Edition 58 | 27 October 2026

Welcome to The Perspective, a weekly note on work, leadership, and clarity. The aim isn’t to add another voice to the noise. It’s to slow down for a moment, look at something carefully, and see what’s actually underneath. Some editions land practical, some more reflective. All chosen to help you see the pattern behind the noise.

A warm welcome to any new readers from the past week. The Perspective lands every Tuesday at 07:00. A note this week on what a board actually does across a year, and what the calendar does not show.

What Boards Do Between Meetings

A board meets four, maybe six times a year. Most people assume that is when the work happens. I assumed the same before I joined boards.

I have been a non-executive director for five years, and I chair some of the subcommittees. My calendar shows each meeting as a few hours in a room. It does not show the phone, the messages and the emails. A call with the company secretary. A conversation with the chief executive. A note from a fellow director who has been thinking about something since the last meeting.

None of it is on an agenda, and none of it belongs to one person. Management and the chief executive run the company. The company secretary keeps the governance process on track. Each director brings their own judgement, and the chair keeps those pieces moving together. It is a shared responsibility, and it runs all year.

That responsibility does not pause with the calendar. A director is not answerable only for the decisions taken in the room. A director is answerable for the company, including the weeks in between.

Yesterday was my final board meeting at LEZA, after a long and considered term. My resignation takes effect at the end of this week. A proper farewell is coming in November, which I am looking forward to.

What I have realised over the years I have served, there and elsewhere, is that the strongest boards treat the gaps between meetings as part of the job rather than as time off. The quietest week in the quarter is still a week in which the business is being run on your watch. If a management team is navigating a difficult issue mid-cycle, a director who waits for the next meeting to engage with it has not understood what the role actually requires.

That does not mean micromanaging. It means staying close enough to the business that when the meeting opens, the papers are a confirmation of what you already know rather than a surprise. It means being available to the chair, the chief executive and the company secretary when something needs a view. It means reading the industry, the regulatory environment and the competitive landscape with the same attention you give the pack when it lands.

Most of that work is invisible. Nobody counts it. Nobody pays for it directly. The fee is for the meetings, because the meetings are what the diary can be measured against. The work that makes the meetings useful is a different thing, and it is where the real value of a director sits.

It also explains why boards fail quietly. Not usually at the meeting itself. Usually in the weeks when nobody was paying enough attention, when a question that should have been asked earlier only surfaced when it was too late to act on it without cost. The agenda caught up to the problem after the problem had already shaped the outcome.

The agenda lists the meetings. It does not list the responsibility.

👉 I shared the shorter version of this on LinkedIn last week:

View the full post and comments on LinkedIn

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The Longer Read

You Already Pay for It

I published a piece this week on how our cities are actually funded, and what to look for on the ballot on 4 November. Johannesburg, Cape Town and eThekwini each raise roughly 86% of their own money. Property rates are only a fifth of that. Close to half is service charges, which is a polite way of saying your city buys electricity and water wholesale and sells them to you.

The piece works through why three cities that look alike on paper are very different in practice. Cape Town collects almost 98% of what it bills. Johannesburg has budgeted to collect 86% this year, which is a collection expectation rather than a collection failure. On the other side of the meter, Cape Town loses 24% of its water before it reaches a customer. Johannesburg loses 45% of its water and 30% of its electricity. And in July this year, National Treasury suspended R13.5 billion in equitable share transfers to 69 municipalities, including Johannesburg, and for a period decided which of a city’s creditors got paid first.

Before 4 November, one number predicts almost everything else.

Read the piece

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On My Desk

The week is full of work in the education sector. Three different organisations, all non-profit, all with meetings landing within four days of each other.

Education has quietly become one of the areas I give the most time to outside my core finance work. Partly because the problems in the sector are real and specific. Partly because the people doing the work are serious about it. And partly because the children who sit on the other end of these decisions are the ones who most need the decisions to be made properly.

Nothing about the week was planned as a theme. It is simply where my calendar landed. But a theme is what it has become, and I am not minding it at all.

Closing Perspective The best work in any professional role is almost always done in the spaces that nobody is counting. The agenda, the invoice, the diary entry, these describe where the work shows up. They do not describe where the work gets done. Which is worth noticing, because the people who understand that distinction tend to carry the room, and the people who do not spend their careers looking surprised at what the room expects of them. Keep thinking. Move forward. — Yusuf Visit my website

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