I suddenly realised that business wasn't just about money. It's all about value. It's all about providing something for the world. Business is your passion, your imagination, your creativity, your capacity to relate to people, to understand and give people things that they need to help them in their lives, to make life better and to provide opportunity to people.

Everything that's a form of exchange of something for something of value, you could argue, is a form of business, whether it's barter or whatever. Exchange of value for something of value, systematised in some way, is a form of business. So the business community is pretty wise.

You don't need some outstanding talent to be successful. You just need a certain sense of understanding. You need to understand your own mind, what it can do, and your own capabilities. You listen to so many people who say, “There's nothing special about me. I just did X, Y and Z.” But the fact that they did X, Y and Z is quite special.

If you can teach somebody to learn well in real life, in real time, you are future proofing them to a degree because whatever comes, they're going to be able to learn their way through it. The greatest confidence you have in life is the assiduous disciplines and efforts you made about helping yourself learn, while knowing you can never be fully right and accepting that uncertainty.

You've got to train yourself to scan and become situationally aware. You train your brain to be plastic and flexible and aware. If you train people to do that, they become very adept at dealing with change. You also have to create curiosity and a sense of confidence that you can cope - and if you don't cope and you crash and burn, you are going to pick yourself up again.

What we mean by personal growth is personal consciousness, personal awareness, expanding my field of who I might be, and also being able to be more open. People say it’s being vulnerable and I suppose it is because you are going to get beaten up sometimes in one way or another, but that's not the point. The point is you're there for a cause.

A lot of senior, successful people will run or do bicycling or climb mountains. They always have somewhere they go, where their mind is switched off. They do it in multiple ways and there's lots of theory about this - theory of flow and theory of creativity - and it’s all fascinating, but in practice, you have to find your own way.

Give yourself a one-year programme which might have some coaching, some mentors, whatever, but structure that in your own mind so you’re doing your own course.The plasticity, curiosity and innovation of your mind is something you also need to work on. Fundamentally it’s about how you live a decent life.

When I joined Henley in 2010/2011, we just had one MBA, which had 20% women on it and 30% black people (in the South African BEE definition of black). We are now, at the school as a whole, 85% black and 55% women and our staff are 75% women and about 75% black. So what strategies do we use? I think we have an un-strategy. We stopped using strategies and we just say, “Hey, people of South Africa, come, you're welcome.”

As a leader, you can't be making decisions that only benefit you, because you think it's your turn to eat or whatever, because you will make lots of people suffer. The people who suffer are always the poorest and most vulnerable, not people who have something. They continue to suffer and are therefore also the most malleable. If you build them up, their lives improve and their kids can do stuff. That's the number-one leadership.