ABSTRACT
After graduating, I spent a year working and travelling in Canada and the United Kingdom (more about these experiences in Chapters 16 and 21), after which I returned to South Africa. By then, I desperately wanted to focus on alternative models of business, so I began a Master’s in Business Science at the University of Cape Town. My chosen topic was ‘Holistic business: a study of synergy in organisations’. Through my research, I intended to apply Jan Christian Smuts’s far-reaching theory of holism, as expounded in his book Holism and Evolution, to business. I could see a clear contrast between a holistic model of organisations and the rational model of commerce that Tom Peters and Robert Waterman criticised so effectively in their bestselling book In Search of Excellence.
