Part 14
Talking of rugby…winning a World Cup takes a combination of skills, planning and physical attributes. Witness the World Cup that just finished in Japan. It was enormously successful for the host country’s team, proving their fitness a force to be reckoned with. South Africa’s win over England in the Finals highlighted another vital element of success – the alignment of purposes!
It’s amazing to examine how impossible things can get without well-aligned purposes. For example, about fifteen months ago, South African rugby was in the doldrums. They had a measly 20 percent success rate over the previous year and were languishing in fifth or sixth place in the world. For a proud rugby nation, this was pathetic and South Africans weren’t happy about it.
Yet it was South Africa’s misguided attempts to impose political correctness since the end of Apartheid that had heavily afflicted our sport. Manning the National Team with what appeared to be the correct demographic left players with obvious skills behind. The purposes, it seems, were crossed. Instead of building a team, they were trying to make up for the failure to build a nation.
Talented players were bypassed. Disillusioned, they went overseas where they rose to top levels of club rugby in Britain, France and Italy. For some time, they were barred from coming back and participating in the South African team, known as the Springboks. But, inevitably, the standard of South African rugby suffered. Players who had been pushed onto the National Team before they were ready often failed, their careers ruined by people with other motives.
Amazingly, the Springbok team still had moments of great success, winning the World Cup in 1995 with Nelson Mandela famously donning a Springbok jersey for the Final, bringing the nation to a moment of harmony. There was even a second Final in 2007 – but to be realistic, the standard of world rugby had declined. After that, the Springbok team went from bad to worse and by 2017 they were rudderless, with loss after loss to teams who had never beaten them before.
Then a new coach, Rassie Erasmus, was appointed. How he turned the team around to win the World Cup in 2019 is little short of incredible. Rassie brought about an alignment of purpose within a group of players from very different backgrounds and cultures by doing one thing: all men earned their places on merit. He formed a team that could win by recognizing the fundamental need for all purposes to be pointed in the same direction…in this case, toward the World Cup. Of course, he also had good coaching skills, but more basic, he realigned everything toward the goal. This indeed is the quality of a leader. It’s not for nothing that the International Rugby Federation just today voted Erasmus as Coach of the Year!
Peter Warren, the creator of ExoTech, has also aligned cross-purposes, this time in the field of computing. He has aligned the computer’s purposes with those of its users, so that instead of the computer forcing users to do the few things it can do, the computer now does what people can do. And it does them in the way a user wants them done. Warren and over fifty men and women from diverse backgrounds and different countries around the world have teamed together with a single dedicated purpose, namely the launching of the world’s next major step forward in the realm of computing. It is a step that will make the Internet and the numerous social media applications seem quite ordinary.
To have a computer that emulates a person’s ability to think and that can instantly carry out increasingly complex tasks, without the human in charge having to learn “computerspeak” to get results, will radically change the way we use computers.
It will also open up a huge market to millions who have never owned a computer, either because they couldn’t afford one or because they’re terrified of learning how to use it.
The ExoBrain system will be available at a very affordable price estimated at about US$15 per month. The software is simplicity itself.
The ExoBrain team has aligned all purposes toward one simple goal – to bring the full potential of computing to the world population in a socially responsible manner. This should be worth a World Cup when we achieve it…and we plan to do that very soon!
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.