For most of his entrepreneurial career, Christo Davel has worked at the intersection of finance and technology, even before “fintech” was a thing. Among other businesses, he founded what became Old Mutual Direct, 20twenty (South Africa’s first pure online bank), and 22seven – which is where we met. Disclosure: we have become friends and have worked together on and off since then. In that time, he’s used some expressions that struck and stuck with me. In this interview, I asked him about them. This is an edited transcript of that interview.
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Sasha:
I wanted to talk to you about “karmic debt”, which is a phrase you used soon after we met. What did you mean by karmic debt, and what was the story or history behind it?
Christo:
It’s the old saying that you reap what you sow. And how one lives one’s life is how you experience it in the end. I think where you are today is just a complete collection of everything that happened on your journey. All the mistakes you made, the relationships you had, the loves you had and lost, small victories… all that adds up to the individual you are today. You’re a sum total of all the small, at the time seemingly inconsequential, events that shaped you.
Sasha:
My takeout of it, at the time, and I don’t know if this was a word you used, was about a need to repay karmic debt. My assumption was that it was based on the kinds of work and the kinds of businesses you’d worked in previously. Obviously when we met it was at 22seven, which really had noble intent. So my interpretation of your phrase was in that context.
Christo:
Well I can thrash that out because there’s definitely an element of accuracy in that. I probably reflected on previous businesses that were, on the scoreboard of financial success, very successful. But as I grew and I probably became more aware, I realised that it’s a very one-sided and skewed scoreboard to measure one’s life against. So trying to do something with good intent, and building businesses that make a positive contribution, at that stage probably was an underlying reason for me using the phrase.
Sasha:
In storytelling or narrative terms, we speak about a “call to adventure”. What do you think your call to adventure was?
Christo:
It wasn’t a lightbulb moment, it was more a gradual awareness. As a young child, it was always nice to do things that made you feel good. And what made me feel good was when you did stuff that helped. You quickly forget that as you become a teenager and you’re under social and peer pressures and just learning to become a human being, whereas when you get older you realise that is quite cool.
Sasha:
This feeling around karmic debt… what was hard about it? How did people respond to it? And how do you think these thoughts that you’re describing shaped your career over the last 10 or 15 years?
Christo:
It helped me remain true to what made sense to me, and I found that if that becomes a magnetic default, it’s easy to respond to the daily, quarterly, hourly tensions and dramas one has to cope with if you build a business. So I found that it was a natural default for me that I could use with warmth and comfort in any discussion. I started seeing the humour in using “love” as a word with big corporates and seeing the accountants’ eyes go wide or gloss over. And I was fuelled by that probably to an extent. And if you’re fuelled by that and you keep on sticking to what you believe the core is, and you start getting traction, that momentum then fuels itself, and you have more and more people in the team that think like that. And when they get challenged – because your other question was what were the challenges – you go back to principled behaviour. And principled to me is not as opposed to being dishonest. Principled is to be very strongly driven by purpose. And it becomes a very, very powerful and warm momentum almost. You have strong confidence just to repeat what you believe is true. So the difficulties that I encountered in the teams that I worked with, it wasn’t so difficult to overcome if you just kept going back to what became everybody’s authentic, strong conviction. It becomes a way you live and a way you make decisions. You don’t have to think about it, it’s like breathing, it just happens.
Sasha:
Another phrase that you used from time to time is “poetry and profit”. What is that about to you, and what do you hope to evoke when you use those words?
Christo:
The one thing about poetry and profit, why I used that – people think it’s two opposing forces. To me it’s totally the same thing. It’s of equal value and equal weight when you build a business, not one against the other. But there was probably a bit of a naughty streak because whenever you use the phrase “poetry and profit”, it upsets people who think profit has to be driven by dogmatic focus on efficiency, profitability. And old war terms – “we’re taking aim at the competition”, “we want a slice of the pie” – are very foreign if you start talking poetry. If you solve a problem with grace and beauty, and it really solves a problem, profit will flow.
Sasha:
If you think about people 20 years ago and people now – have you seen a change? Have people come around to this idea over time?
Christo:
Definitely. If I flash back to Christo at age 40, the energy I had was almost, in hindsight, it must have looked like a very strong, youthful ambition to get across that poetry and beauty is important, and I was almost fuelled by the resistance. Whereas today… the global conversation in business leadership has definitely shifted to people being driven far more by purpose and fulfilment than just a financial reward. This isn’t just my view. The energy has shifted. And specifically with start-ups and this generation that’s now entering work. But the other side is that big companies still battle with it. When you have a big machine that works like a mechanical organisation, that’s got lots of processes to make sure it’s successful, and the oil flows where it should flow to keep the gears greased, it’s hard to force organisations to talk about love or purpose.
Sasha:
So let’s imagine a conversation where a colleague who you’ve known for 30 years comes to you. They’ve built a really successful but very conventional business that makes a lot of money, but where purpose never really came into the thinking, and that person is now at an older life stage, waking up to the fact that purpose is now part of the mainstream, but that person doesn’t know how or where to start. How does that conversation go?
Christo:
I don’t know if you can change a culture, which was quite a startling confession that I had to make. But if you have a business that is dominated by people who are very strong in logic and systems and numbers, and the evidence of their behaviour is a successful business – it’s actually quite stifling and corporate, and you’re not attracting young people who are innovative – it’s very hard to do. So then the question is what do you do? There’s no silver bullet. It depends on the category of business, the people leading the business, the team, but it requires unbelievable honesty to look at the dark side of a machine like that. And I find that’s probably the hardest thing. It requires deep courage as a team to say, well, there are certain things we are missing. And then you deal with the different stages of maturity each one of those execs are at. Some people just have a learning mindset and are so keen to grow. Others say, “how can you tell me this thing isn’t working? We’ve been mega successful for 20 years, there’s nothing wrong with it.”
Sasha:
But if there’s real, genuine intent to make some kind of positive difference through business, one wants to indulge that…
Christo:
I fundamentally believe, if you have the right intent and the right leadership and you have clarity of where you’re going, that you can, without a doubt, build a business that is full of love and it’s a human business.
Sasha:
What are the small pockets of success that you take encouragement from? What are the things that you do or that you’ve seen other people do, that are working well?
Christo:
There’s actually nothing as rewarding to me as seeing when people boldly lean into it. When there’s been open and courageous discussion, with people standing up for building a humane business. There’s a very strong logic that, I’ve now realised, the sooner you bring it out in a conversation, the easier it is to bring the doubters along. If you have an organisation built around humanness and what drives individuals, you work smarter together. There’s an increasing level of trust. Creativity and innovation happens as opposed to just following a process. The victories you see are when people go back to reminding themselves and others why we’re doing this, and using that as a default, and then how having a strong north star gets people to solve problems. And then it brings the profits thing back to poetry, because you’re working as a group of humans who are open to learning from each other, there’s an abundance of love in the room, and as I say those words I know that anyone who listens to this will say, “good gracious.” But if you start with an abundance of love in a room, the logical solution happens faster. It’s almost that state of flow that we all so elusively search for. I think it only happens when people’s veneers are absent and you’re really together as bunch of humans solving things. And that comes from being aligned on purpose.
Sasha:
When listening to you, I can picture a lot of people going, “yes, this is what work should be.” And on the other side, I’m picturing type A, very left-brained, MBA graduates, very into processes, and what you’re talking about is quite intangible, it’s soft stuff. And I imagine that must be very hard for a lot of business leaders to grapple with, because it’s territory they’re not used to exploring.
Christo:
I don’t know if it’ll happen in my lifetime that people will stop thinking of it as soft, fluffy stuff. There’s a monster shift. But it’s going to take time. My hope is that the human species changes before the planet gives up on us.