David Weideman

Whether sipping on a fresh-grounded-bean coffee at home that I made myself, on my motorbike on a dirt road, mentoring, consulting, speaking, reading, learning something new, walking the production floor, or sitting in the boardroom, I am an unapologetic challenger of the status quo. I have a simple principle for life, inspired by quotes from respectively Ray Dalio, Edgar Allan Poe, Theodore Roosevelt and Albert Einstein – “To be effective you must not let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out what’s true.” “Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see”, and find out the rest for yourself. Then “do what you can with what you have where you are” and never forget that “insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results”.

With more than thirty years’ experience in banking, I have first-hand experience in a plethora of business fields and am as comfortable in the boardroom as in the canteen. Spending twenty-two years of my career in South Africa and nine years experiencing fourteen countries in Africa, I grew a particular awareness of the impact decision-making has on businesses. Having had seen how volatility in markets, as a result of exchange rates, ignorance of, and/or lack of mindfulness of macroeconomic factors, can seriously damage and even destroy any business, I developed a keen interest in helping people better circumnavigate life’s challenges, both business and personal in nature.

As both an entrepreneur and intrapreneur, I enjoy asking the unwanted questions, getting to the “real issues”. With the famous quote of Nelson Mandela – “It always seems impossible until it’s done”, I believe that – “There are no stupid people. Only ignorance. And to get rid of ignorance we need to ask as many questions as possible. Then challenge the answers. Challenge the status quo. Unapologetically.”