I am excited to announce the search for the third CEO of African Leadership Academy, the institution I co-founded 16 years ago. At African Leadership Group, we have long believed in the importance of developing great institutions that last beyond their founders. I served as the day to day CEO of ALA for the first 10 years and then handed over the reins to my co-founder Chris Bradford while I remained Board Chair. In 2021, after 6 years of being CEO (and 16 years of building ALA with me), Chris will move into a new role as Chair of the board, ensuring a smooth transition.

The next CEO will take the helm of an immensely influential organisation with a bright future. ALA is already a model educational institution for the African continent; a major global player in youth leadership development; the home of the Anzisha Prize for young entrepreneurs which is creating jobs across Africa; and — perhaps most importantly — the hub of a network of leaders who are already redefining expectations for the continent. Millions of people across Africa are already impacted each day by the work of ALA’s young leaders, who are working to bring lasting peace and shared prosperity to Africa. In the years ahead, we will build powerful networks that will accelerate this impact, and share our leadership development and educational practices with organisations across Africa and around the world.

ALA has an exceptional team of 150 mission-driven professionals, with great programs and a strong balance sheet. The community is filled with driven students and motivated alumni. Do you know an extraordinary, values-driven executive with the passion and experience to take ALA’s work to the next level, building something greater and more impactful than its founders could have imagined?

Please nominate them — or apply yourself! — by contacting our search partner Tidi Padi at Riverhouse Partners: tidi.padi@riverhousepartners.com

As an entrepreneur, I’m constantly searching for talent. Over the years, the various organizations I’ve founded have hired almost a thousand people. We will likely hire thousands more as we grow. Thankfully, most of the people we hire turn out well. Sadly, a fraction does not.

I find it personally heartbreaking whenever someone we hire does not succeed. From our side as the employer, the failure means several wasted months searching for that person, doing interviews, reference checks, assessments, onboarding, etc. For the person leaving us, they may have given up a great job elsewhere or moved their entire family halfway around the world to join us. They might struggle for a few months to find their next job. It truly makes me sad when it does not work out. No one benefits from this situation.

As I reflect on those hires that do NOT work out, I’m realizing that one of the biggest issues that prevents people from succeeding with us is actually not their skills. It is often a misalignment between their personal values and beliefs and those of our organization.

Most companies tell prospective employees all the reasons why they should work there. But they don’t tell people why they might not want to work there. Today I want to change that. For anyone considering joining us, here are five reasons you should NOT apply for (or accept) a job offer at ALX — our next-generation lifelong leadership development platform.

1. You don’t want to scale:

From inception, we set an audacious goal: to develop 3 million transformative leaders for Africa by 2035. We originally thought we could achieve this goal by opening 25 university campuses with 10,000 students each over several decades. We now realize that we need a different vehicle for developing talent that is not a university (see next point), and that we need more sites with fewer students in each. Whether we end up with 25 sites, 50 sites, or 200 sites is beside the point. The point is we need a large-scale solution to a large-scale problem. We are not a tiny liberal arts college with 1,800 students or even one university campus with 20,000 students. And we need to do this in the next 6,000 days because that’s when Africa will have the largest workforce in the world (one billion people). If you believe that quality will get worse with scale, then this may not be the place for you. We believe that organizations can scale such that product quality actually gets better, not worse, with size. Just look at Emirates Airlines, Apple, Google, Four Seasons Hotel etc. The bigger they got, the better the quality of their products (just think Iphone 1 vs Iphone 10). Similarly, we’re going to scale and increase our quality. If you are frightened of scale, do not believe there are enough talented Africans who can thrive in our model, or do not believe quality can get better — not worse — with scale, then it is very likely that you will have a hard time aligning yourself with what we’re doing.

2. You want to build something conventional:

We believe that existing models for developing talent around the world are broken. We need to re-imagine a new model that is faster, cheaper, higher quality, and more in line with the needs of the future. For example, our model is student-driven (i.e. our students learn by themselves and from their peers) vs professor-led. We prefer to assess our students on real-world projects vs exams. We encourage our students to personalize their learning by declaring ‘missions’ around problems they want to solve (and to curate their own interdisciplinary learning around the problems they are passionate about) vs choosing academic majors from a menu we give them. We measure our success by whether our graduates become problem-solvers who ‘learn how to learn’ and can reinvent themselves as the world changes vs whether they remember the facts and figures from their academic degree. We do not believe in grades (we believe they rob you of learning) and instead believe in feedback. We engage deeply with employers (our students have a 4-month mandatory internship each year) to ensure we are producing skills employers want. We focus on lifelong learning — i.e. we want people to never ‘graduate’ from ALX and instead keep coming back for continuous learning as they mature and as the world changes. We believe that giving young people a powerful network, work experience, 21st century skills (like collaboration, leadership, entrepreneurship, data analysis, critical thinking, communication, and project management) is as important as giving them academic theory. When we select talent, we focus less on their national exam results or SAT scores and instead look for attributes that make great leaders and entrepreneurs — traits like perseverance, passion, agility, resilience, imagination, etc. We do not measure our success by the research our faculty publish (which is what traditional university rankings are mostly based on) but rather by the impact the talent we produce has on society, the jobs they create as entrepreneurs, the transformative national policies they implement, feedback from employers, etc.). Our institution has a very clear purpose — to create entrepreneurial leaders, not just to educate for education’s sake. As such, academics is a means to that end, not the end in itself. Ultimately, we want to disrupt — in a major way — existing models of teaching and learning. If any of the statements above make you uncomfortable, then again, it is unlikely you will enjoy your time/feel fulfilled at ALX.

3. You think ‘revenue’ is a dirty word:

Running such a large-scale enterprise as ALX costs millions (and eventually billions) of dollars each year. As such, we cannot rely on government or donors to keep our mission alive. We must be able to control our own destiny, and not ‘beg’ for a living. We have a 100-year mission. There is no way we can last that long, and reach the scale we envision without generating our own revenue. Revenue drives impact. Period. It gives us the resources we need to develop millions of young Africans. So, if you believe that revenue is a ‘dirty word’, and that education is something that no one should pay for, that the private sector is bad, and that corporations are bad, you will likely be frustrated at ALX. Don’t get us wrong, we fundamentally believe that education should be accessible to all. Unfortunately, the continent cannot afford to wait for governments to get their act together. We have to leverage private sector financing as well. If you find it difficult to be supportive of private sector funding/revenue generating models in education, in the way that ALX has engaged with it (such as our income share agreement, whereby students only pay for their education once they are employed by giving us 10% of their income for 5 to 10 years), then again kindly reconsider whether this is the place for you.

4. You want a “safe bet”:

There is no other way to say this: there is a chance that what we are doing could fail. No one has ever built an organization to develop 3 million African leaders in less than 6,000 days. There is no blueprint. We’re learning as we go along. Many of the innovations we attempt will not work. The good news is that in our last 16 years as the African Leadership Group, we have never missed payroll. But, the fact remains that we are a fragile start-up, not a ‘safe bet’. We could run out of money or be forced to cut costs drastically to survive.

We are a community that would rather fail trying to achieve something extraordinary than succeed at something ordinary.

If that mindset freaks you out, and you want a safe, guaranteed job for life, with a very clear pathway, then ALX may not be the place for you.

5. You don’t want to build something global. The low-cost, high-quality, large-scale disruptive model we have pioneered at ALX is game-changing, not only for Africa but for the whole world. So, while we are proud of our African roots, we see ourselves as a global innovation born in Africa. Just like the first heart transplant in the world (which was done in South Africa), or Nandos’ (the fast-food chain), we will eventually transplant our model around the world. Our students engage with global content from the world’s best universities (much of which is now freely accessible online) and they will access global research databases as they pursue their personalized ‘missions’. While we will create African content and case studies to add to our students’ learning content, we don’t have the time — nor the money — to create only African content or technology from scratch. We must be open to adopting relevant technologies and ideas from the rest of the world (and leaving behind the ones that are not relevant). We seek the world’s top talent, so will continue hiring staff from all over the world, not just from Africa. Our investors, advisors, board members and academic partners come from all over the world. We engage globally because we believe that Africa cannot develop in a vacuum. Its future leaders need to think globally and leverage global relationships to attract investment, ideas, and trade to Africa. If that sentiment really troubles you, then please reconsider your plans to work with ALX.

There are a few other reasons you might not want to work at ALX. Talk to our staff to find out more. For example, another important reason not to join us is if you want perfect work/life balance. That is not something you’ll likely get in the early years of our bold, disruptive, ambitious start up. You’re going to have to work really, really hard and put in long hours.

But for now, I wanted to share some of the more common misalignments with the whole world in the hope that fewer people will join us who are not aligned with our beliefs and values.

Please carefully reflect on the five reasons NOT to work for us above. If you checked “NO” to all of the above and you are excited about rethinking how the world learns while building a better Africa and a brighter future,then we would love to hear from you. Otherwise, we wish you well in your endeavors and hope this letter helped you avoid making a decision both you and ALX would later regret.

Fred Swaniker

Founder

African Leadership Group

She was very passionate about theater, and kept acting in plays on campus. I attended a few of her early performances, which didn’t impress me much. In fact, on one occasion, I walked out of a play she was in because I couldn’t understand the weird plot and thought my time would be better spent on some homework.

She eventually decided to major in theater, something I vehemently advised her against. I told her that it was an absolute waste of time, and that she should study a ‘real’ subject like economics (as I was doing). I told her she would go the way of other ‘starving artists’ once she graduated — unemployed with nothing but dashed dreams. As far as I knew, Africans just did not have careers in the arts.

After I graduated from college, I started my jet-setting career as a McKinsey consultant, while my poor ‘little sister’ continued down her doomed path. Why didn’t she listen to me, I wondered? Couldn’t she see this was the path to unemployment? The following year, she graduated with her degree in theater and moved to New York to study a Master’s degree in theater and to try acting off Broadway.

We loosely stayed in touch. Then, 4 years later, I was flipping through TV channels in my hotel room on a business trip in New York. Who, to my major surprise, did I see playing a minor role in an episode of ‘Law and Order’, than this woman? She had actually found a somewhat respectable job! I called her, and we went out to dinner to catch up. She filled me in on the play she had just written, about a woman in South Africa who was living with HIV-AIDS, and which would soon start running in New York.

Her career kept rising. Her first play went on a world tour. Her second play won many awards. Next, she began acting in small independent movies, and she later landed a major role in one of the most popular TV Series in the world.

Two weeks ago, this old friend of mine invited me to a movie premiere in Johannesburg as her VIP guest. I watched with pride as she came on stage for a brief interview before we watched the movie. I then joined her for dinner afterwards with the movie’s cast.

This ‘little sister’ of mine, whose acting career I didn’t believe in 22 years ago was none other than Danai Gurira, and I was one of the first people in the world to watch what is likely to be one of the most successful movies of all time — Black Panther — as her guest. I smiled as she casually introduced me to her own, Oscar-winning ‘little sister’ Lupita N’yongo, her co-star in Black Panther. We laughed and caught up about old times when we were in college and when I used to buy her lunch as a struggling actress in New York. She’s still as opinionated and passionate as she was when I met her at the age of 18.

I’ve been apologizing to Danai for the last 15 years for not believing in her all those years ago.

The experience of not supporting Danai’s in her dream when we were younger taught me a very powerful lesson — one that has shaped my life’s work for the last 14 years: Every single one of us has unique passions, talents, and destinies. We should never belittle someone’s dreams as unrealistic, and should never try to define what someone else should be. In my work today, I am on a quest to identify young talented ‘stars’ in various fields across Africa, and to give them a platform to fly. 3 million stars over the next 50 years to be precise. But I never, ever now tell them what they should be or do. I offer them one major piece of advice: “follow your passion. Don’t give up until you achieve your dream. Only surround yourself with positive energy, and remove those with negative energy from your life”.

When someone share’s their dream with you, do you encourage them or discourage them as foolish? Are you a dream killer? If you are a parent, are you truly listening to your child and giving them space to pursue their own passions, or are you trying to impose your own passions on them? What would happen if schools all around the world gave children the right to dream again? How much talent would we unleash onto the world? How much could this change the world?