Rising to the top Down Under on the basis of lessons learnt in SA
Kelly recounts how she overcame uncertainty to head an Australian bank
LIVE LEAD LEARN: My stories of life and leadership Gail Kelly Pan Macmillan Gail Kelly’s success is not surprising. Dressed in a baby-pink cardigan and matching skirt, she is warm, bold and self-assured. A former CEO of Westpac – one of Australia’s big four banks and its oldest company – the South African-born Kelly is fiercely proud of her heritage. The lessons learnt during her first 40 years in SA were, she says, "enormously important to my future success. I can’t overemphasise that. "South Africans have a special set of capabilities because of the environments we grew up in and work in here … because you learn about change and you learn about diversity, and you learn about how to make decisions in ambiguity, and you learn how to get up again and go forward, and you learn about resilience, and you learn tolerance and respect for difference, and you learn about inclusion and you learn about accountability," she enthuses. And then she remembers to add to the list the South African ...
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