Cyril Ramaphosa, President of South Africa:

“When I started on the task of sorting out the mine workers, I consciously chose to leave the authority I had. Because I took the view that others before me had failed by trying to operate it this way and that I would be better off taking on the task with no authority at all.

“In the 1970s, the trade union movement began to surge. In those days there was an unquestioned principle that you never went to the bosses. I broke it – and went to ask permission to organize the workers. Asking the bosses for permission was like going to Alcatraz and asking for permission to organize a prison break-out.

“I knew I was taking a big risk. Many before me had tried to organize the mine workers; there had been many such attempts between 1946 and 1982. I knew I had to do something new. Why would I take a long detour (which is what it was) and break a fundamental principle about working with the bosses? I attracted a lot of criticism from the trade unions and the ANC. It was a painful and lonely path to take.

“But I knew that the authority I appeared to have was the wrong one. The miners were living in an almost military environment – they were like hostages. I knew that I needed to move outside the rules, outside the traditional way of organizing the workers and outside the authority that I had been given.

“So I went to the Chamber of Mines and asked for permission to operate in the mines: for offices and resources and food for my officials. The timing was right because a report had just come out saying that black miners needed to organize into legalized trade unions.

“Once we got going properly, the workers stopped feeling so brow-beaten – and stopped behaving like hostages. It was like lancing a boil: there was an out-flowing of this quest for freedom – and we became the fastest growing union in the world, with 360,000 members eventually.

“So I eventually moved back into authority – but a different one. To get there, I had to make a detour and operate way beyond my authority first. If I had not taken that detour and moved way outside my authority, it would have not been possible to organize the mine workers so quickly. Of course, the strikes they then backed played a crucial part in making the country ungovernable and causing the break-down of the apartheid government. The detour was all part of achieving our original objective.”

Taken from Beyond Authority: Leadership in a Changing World by Julia Middleton