282: The Springboks and Strategy: Eben Etzebeth’s Unlocked
Good morning friends
At the end of 2025, Eben Etzebeth released his biography, Unlocked.
Etzebeth is South African rugby’s most capped player. In fact, he is one of the most capped players in all of rugby history. He has two World Cup winners’ medals. And he is the man who captained the Springboks to a historic 57-0 loss in Albany on 16 September 2017.
The year before that had also been terrible for the Springboks. They lost all their away games and won only a third of their tests.
He comments in Unlocked, “We were a mess, light years away from being the best in the world. Some pundits claimed we were the worst Springbok team in history. We’d lost eight Test matches in a calendar year for the first time, and in almost every game our opponents set some new record against us: our first defeat by Ireland at home, our first defeat by the Pumas in Argentina, our biggest defeat by the All Blacks, our first defeat by Italy, our biggest defeat by Wales”.
The worst Springbok team ever. Yet, three years later, they won the Rugby World Cup in Japan and did so again in 2023 in France.
Etzebeth notes that present in that ‘worst team’ were “players now considered to be Springbok greats – Beast, Willie le Roux, Damien de Allende, Pieter-Steph du Toit, Lood de Jager, Vincent Koch, Bongi Mbonambi, Steven Kitshoff, Franco Mostert, Faf de Klerk”.
Each of these players was in the world-beating 2019 squad. Like Etzebeth, the worst and the best.
One of the phrases I hear most often from leaders is “If only we could get the right people”. Do I need to say it?
Primarily, what changed was the strategy.
Although, to be fair, even if Coetzee had a different strategy he was hamstrung by a South African Rugby Union decision that only overseas-based South African players who already had 30 caps would be eligible for selection.
The idea was to encourage players to stay in the country, but the pay at international clubs was markedly better; a professional sporting career is a short one, and the players did what any of us would do: they chose the better salary. A rule formulated to protect South African rugby was damaging it.
When it changed, Erasmus instantly had access to a much richer talent pool.
We all have rules like that in our businesses: procurement rules meant to reduce risk that prevent the organisation from working with its best suppliers; governance structures intended to ensure oversight that actually slow decision-making to the point of irrelevance. On paper, they look logical. In reality, they swim against reality and undermine our ability to succeed. They’re tricky to spot precisely because they’re expressed as enabling something positive. The effective leader looks at the result not the intent.
In that dismal 2016-17 season, coach Allister Coetzee attempted to get the Springboks to play a more expansive game; the pundits named it ‘the modern game’.
When Rassie Erasmus took over, and went on to win two consecutive World Cups, he returned the Springboks to a defining part of their rugby – strength and physicality.
Etzebeth explains:
“For the previous few years, journalists and pundits had been imploring the Boks to develop a more sophisticated game – play more like the All Blacks, in other words – and here was Rassie saying physicality was the very essence of South African rugby; and rather than doing something different, he thought that we needed to double down.
As far as Rassie was concerned, we could spend lots of time working on other parts of the game and still lose more matches than we won, but if we focused on making our big rock more solid, we’d win more games than we’d lose. Then, once we’d nailed the physical stuff, we could start thinking about adding bells and whistles. As you can imagine, all this talk of physicality was great to hear for us as players, and I left that meeting thinking, This guy is the real deal.”
In naming physicality as a ‘big rock’, Erasmus did something critical: he identified a capability the team knew they had. That, without question, is the best place to start any transformation.
A few years ago, I worked with a client who, like Rassie, specialised in turnarounds. The difference was that he’d won his stripes in retail. I asked him the secret of his success and he answered, “Every business is started by someone in a particular way to do something for particular customers. Then, if it is successful, it grows and then professional managers come in, and they pull the business away from that. All I do is take them back to the beginning”.
Benchmarking is important. Analysing case studies is invaluable. Both expand our ability to imagine what might be possible for ourselves and our organisations. But it is all too easy to get distracted by the latest fad, by appeals to sophistication. Each organisation has a unique history and DNA; the best leaders uncover it and amplify it.
Not that the amplification is easy.
Etzebeth left that meeting thinking, “This guy is the real deal”. Then Erasmus hired Aled Walters as the head of athletic performance. Very quickly the team realised they were not strong or fit enough to dominate in the way Erasmus envisaged. Etzebeth describes Walters’ training sessions as ‘brutal’.
Occasionally, a client will say to me, “That’s not strategic, we already know that. It is a prerequisite”. My retort, “Then why isn’t it done?”
Etzebeth shows us that even when it is obvious, even when we can say ‘that’s us’, getting to excellence is much, much harder than we think.
Erasmus’ appointment wasn’t an instant cure. The Springboks lost four of his first seven games in charge. He kept changing the composition of the squad and was criticised for it.
Etzebeth gives a different view, “What people didn’t realise was that he wasn’t mixing things up for the sake of it, there was science behind it. Rassie’s aim was to build combinations and find out what worked best for the team, and he was putting players in tough situations to find out whether they belonged at that level.”
He was failing in pursuit of strategy. He had hypotheses, he was testing them, reflecting on them and re-integrating them into the game plan.
Ultimately, the Springboks won the 2019 World Cup.
Etzebeth’s reflection on the game is telling, “Going into the game, we knew they were going to kick almost every time they got the ball and that we were just going to kick it back. Rassie said more than once, ‘Don’t get bored of the plan,’ because he knew the team that ran out of patience first would probably end up losing. You have to be very disciplined to carry out such a simple, some might say limited, game plan. It’s particularly difficult if you’re a winger or full back whose first instinct is to run into space, and it takes only one have-a-go hero going off script to ruin things.”
It is something I confront often when working with leadership teams: they face enormous pressure to innovate, and then the busyness of everyday business distracts them. Add to that the new-shiny idea on the front page of the business press, or a near miss of the month’s revenue target and the plan is abandoned. Yet, as the Springboks demonstrate, so much of winning is sustained, intentional action. Identifying the right idea or direction is only half the work; the other half is building the capabilities and management systems to execute it, day after day.
Doing the basics, sticking to the plan day in, day out, day out may seem boring. Winning isn’t.
Best wishes
Karl
PS: You can read more about Rassie Erasmus’ strategic genius here and Siya Kolisi’s leadership here.
PPS: It felt remiss to be celebrating excellence without highlighting incompetence. South Africa’s Minister of Sports, Arts and Culture has withdrawn the country’s participation from the Venice Biennale, this year posthumously curated in accordance with the vision set by the late Cameroonian-born, Cape Town-based, Pan-African curator Koyo Kouoh. You can read my take here.