Living our Purpose: An open letter from Ajen Sita, EY Africa CEO

Living our Purpose: Stronger Together
 

I have watched the events unfolding across our country over the last ten days with a mix of emotions. From sadness to hope, including dismay and delight.  Like so many of you, I have been disheartened to see so much destruction and yet encouraged by our ability as a nation to regroup, re-evaluate and reset. This is our country and our home. We stand together and know that we are Stronger Together. South Africa is unique, and our people are remarkable.
 

As leaders we know that this is a time for action and not self-pity. This is a time for us all to step up. Whilst politics, the pandemic and poverty may have got us here, as business leaders we have a role to play in adapting to these setbacks, responding strategically and quickly resetting business strategies. Whilst we can be distracted by short term wins or losses, this moment has been a sharp reminder of the need to focus on creating long-term value for all stakeholders.  Long-term value starts with having a unifying purpose followed by creating value for our people, our businesses, and our communities.  Businesses who are focussed on the long term will attract the best people to work for them, will provide the best opportunities for those people to work on, will have the most committed investors and are the most beneficial to society.  Nothing short of building for the long term will do – we must now hit the reset button.

At EY we talk about living our purpose of building a better working world.  We are using this moment to answer a number of strategic questions that all businesses need to ask of themselves:

• What is your Trust relationship with your stakeholders?
• How are you driving Trade and growth?
• Is your Technology strategy agile enough for a rapidly changing environment?
• Is your operating model driving climate Sustainability?
• Is your business attracting and retaining the best Talent?

Despite the unpleasant narrative playing out across our lives and screens, I have been so proud of the commitment, compassion and contribution of each of our EY people in support of their colleagues, our clients and the broader community during this disruptive time. The social unrest and the anxiety that it generated, created a perfect storm.  We saw so many people wanting to help, but they did not know how to. People want to support others and need a channel to do that. This gave us a perfect opportunity to bring together the smart innovative thinking and the energy of our people - together into an Ideathon – where everyone shared their ideas and suggestions collaboratively of what we (as EY and as individuals) can do practically to power our purpose and make an impact.  From suggestions of how to partner with other organisations, how to help our clients supply chains, highlighting relief that is available to businesses, sharing our own comprehensive well-being resources and support to smaller, entrepreneurial businesses – our list of ideas is long.

We have appointed a task team to shortlist and prioritise those activities so that we can get to work on the implementation – we are committed to moving forward with a sixty-day plan and we are excited about the energy that this is creating within our firm.  These have not been easy times, and I believe that we will continue to have challenging times ahead – but I know that by being stronger together and focussing on long-term value, better days are ahead.

Best regards,