Dive into our worlds - Ronell Govender
I’ve been part of the Naspers and Prosus group for almost 20 years, which still surprises people when they hear it. There’s this idea that if you stay somewhere a long time, you must be standing still. That’s never been true for me. I joined in my twenties, thinking I’d stay five years, but my time here has never stood still - each chapter involved moving across functions, taking on new roles and expanding how I thought about the business. Different leadership eras, cultures, and geographies meant I was constantly required to grow and adapt. If anything, the constant has been change — and right now feels like the most “us” we’ve ever been.
So when I was nominated me to attend the Prosus 10X Leadership Programme, I felt truly honoured. 10X is one of Prosus’ flagship leadership programmes, designed to help leaders think bigger, move faster, and collaborate better. On paper, that sounds like a lot of other leadership programmes... In reality, it was like something I’ve never experienced before!
It wasn’t a week in a classroom taking notes and pretending you’re not fading after lunch. It was intense, hands-on, and genuinely exciting — the kind of week where you don’t even get that 2pm slump because your brain stays switched on.
From Johannesburg to a room full of the Prosus ecosystem
The programme was based in Silicon Valley, California, and brought together a cohort of around 70 leaders from across the wider group. I’m based in South Africa, so even that part felt huge. You go from your day-to-day world to sitting in a room with people from cybersecurity, AI, ethics and compliance, finance — plus leaders from our operating companies across the portfolio.
And that’s when the “magic” bit happened.
You realise we’re all building under the same umbrella, but most of us don’t often get to feel that ecosystem in a real way. We’re busy. We’re deep in our lanes. We might know of the other teams, but we don’t always understand how they work, what their constraints are, what they’re trying to solve.
10X put all of that in one room and gave it space to connect.
For me, that was one of the biggest gifts: seeing the portfolio properly, not as logos on a slide, but as people doing real work in very different contexts — and then spotting the overlaps and the opportunities — and how I could help them.
The Prosus Way is real, but culture is what makes it live
I work as the Global Sustainability Business Partner at Naspers, looking at how we strengthen our impact through the businesses and places we operate — and how we influence outcomes for people inside and around our organisation.
I’ve always connected with the Prosus Way — entrepreneurship, innovation, impact, people — because it reflects how the company actually moves. What 10X did, though, was go one layer deeper.
Values are important. They give you identity and direction. But if the culture isn’t aligned with the values, the values don’t show up when it matters. They stay as words.
10X didn’t just say “here are the values, go and live them”. It got into the reality of how culture either enables those values, or quietly blocks them.
That part really landed for me, because it explains something I’ve felt for a while: pace doesn’t have to mean chaos. Speed doesn’t have to mean people get left behind. You can move fast and still build a culture where people feel safe, included, and able to do their best work.
The idea I keep coming back to
One idea that was first presented in the pre-work, but then kept showing up in different forms throughout the programme was this:
Obstacles aren’t roadblocks. They’re design parameters.
That’s a mindset shift. It was a huge ‘wow’ moment for me. Most of us hit a barrier and immediately go into “fix it” mode. We sit inside the problem, we talk it to death, we obsess over the perfect solution. The programme challenged that reflex.
It’s made me realise that an obstacle is a prompt. It’s a perimeter that forces creativity. It’s raw material for a breakthrough — if you use it that way. Since I got back, that’s the mindset I apply to everything — not just at work but in life generally. It changes how you approach pressure.
Learning from Silicon Valley — and feeling more confident in Prosus
We covered a lot: agentic thinking, speed science, psychological safety, design thinking, AI relationships. We had panels with people from tech companies talking honestly about how they trial, fail, test and move.
What I didn’t expect was the reassurance that came with it.
Nobody has the full playbook yet. Everyone is learning in real time, including Silicon Valley. The pace might look different, but the uncertainty is shared. That made me feel even more confident that Prosus is heading in the right direction, because we’re not moving blindly. We’re moving with intent — and with the cultural guardrails that keep speed from becoming madness.
What I came home with (and what I want to do with it)
The biggest shift wasn’t “aim higher”. It was “think differently”.
There’s never going to be a perfect moment. If you have an idea, you don’t wait for conditions to be ideal. You take the smart risk. You own the work. You move.
I came home feeling a mix of gratitude and responsibility. Gratitude, because it’s a real investment to send people across the world for something like this. Responsibility, because it would be a waste to treat it as a nice experience and then go straight back to business as usual.
If you’re a leader, you don’t just learn for yourself. You bring it back. You create permission in your team to innovate, to challenge patterns, to see obstacles as fuel, not friction.
That, for me, is what Prosus 10X is really doing. It’s building leaders who don’t just perform, but who raise the standard around them — and who can help the organisation move fast without losing the culture that makes speed sustainable.
