Bureaucracy and Leadership: Balancing Structure and Innovation in Modern Organisations

The Baker and the Bureaucrat: Lessons From Leadership

The Human Heart of Entrepreneurship

At its heart, entrepreneurship is about love, life, family, friends, and community. It's the daily push to do business that is leaner, more efficient, and more humane. It’s stripping away bloat and bureaucracy, calling out weakness—your own, the world’s—with honesty, and doubling down on what’s strong. My journey—shaped by places like Plumbago and scarred by bureaucracy—is about adaptation. We don’t just find ways to avoid failure, we let it make us sharper. We live antifragile. Geselligheid in Afrikaans, cosiness in English, philoxenia in Greek: it all comes down to connection and purpose that comes alive when you risk everything and keep going, no matter what’s thrown at you.

The Rise of Bureaucracy: Lessons from Burns

James MacGregor Burns saw through the lie that bureaucracy is just about order. Bureaucracy kills creativity by design: it erases real human relationships, pretends conflict doesn’t exist, swaps earned power for positions and rules. As Burns puts it:

“Bureaucracy is the world of explicitly formulated goals, rules, procedures, and givens that define and regulate the place of its ‘members’... It is a world that prizes consistency, predictability, stability, and efficiency (narrowly defined) more than creativity and principle.”

Bureaucracy doesn’t care about the stories or scars behind the till. It cares about forms, not faces. When you’re just a number or folder, you don’t matter, and every system will eventually show you how replaceable it thinks you are. If there’s a problem, the reflex isn’t to adapt but to restrict and ignore. That’s why true leadership—real, creative movement—often happens in spite of bureaucracy, not because of it.

My Upbringing: Family, Business, and Learning

Born in Andrew McCollum Hospital, Pretoria. My parents—working 7 days a week, 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., running supermarkets, tea rooms, bakeries. The bakery meant early, cold mornings: waking up at 5 a.m. on Christmas to bake for Valhalla’s military HQ, a stone's throw from the Union Buildings and Mahlamba Ndlopfu, where the President stays. No memories outside the business—that was life.

My dad is a simple man, not interested in debate, only business and shooting birds with a shotgun. I got close to him by hustling in the shop and by hunting—I was a “freak shot” by twelve, obsessed with guns and the high of the chase. Unloaded, but my hands were on them all the time.

Our dinner table was all business, all the time. Uncle Nasso and his Camel swag, Sunday motorbiking with my uncle Soto in Limassol, wrenching on my Honda CR 125. Not passive: learning, doing, losing, then trying again.

The world we grew up in taught lessons about adversity and prejudice. Greeks didn’t escape it. Especially after Hendrik Verwoerd, the apartheid ctrl c ctrl v policy guy, was assassinated by a Greek, Tjafendis. Greeks got the blowback. My dad carried that with him. He never really showed his scars. I learnt about this much later in life, when i did a podcast with my dad in 2019.

The Impact of Bureaucracy—And Its Brutality

I know bureaucracy from the other side of the counter—the inspectors from the Afrikaans government with their arrogance, the cold way they talked to my dad. And then there’s crime, racism, break-ins—business in Africa isn’t for cowards. I was a kid ready to defend the family with my dad’s .38 Special if it came to that. That’s how it hardwires you.

We were always a folder, a case, a number. When government and councils wanted something else, you were gone. Nobody ever explained why. Plumbago was our high point—a roaring business, the first home at 51 (not late, just later; you don’t expire when you hit some magic number, you go until you make it or die trying).

Plumbago: When Bureaucracy Destroys, Antifragile Survives

The local council, ANC government—let’s call them what they are—idiots, but that’s soft. These were jobsworths with power. They were lesser humans in my view. They had a narrow view and were accidental terrorists to our world. They forced us out of a 99-year lease—the reason: “redevelopment” of Faerie Glen Nature Reserve, or whatever reason they couldn’t muster up. Nobody competent told us the truth. We took it to the Supreme Court in Bloemfontein, my brother-in-law on our side. It didn’t matter—bureaucracy always wins by default: just make you wait until you quit.

I kept hustling between Plumbago and Nielsen in Jo’burg, then Dublin, then Oxford. Double-cuffed shirts in the bakery. That’s just me—if you’re fighting for your family, you show up the way you want. My wife Vanessa and I, hijacking, job moves, moves abroad, it never stopped.

Returning to Plumbago with Aimee, Lucie, my parents—just before COVID—it’s a shell. Lifeless. One sad vending machine. No people, no footfall. I stood there and told my parents how proud I was—they pulled themselves out of the gutter, built it all at 52, and the system still took it. There are thousands of families like mine in this world, gutted by a faceless, number-driven system.

But here’s the thing: we don’t curl up and die. My parents still grow fruit, swim, make meals under the fig tree. We lost what money measures, not what actually makes you rich: laughter, food, sun, stories, and stubbornness. The fig tree is our table, our rebellion against what the system destroyed.

Bureaucracy’s Double Edge & Burns’ Truth

Bureaucracies keep order, crush the human. James MacGregor Burns writes that change happens only in conflict, when the ossified and the innovative bash against each other:

“Even the outwardly most disciplined and unified bureaucracy may harbor latent and overt conflict... The potential for bureaucratic leadership is at its fullest when these forces are somewhat evenly balanced in conflict.”

But mostly, bureaucracy feeds itself, becomes a machine that forgets the people it’s supposed to serve. All real value and adaptation comes from below, not above.

Antifragile: Why Failure Is Fuel

Here's the part so many get wrong: it's not about resisting failure—it's about learning from it, letting it turn you into something the system can't break. Every time you get knocked down, the point isn't to get up the same. It's to get up different, sharper, meaner, more creative, even more dangerous to the status quo.

That's antifragility. It's not theory out of a book. It's surviving and building something new from what broke you.

Every major thing I've learned came the hard way: working across eight countries, fighting for family, running businesses big and small. The only way forward is never letting a system or a smackdown make you smaller. Break problems down, stay closer to the customer than anyone in the bureaucracy will ever know possible, keep creating no matter how many times they knock it over.

When we lost Plumbago, we lost money, stability, and a thiriving business that actually worked for our family, and the community. It was the anchor that rooted us to one another.

So, how do we build organisations—even nations—that can adapt under pressure, while staying tethered to community and to one another?

We don’t resist failure. It’s a gift. But only when observed with the right eyes. Reframes like “it happened for me, not to me” tend to help with this. It happens, again and again, whether you plan for it or not. The only thing that matters is whether you adapt and move forward. Can you take the loss, learn from it, start over, and keep hold of the people and connections that matter? Organisations—or families, or nations—that last are the ones that aren’t rigid, but can change, bend, and rebuild while staying tethered to community.

Make failure a part of design. Entrepreneurship isn’t just about ideas or slogans—it’s about risk and reward, sacrifice, hard work, discipline, and always learning. Failure isn’t something to dodge. The world doesn’t reward the most careful; it rewards those who pay attention, who adapt when it all goes wrong, who don’t just survive but actually get stronger for having been knocked down.

Build teams, communities, entire countries that expect to fall and expect to get back up—smarter, sharper, and harder every time. That’s how you last. To be antifragile is not to play it safe, but to thrive in the mess, the unpredictability, the setbacks.

And enjoy the figs along the way. Looking back, those are the moments that still glow bright in my mind. The figs, the laughter, the sense of ownership and responsibility—these outlast any property or profit.

That’s antifragile. That’s the only system actually worth fighting for.