Since the beginning of March this year, our Shape the Future Series has been traversing the world of the Foundation’s five pillars. The Foundation’s core beliefs are centred on our five pillars, namely, Intellectual Imagination, the Spirit of Significance, Achievement Excellence, Personal Initiative and Courageous Commitment. These five pillars are at the very heart of everything we do.
In 2012 we found a way to activate the Foundation’s pillars online, through the iShift platform. The iShift platform showcases the five pillars in action. Each pillar is disaggregated into 4 mindsets, making a total of 20 mindsets and then each of these mindsets is broken down into 6 attitudes, making a total of 120 attitudes. The platform provides Allan Gray Fellows and Candidate Fellows with an opportunity to learn through a set of reflective questions which culminates with putting that learning into action. It allows Candidate Fellows and Fellows to “meet” the 120 extraordinary individuals who displayed one of the attitudes, within the mindsets and pillars.
Our Shape the Future series has provided an opportunity to showcase some of the personalities who were chosen as examples of the attitudes which we hope our Fellows and Candidates Fellows will develop in the coming years. As a reminder, the graphic below outlines the core of the iShift platform.
During our journey this year we have met the following individuals and learnt about how they embodied the various attributes of the five pillars:
|
Pillar/Mindset/Attitude |
Personality |
| Intellectual Imagination/synthesising/conceptual ability | Charlie Munger |
| Intellectual Imagination/creating/innovating | Walt Disney |
| Personal Initiative/proactive/initiating | George Washington Carver |
| Personal Initiative/persuading/persisting | Robert Kearns |
| Personal Initiative/researching/trend-spotting | Marian Salzman |
| Spirit of Significance/adapting/alternative spotting | Archimedes |
| Spirit of Significance/grounded/internally controlled | Herman Mashaba |
| Courageous Commitment/resourceful/focused | Nikola Tesla |
| Achievement Excellence/learning/being knowledgeable | Leonardo Da Vinci |
| Achievement Excellence/learning/market investigating | Arthur Charles Nielsen |
The most popular of these individuals, by way of blog viewership metrics, was Charlie Munger followed by Herman Mashaba and then Nikola Tesla.
As we conclude the Shape the Future series of cogs we would like to invite you to explore your own activation of these various pillars, mindsets and attitudes. We recently challenged the broader entrepreneurial community to take up the #MakeAR100 Challenge. Through this challenge, we hope that many more South Africans and global citizens will expand their own mindsets to embrace and harness the opportunities that entrepreneurship holds to Shape the Future. We hope you’ll join us.
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