Absa Names Ex-South African Central Banker Van Wyk as Chairman
Absa Group Ltd. named the former head of banking supervision at the South African Reserve Bank as chairman, after the incumbent said he'll resign.
René van Wyk will replace Sello Moloko, South Africa's third-largest lender by assets said in a statement on Wednesday. Moloko will step down on July 15 to focus on his business interests and other commitments, according to the statement.
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Associated Press
3 hours ago
- Associated Press
Norfolk Southern board of directors elects Richard Anderson as chair
ATLANTA, June 12, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Norfolk Southern Corporation's (NYSE: NSC) Board of Directors has unanimously appointed Richard H. Anderson, the former CEO and Executive Chairman of Delta Air Lines, President of Optum Health, CEO of Northwest Airlines, and most recently President and CEO of Amtrak, as the independent chair of the board, effective immediately. Anderson has served on Norfolk Southern's board since May of 2024. Anderson will also serve as chair of the Executive Committee and the Strategy & Planning Committee. In addition, Jack Huffard, co-founder and director of Tenable Holdings, Inc., has been appointed as chair of the Compensation and Talent Management Committee. These appointments are also effective immediately. The board has agreed to reduce its size to 12 members and remaining committee chairs will continue in their existing positions. 'Since the very beginning of his time on our board, Richard has contributed deep, experience-based business insight and a collaborative style that has helped drive cohesion among the newly-constituted Board,' said Mark George, President and CEO of Norfolk Southern. 'I look forward to working with him in this new capacity as we continue to build on Norfolk Southern's strong momentum, advance our strategic priorities, and deliver long-term value for our shareholders, customers, and employees.' Anderson said, 'During my year on the board, I've seen firsthand how the Norfolk Southern team has propelled the company forward — delivering strong performance for stakeholders and becoming an even safer, more efficient railroad. Alongside the management team and dedicated employees, the board remains focused on delivering value for all our stakeholders.' More about Richard H. Anderson is available at About Norfolk Southern Since 1827, Norfolk Southern Corporation (NYSE: NSC) and its predecessor companies have safely moved the goods and materials that drive the U.S. economy. Today, it operates a 22-state freight transportation network. Committed to furthering sustainability, Norfolk Southern helps its customers avoid approximately 15 million tons of yearly carbon emissions by shipping via rail. Its dedicated team members deliver approximately 7 million carloads annually, from agriculture to consumer goods. Norfolk Southern also has the most extensive intermodal network in the eastern U.S. It serves a majority of the country's population and manufacturing base, with connections to every major container port on the Atlantic coast as well as major ports across the Gulf Coast and Great Lakes. Learn more by visiting View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE Norfolk Southern Corporation
Wall Street Journal
5 hours ago
- Wall Street Journal
Peloton Names Its Latest Marketing Chief as Turnaround Project Continues
Peloton Interactive has named Megan Imbres chief marketing officer, making her the fourth marketing leader at the connected fitness company since 2020. Imbres, who most recently served as managing director of the market communications company Apple Marcom LA, succeeds Lauren Weinberg, who left earlier this year after 16 months in the role.
Forbes
5 hours ago
- Forbes
Gary Hamel On Leadership's Blind Spot: Until You Change The System, Nothing Changes
Gary Hamel Despite decades of leadership innovation, most organizations still operate like it's 1895. Control flows up, trust trickles down, and people are managed more for predictability than possibility. Gary Hamel has spent more than three decades confronting these outdated assumptions. His work with C.K. Prahalad reframed the notion of competitive advantage. He called for the reinvention of traditional management in The Future of Management before its limits could choke adaptability or innovation, and dismantled the logic of hierarchy in Humanocracy. Few thinkers have done more to reveal how deeply control still shapes our systems. Yet most hierarchies remain untouched. Oversight is still rewarded more than contribution. 'We are still running organizations with 19th-century thinking,' Hamel told me. 'The assumption is that people can't be trusted, that they need to be closely monitored and that only people at the top can make good decisions.' What we often label as inertia is, in truth, design. Hamel defines bureaucracy as more than red tape. He describes it as an 'intellectual caste system,' a hierarchy where performance reviews, strategy and resource allocation live at the top while most employees are expected to execute. It's not, he said, a hierarchy of creativity or confidence, but one of information. The belief has long been that only the people at the top have the full picture—and that justifies their decision rights. Yet many executive teams still operate as if that hierarchy is wisdom itself. In my work with CEOs and CHROs, I see how deeply that assumption is embedded. But when the information advantage disappears, title no longer earns trust. Leadership must. That's not just a leadership flaw. It's a structural inheritance. As Hamel put it, 'In most organizations, the only way to ultimately get ahead is at some point, you have to join the administrative track.' Ironically, he said, 'management is not a competitive advantage. But perversely, those are still the skills we elevate.' That system creates what he calls 'a massive multiplayer game' where the rewards are positional power. You learn how to negotiate targets down, deflect blame, embroider data, hoard resources and manage up. 'None of those skills correlate at all with creating value.' The danger isn't just misaligned incentives. It's that we've professionalized bureaucracy into a leadership identity. When power flows through hierarchy, people learn how to rise—not how to lead. And leadership becomes performance art. The best leaders I work with are not chasing control. They're learning to release it. But few are taught how. Most inherited a system that rewarded oversight and expertise. Hamel traces that inheritance directly. The historical reasons for becoming a manager, he said, were twofold: 'One, you had more experience. Two, you were there to control people.' But those reasons no longer hold. 'Today, people don't want to be parented at work. If a 13-year-old doesn't like having someone manage their life, a 33-year-old likes it even less.' Leadership now demands a new posture. Not the smartest in the room, but the calmest and most curious. It's a shift from supervisor to sense-maker. From answer-giver to capacity-builder. Nowhere is the structural misalignment more visible than in how we've used technology. 'There's a ton of technology out there that could be highly useful in empowering people,' Hamel said. 'But most companies aren't using it that way.' He pointed to Buurtzorg, a Dutch home health provider with 10,000 nurses and only two managers. Teams are fully self-managed. Knowledge is shared peer to peer. 'There's not a single top-down protocol,' he said. 'Everyone reports on cost and satisfaction, and that data is fully transparent. Knowledge propagates fast. You don't wait for a central decision.' The result? Lower costs. Faster decisions. High patient satisfaction. No bureaucracy required. He also described a project inside Apple Retail, where his team built collaboration software for 40,000 employees. 'You don't need much hierarchy when performance is visible and people have access to the right metrics.' Agency is a design decision. Most leaders keep the structure and simply add tools. They digitize hierarchy instead of dismantling it. The result isn't empowerment. It's control with better optics. Empowerment doesn't come from dashboards. It comes from redesigning how decisions are made, how trust is earned and how power flows. If strategy lives only at the top, it's not leadership. It's guessing. 'The reason companies miss the future,' Hamel said, 'is that when you vest the power for setting direction at the top, you hold the organization's future hostage to the willingness of a small number of people to unlearn.' He shared the example of Ingersoll Rand, where frontline teams were trained to think like businesspeople and strategists. 'They were asked, where do we put our resources next year? And those ideas went through peer review and became the strategy. Everyone understood it. Everyone owned it.' In most strategy offsites I've seen, one question rarely makes the agenda: What do we need to unlearn? The leaders at the top are often the most insulated. Hamel argues that real foresight depends on distributed intelligence. Not just data from below. Insight. That only happens when leaders trade PowerPoints for conversations. In strategy sessions I run, executives use future-focused questions to interview people across levels, including supervisors, frontline managers and even customers. The stories they bring back spark deeper, more honest discussion. Open strategy isn't a gesture of inclusion. It's a safeguard against blind spots. If your people are your advantage but you don't involve them in strategy, what exactly are you protecting? I asked Hamel if the manager's role must evolve from boss to coach. 'The manager's job is to help people succeed,' he said, 'not to monitor or control them. It's to create the conditions where people can give their best every day.' That shift changes everything. Coaching isn't a soft skill. It's a structural one. When organizations expect managers to coach but still reward them for compliance, they create a contradiction no training can fix. 'I think about a third of people in managerial roles never wanted the job,' Hamel told me. 'Another third just likes being the boss too much. And the final third are the real leaders, people others would follow even without authority.' He compared it to academia. Nobody becomes a professor to climb a ladder. You do it to teach, to research, to make an impact. But in most companies, advancement still means title. That's not leadership development. That's structural misalignment. If we want people to grow in contribution, we have to stop asking them to climb to be seen. 'It's going to be increasingly impossible to know more than the people around you,' Hamel said. 'What adds value is not knowing more, but knowing different.' That idea runs deep in his work. Innovation doesn't come from having more information. It comes from seeing what others don't. 'Only stupid questions create wealth,' he's written, reminding leaders that breakthroughs often start with provocation. Hyper-rational leaders, he warns, tend to build hyper-boring businesses. Adaptability, he believes, begins with mindset. 'You can't build an adaptable organization without adaptable people—and individuals change only when they have to, or when they want to.' But when conformity is rewarded and legacy assumptions are protected, organizations grow blind to what's next. He encourages companies to bring in contradictory voices—from outside the hierarchy, outside the industry, outside the pattern. Insight rises from the edges. In high-performing teams, I've seen leaders who don't dominate meetings. They disturb them—in the best sense. They frame the question no one else is asking. They notice what others miss. 'The best ideas don't always come from the top,' Hamel said, 'but they can come from anywhere.' Hamel sees management itself as a kind of operating system. 'It's probably the most important social technology of all. But it hasn't evolved in decades,' he said. 'There have been no fundamental management innovations in my lifetime.' That should alarm us. If the structure is outdated, the strategy built on it will be too. The real work of culture isn't tone at the top. It's structure at the center. Many leaders think they're transforming their organizations because the language has changed. But nothing about how decisions get made, who has access to power or how value is rewarded has shifted. If structure remains untouched, culture will revert. 'Our ability to transform isn't limited by technology,' Hamel said. 'It's limited by a set of legacy beliefs that have locked us into a now completely out-of-date model.' And that's where most transformation efforts fail. The beliefs never get named. Power never gets questioned. Managers are told to coach but still judged on control. The solution isn't to flatten org charts. It's to rethink the levers of trust, contribution and accountability. We've reached the limits of reform. Leaders can no longer tweak the edges of a broken system and expect transformation. The real challenge isn't your people. It's the system around them—an architecture of compliance, control and constraint. If leaders want innovation, they must stop managing for predictability. If they want ownership, they must dismantle hierarchies that treat employees as resources, not creators. The change begins where power is held: To unlock human potential at scale, leaders must stop managing around the edges. They must redesign what holds people back—structure, assumptions, reward systems and control. 'It's the courage to abandon the familiar,' Gary Hamel said. 'But it's also the will to tear out the wiring that keeps pulling us backward.' Until leaders change the system, nothing truly changes. And every day they don't, the cost compounds.
