RSA Group Reflections March 2025
Dear friends
I celebrated my 60th birthday this March. The days surrounded by family, friends and colleagues were amazing, and have already slotted very firmly into the ‘life-long memories’ category.
But there was also a stark reality lurking: that disconcerting understanding that time is running out, fast. Which, for me, was stubbornly accompanied by thoughts of how much I still want to do!
Having celebrated RSA Group’s 40th birthday last year, I was also intrigued by the one big difference between getting old as a single human being, and as a company. For a business, advanced age doesn’t carry nearly as much existential weight as it does for an individual. We know that the older our company gets, the stronger it gets, and that new generations will arrive to keep building on what has already been created. But when it comes to our own lives, the same cannot be said!
Even so, the line between our personal life and work life can be very thin. We spend so much of our time at work, growing our careers and the businesses we work for, that it can be difficult to figure out where personal and professional contexts begin and end. Which is why we need to take advantage of the opportunities that perspectivechanging events, like birthdays, offer us.
Surrounded by my most important people, thinking seriously about all these things (as well as indulging in too much cake, of course), my major takeout from my 60th was this: I don’t think familiarity breeds contempt, as much as a kind of warm, comforting blindness.
Our relationships, for example, play such a huge role in everything we are, and everything we do, that it’s incredibly easy to lose sight of their importance, and simply assume that life will always be ‘like this’. We do this even when we know, deep down in our hearts, that life is incredibly fragile and fleeting, and subject to quick, massive change. My 60th birthday showed me – in very clear terms – why it’s so important to recognise and respect our relationships; and to make sure we pay careful attention to the immense human value that surrounds us.
I think this applies as much to business life as personal life. At RSA Group we always try to actively recognise the importance of quality relationships to our business. We say again and again how important our farmers, buyers, business partners and industry colleagues are to us. But, even so, we need to be very careful as we age that our words don’t become a little bit thoughtless, and start to drift down that track of warm, wilful blindness.
Do we pay as much practical, daily respect to our relationships as we like to think we do? How do we know this is true? What metrics (if any) do we use to assess this? Are there areas of action we know we’ve let slip a little bit, but we assume ‘will just be ok?’ These are vital questions we should never stop thinking about.
As a business, we have many advantages over a single human as we stretch into advanced age. But we shouldn’t get too comfortable with this advantageous position. If we want to make sure our old age is as prosperous as our youth has been, we can start by making sure we always nurture and respect (in practical, real world ways) the relationships that support us, and make us who we are.
Best wishes
Jaco Oosthuizen
