Professor Ronnie Lessem

Touched throughout my work and life by particular individuals, enterprises and, most especially whole societies, that are inhibited from making their unique contribution to the world, I continually seek, with others, to recognize and serve to release their personal, institutional and societal genius.

 

In my own being, I see myself as an Afro-European, embodying the “South” and the North”, societally, while my wife Joey, as a practicing psychotherapist, bridges the worlds of feeling and thought, individually. As our son Gabriel, now living in Israel, seeks to further our secular Jewish heritage, our daughter Talya, as a German teacher, ensures that our central European heritage lives on, indeed renewing itself through our bi-lingual grand-daughter Saana, who embodies life to the fullest.

 

Born in Zimbabwe of Central European parentage, as a young boy, I can vividly remember walking down the family business’ factory floor, a factory with a thousand African machinists, and none of them ever smiled. For those who have had the good fortune to have met the warm and sunny black Zimbabweans, perhaps the most friendly people on earth, that young boy was nonplussed. I just could not make sense of it. Ten years afterwards, at the age of 17, I can remember retrieving from a dusty school library shelf, a red London University prospectus. I turned to a previously untouched page, headed Industrial Psychology, and said to my parents, this is what I wanted to make of my life. Of course nobody in Zimbabwe, including myself, had heard much of industrial psychology at the time. So my father consulted his trusted friend and then Rhodesian Minister of Finance, Cyril Hatty, who pronounced “young Lessem, psychology is for back room boys”. From then on I was determined to bring the psyche not only of the person but also of an enterprise and of the whole society into the front room of business.

 

I started in my youth studying economics, and business studies at the University of Zimbabwe (BSc Econ in Economic Principles), the London School of Economics (MSc in Economics of Industry), Harvard Business School (MBA in Corporate Planning) and City University in London (PhD focused on action learning and enterprise development).

 

I initially worked as a Corporate Planner and subsequently as Managing Director of a chain of supermarkets, both in South Africa, before becoming a business academic based in the UK, Switzerland, South Africa and Zimbabwe, as well as an international management consultant. His major clients were such multinationals as IBM, Shell, Esso, and Unilever. At the same time I co-founded URBED – Urban and Economic Development Group – in London, focused on community economic, and enterprise, development.

 

Since the 1980’s, moreover I have written some 30 books on self, enterprise and societal development, focused on Africa, Asia, Europe and American in turn. Aside from the books published jointly with Alexander Schieffer, I have written, together with kindred spirits from Africa, Asia, Europe and America, Integral Community (Gower, 2013), Integral Polity (Gower, 2014), Integral Advantage (Gower, 2015) and The Integrators: Beyond Leadership (Routledge, 2016). My primary orientation though, as co-founder of Trans4m, and together with Alexander and our Trans4m community, is to further promote community activation, while awakening individual and collective consciousness, and to co-evolve innovation driven, institutionalised social research centers, most especially in the “Global South”. These are invariably aligned with transformative enterprises and transformative educational establishments.