In the realm of towering ideas leadership acceleration stands a story or two above the rest. It’s a notion capable of advancing not one company or one nation, but the world, and its origins can be traced not to a classroom, laboratory or business bestseller, but a handful of consultants from McKinsey & Company.

One of those consultants is McKinsey partner David Fine, who is today described as the core leader of the firm’s capability-building practices. However, Fine’s contribution to the firm is hardly revealed by his title. Having been among the core group of consultants who opened the firm’s Johannesburg office in 1995, Fine is recognized as one of the authors of what the Johannesburg office calls its African Manifesto. More a pledge perhaps than a legal document, the Manifesto embraces the goal of helping talented black South Africans develop as leaders. For its part, the South African government has mandated a timetable for the ascension of black managers to leadership positions as part of a wave of post-apartheid reforms.

“Our sense is that the long-term sustainable economic growth of South Africa and Africa depends enormously on building high-quality leaders,” says Fine, who last year had an opportunity to expose the precepts of leadership acceleration on a world stage when he led a panel exploring South Africa’s leadership challenge at the World Economic Forum.

In South Africa, conversations between business and government leaders are already taking place to accelerate leadership development, as Fine and his McKInsey colleagues advance their objective and help secure commitments from business institutions to be part of their leadership development curriculum “We look at this as an office that ultimately has to truly shape in some way the social fabric of the continent,” says Fine, who believes the grand ambition of McKinsey’s South African office has been fueled in-part by the excitement shown by McKinsey consultants from all parts of the world.

– Jack Sweeney

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CM: How committed is your office to applying the concepts of leadership acceleration?

Fine: In terms of our Africa practice, we’ve committed ourselves to cracking the growth code. It’s part of what we call our African Manifesto, within our sub-Saharan practice. As we explored the issues in South Africa and Africa, the issue that we continued to come across was leadership capability and capacity. Our sense is that the long-term sustainable economic growth of South Africa and Africa depends enormously on building high-quality leaders.
Just to give you a sense of the magnitude of the challenge, if you look at South Africa specifically, just to meet their transformation aspirations, by 2014 they’d need to develop an additional 60,000 African senior management leaders. That would probably mean that they’d have to cut down the typical leadership journey from university to senior management from about 18 years to seven years.

It gives you a sense of the magnitude of the issue. This is also compounded by the fact that in Africa you have multiple value systems. In South Africa alone, you’ve got eleven different official languages. The complexity that adds is tremendous. So we see this as a fantastic opportunity to make a contribution to something that would truly allow Africa to emerge in the 21st century.

CM: Are there other parts of the world that are facing leadership challenges of such magnitude?

Fine: Well, there are two other regions, specifically, that we’re focusing on in addition to Africa at the moment. The first is Asia and the second is the Middle East. And what we’ve committed ourselves to doing in Asia is to do a similar exercise, where even though there are very different cultural issues in many of the Asian countries, the scarcity of leadership talent is of great concern because the economies are growing so quickly. The ability for them to grow leaders to meet the challenge is becoming a real constraint.