Ambition is the strategic imperative propelling organisations into the future. While executives today grapple with change in every facet of their business – rapid technological advancements, evolving market dynamics, and shifting regulatory landscapes to name some – the question has become: how do leaders navigate the most difficult operating environment we can remember not only to survive, but grow?
The landscape of unprecedented change
In previous years, scaling businesses may have sacrificed ambition and agility for stability and process but still found success – if it isn’t broken, why fix it? But on the horizon is a future where staying the course will mean falling behind. The role of ambition in an organisation has evolved from being a tactical play made to disrupt, to a strategic imperative for sustainable growth.
A recent survey conducted by the Economic Intelligence Unit for Stripe showed that the chief factors of revenue growth as attributed by executives in the last six months have been the adoption of new or different business models (such as the implementation of a subscription service), expansion into new products or services, and unlocking value through cloud-based tools and platforms.
To ambitious leaders, the maelstrom of today’s uncertainty is also the backdrop for opportunity.
Ambition as the mother of invention
While innovating “out of necessity” may temporarily keep the threat of obsolescence at bay, it is a complete embracing of change that creates a sustainable competitive advantage.
Consider Naked Insurance. Launched in April 2018 as a digital-first car insurer, Naked challenged South Africa’s traditionally intermediated insurance sector, which relied heavily on brokers, paperwork, call centres, and debit orders. Despite initial scepticism, the founders believed that a digital-first model could offer more cost-effective policies and an improved customer experience. Today, Naked has evolved into a full-suite short-term insurer, raising over $28 million from leading investors such as Hollard, Naspers, and the IFC.
Naked uses big data and artificial intelligence to enable personalised risk underwriting and transforms the traditional insurance business model by charging a fixed percentage of premiums. Its digital-first operations create a seamless customer experience while collecting customer interaction data to continually enhance its models and create a moving competitive advantage.
HomeChoice Group, which has operated in South Africa since 1985 as a home retailer, has navigated and led change to evolve into a diversified financial services business with its fintech businesses contributing 92% of operating profits before Group costs. The company’s decisive response to a declining retail environment has included digitisation investments in core capabilities such as fulfilment, collections, customer engagement, and fraud management, resulting in 84% of all Group transactions being fulfilled digitally. Its diversification into fintech allows the Group to create an ecosystem that facilitates an end-to-end customer journey (selling goods, funding goods, insuring goods, helping to pay for goods) and drives more spend in the Group.
Ambition manifested
These companies demonstrate ambition not just in their ideas, but their execution – creating the frameworks and practices to navigate change:
- Vision (the ideas and aspirations) is the ability to forecast a future that others might now see, and to genuinely believe that it can be achieved. It can be viewed as being proactive about change – leading change, rather than just responding to it.
- Salience (the funnel) is the ability to separate ‘hype’ from genuine trends. This requires having a prepared mind; having conviction on when to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’, and being able to challenge convention.
- Adaptability (the practice) is the ability to quickly read and respond to change. It requires building the muscle to respond quickly but thoughtfully to integrate new technologies, business models, processes, and ways of working.
To understand how ambition materialises within an organisation and how leaders can better employ it, we connected with executives across industries and roles. Alongside conversations about insight and product development, change management, and trend spotting, another theme rose to the surface: the gender-coded nature of ambition.
Reclaiming ambition, driving innovation
This Women’s Month, we will launch an audio series that explores the intersection of these two topics. There is a well-documented record of ambitious women in the workplace from middle management to global celebrities who find themselves negatively impacted by perceptions not applied to their male counterparts. Women are twice as likely to be branded bossy in the workplace, impacting their promotability and influence. Over the last 20 years, this gap has consistently widened and caused many women executives to shrink their ambitions.
Yet, women are at the forefront of business growth from SMEs to corporate.
Globally, women own 40% of the world’s 340 million informal small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and one-third of the world’s 40 million formal SMEs. A USAID survey found that women-led SMEs grew revenues 1.5 times faster and added jobs 2 times as fast as other businesses.
Across the Atlantic, a study by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology found that women-founded companies increased their overall value more than the European average over the past five years: 6.5 times between 2017 and 2023 compared to 5.5.
Titled “Reclaiming Ambition”, the series aims to give women a platform to share how they approach personal ambitions, operationalise change, and push boundaries within their organisations and industries. By side-stepping the conventional questions asked of women during this time – such as how they might balance work and family lives – we hope to spotlight the competitive advantages of ambition in the boardroom.
Ambition is a value and practice that we embrace at every level of our organisation. It is also deeply personal; what we pursue and how we pursue is intrinsically linked to who we are. We believe that leaders who reclaim ambition – defining success on their own terms and with their own values – will see outsized returns. Our goal is to foster this thinking throughout our network so that South Africans may not only face coming change but lead it. DM
By Nicole Dunn, the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Precium, the first African payment platform purpose-built for enterprise. The company helps businesses optimise payment performance, automate financial operations, and craft extraordinary customer experiences through its modular payment platform. Before Precium, Nicole spent 5+ years building and advising businesses – first at Elixirr, a global challenger consultancy, and then at Founders Factory Africa, a pan-African venture builder and investor. She has worked with 60+ startups across the continent and continues to support selected founders as an angel investor and advisor.
