good Hope. Let’s raise a glass to it – Cheers!

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A View from the Inside

December 22, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds History, Leadership

View of Table Mountain with its cloud "tablecloth" from Robben Island.

Robben Island (robben is Dutch for “seal”) is a stunning sanctuary within sight of Cape Town. The island’s vantage point affords spectacular views of Table Mountain and its famous roiling “tablecloth” of clouds. Visitors from all over the globe arrive at Robben Island on a modern ferry equipped with refreshments and video entertainment on the interior decks. Plentiful bird flocks play in the surf and a charming village is marked by a guest house and a church built in the pleasing Cape Gothic architectural style.

Mandela's Cell, Robben Island.

All of this picturesque beauty, however, belies the island’s three-century history as a place of extreme isolation and harsh punishment. Home to thousands of outcasts from lepers to criminals, military prisoners and finally, political dissidents from South Africa’s apartheid era, its most famous prisoner is, of course, Nelson Mandela. He spent 18 of his 27 years incarcerated on the island, along with many others, including current South African president, Jacob Zuma, whose own stay lasted a decade.

In contrast to Robben Island, Constitution Hill, site of Johannesburg’s old Fort and a warren of prisons located in the heart of downtown, was built specifically for the purpose of incarceration. There is no splashy surf or inspiring view to fool one into thinking this is anything but a place to deprive people of their humanity.

Women’s Prison, Constitution Hill.

Separate prisons within the Constitution Hill complex divided women from men, and blacks from whites, but not hardened criminals from conscientious objectors. The women’s prison, built in 1907, was a model of innovation at the time, using British penal reformer Jeremy Bentham’s two-story “roundhouse” design to put prisoners under the constant watchful eye of authorities. Bentham’s theory remains the basis of prison architectural design today.

Now Constitution Hill is a National Heritage Site and museum, and also the seat of South Africa’s 17-year-old Constitutional Court, the highest in the land. The site was chosen to serve as an intentional and bold reminder of the country’s transgressions under apartheid. These included horrific prison overcrowding that led to unsanitary, dangerous and debilitating conditions; divisive food rations where the blacker the skin the less was given; and a wide range of humiliations such as depriving women of undergarments and forcing new prisoners to dance naked in the prison yard.

As many as 2000 black South Africans were sent to the prison each day, including Africa’s first Nobel Peace Prize laureate Albert Luthuli, Pan-Africanist leader Robert Sobukwe (also held in solitary confinement for six years on Robben Island), activists Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Barbara Hogan, in addition to Nelson Mandela. Even Gandhi served time in the black male prison known as Number 4 for protesting Pass Laws in the 1950s. But many more were non-activists, incarcerated for minor violations like making beer.

Solitary Confinement Cells, Number 4, Constitution Hill.

What is so instructive – while at the same time so deeply unsettling – about visiting these South African prisons is the immediacy of their history. Unlike most memorials and museums dedicated to human atrocities, South Africa’s tortuous past is too recent to offer any relief. Although Robben Island’s prison history began at the end of the 17th century, its most poignant period under apartheid ended just 17 years ago. The tour guides are among its former political prisoners, who convey first-hand the systematic brutality and degradation they experienced there.

The prisons of Constitution Hill, I was somewhat relieved to hear, were closed in 1983, 11 years before the official end of the apartheid regime. I was in college at the time, first learning that such a thing existed. But the tour guide’s clarification quickly dispelled my hopeful assumption: the prison wasn’t closed out of recognition of its inhumanity, but simply because, in its dilapidated condition, it was too costly to maintain.

I hesitated visiting Constitution Hill after having gone to Robben Island – after all, how much cruelty can one person bear? In the end though, I’m glad I did. As I looked up at the puffy white clouds easing gently by just beyond the barbed wire overhead, I thought that I must never forget that human cruelty is not a thing of distant history; it is a possibility alive and present in every moment. It begins with our judgment and alienation. It ends when we choose something different. And it is our awareness of the terrible consequences illustrated by Robben Island and Constitution Hill that helps us get there. This Mandela learned, taught, stood for and modeled for his country. Let us all be students of the lesson.

This is part of an extended series on South Africa. Photographs copyrighted 2011 by Rebecca Reynolds.

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South Africa: A Trip in the Making

December 15, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds Business, Featured, Leadership

This is Part I in a series on my experiences in South Africa.

I left for South Africa just three weeks ago, flying from Denver to Frankfurt to Cape Town for a three-week stay. The trip was the zenith of a ten-month journey into the subject of leadership, which I started as part of a sabbatical.

I’ve worked with leaders my entire career, partnering with them and their teams to solve big problems and achieve big goals. In the last few years, I’d noticed that many of the principles that are core to my work – strategic thinking and big vision, broad collaboration and innovative governance, and the idea that working toward the greater good can be profitable in ways a balance sheet can’t count – seem to be gaining traction in our increasingly complex and changing world. I set out on sabbatical, in part, to validate this impression.

The sabbatical would involve travel to a wide range of leadership enclaves: the World
Business Forum in New York, the Aspen Ideas Festival in the high mountains of Colorado and the Management of Change Conference in Washington DC. But I also hankered for an international component to add a global perspective to my study. Then, on a phone call a month or so into it, the invitation to South Africa was presented.

In that moment, South Africa sounded at the same time ideal and impossible. Ideal because it involved spending a week with world leaders exploring my very topic. Impossible because I had no previous experience of South Africa, no connections to it, and not even much of a desire to go – or at least, not at the time.

The invitation came from the Aspen Institute. It involved joining a group of fellows from the Institute’s global leadership network for a week’s exploration into leading in this age of globalization. An opportunity ideal for me, to which I said yes.

As the months passed, I went on the other trips and heard all kinds of people talking about leadership. Big names like Bill Clinton, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, media monarch Arianna Huffington, and many others less well known, but just as passionate and articulate. At each leadership forum, I’d mention South Africa, and from this, the trip began to plan itself. One person led to another and then more,
sprouting opportunities, ideas and connections that steadily grew into an itinerary.

The first week was spent with Aspen Institute in Stellenbosch, famed wine country known for its Mediterranean-like climate. The seminar was hosted by Spier, a wine farm and conference center with an ecological mission. In that spirit, Spier donates land to two conservation projects: a Cheetah protection effort and a Raptor Sanctuary.

During the seminar, we took time out for an excursion to Robben Island, where we toured the island and then the prison in which Nelson Mandela, Robert Sobukwe, and many more anti-apartheid activists were incarcerated up until the early 1990s.

The second week I was in Cape Town, Pretoria and Johannesburg for meetings with prominent South African leaders, whom I interviewed about their road to leadership and their challenges as leaders today. Interspersed with these were various tours, through which I gained a deeper understanding of the rich history and culture of South Africa.

My travel consultant, Sandy Salle of Hills of Africa, provided exceptional tour experiences with guides who were the perfect combination of knowledgeable and personable. Visits to Table Mountain, Cape Point, Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, the townships and Constitution Hill in Johannesburg were all memorable and meaningful.

The final week was for safari. Two different bush camps adjacent to Kruger National Park were the base for forays into the wild of wilds, to experience life at its most essential. In just five days, I saw, not only the big five, but many more species ranging in size from dung beetle to leopard to hippopotamus.

Careening down tawny dirt roads through brush as green as green can be, with intoxicating fragrance and the music of a thousand birds filling the air, I felt life’s magic bursting all around me.

And most magical of all was the reminder that, for all humans have accomplished, we are still children of the veld, so vast and mighty it dwarfs us with its presence. Now that’s a leadership lesson worth traveling half way round the world for.

 

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