60 years in under six minutes. Okay, dead easy. When I finished school, I needed more money than I had so I went to look for a job. I got a job as an official learner in a gold mine in Springs. That was my way of getting to university because, in those days, the Chamber of Mines were very generous about bursaries. So I spent a year underground, something like five thousand feet underground, getting some tough lessons, believe me.

The lesson that I was learning was all about ego. It was all about my own ego, my own power, my own big fat office, my special allowance of beer, my own whatever.

It's been an extraordinary experience. My son Steve and I have worked together for 27 years and I think he's taught me more than I've taught him along the way, because he's got a different attitude to teaching. He says that you don't teach, you enable people to learn. And I think it's even more exciting, in that you enable people to remember because what we teach people is what they actually already know, but have forgotten.

What we discovered was the key role that energy plays in everything we do. That when your energy is high, you're fantastic. You can fly almost, but when your energy slumps, you're useless. Absolutely, potentially useless. I had never realised that. It hit me like a brick, I can't remember exactly when it was. And I thought, "Wow, I have bad hair days. Oh, well you have bad days, Everybody has bad days". And then I suddenly thought, "Well, hang on a minute. How did I get a bad hair day? What caused the bad hair?" I became a student of my own energy. 

I dreamt that my granddaughter Hannah, who was then four, was standing at the bottom of my bed and she waved the finger at me, a bit like PW Botha. And she said, "What have you done?" And what I interpreted that to mean was, what have I done to make the world a nicer place than it is for her to live in? That's what I thought. It was four in the morning and I got up, at seven in the morning, I'd finished the book. Fastest book ever written, I think. It's called People. In it, I very simply endeavour to show her the two kinds of behaviour. The one is red, and the other one is blue.

I think I need to say one thing first before that, and that is that I think we're born blue. That the journey doesn't start with red, it starts with blue. I don't think babies have got any sense of negativity in them at all. They expect love. They have love. They feel love. They've been nine months in the womb, being loved. So my theory is that we all start blue. The interesting thing is how quickly we learn red, some of us, most of us.

The first thing is to be able to say convincingly to people, "I can't design a 'how' for you". We use the metaphor of a battery. You've got a battery, I've got a battery, everybody's got a battery and everybody's batteries are different. And everybody's got to take responsibility for charging their battery. I had this discussion last night and somebody said to me, "How do I charge my battery?" I don't know, but what I can do is I can give you some tools that'll help you to charge them. 

I can still see her, Dorcas. Dorcas had worked with us for, I don't know how long. Anyway, she came towards me, waving a piece of paper, and she said to me, "Mr Hall, I need to talk to you". And when Dorcas needs to talk to you, you say, "Yes, what do you want to talk about?", because she's got that kind of personality. She said, "Do you see this, Mr Hall, this piece of paper? Do you know what this is?" I said, "I think it looks like a salary slip". She said, "That's what it is. Do you know how long I've worked here, Mr Hall?" I said, "No Dorcas, I don't. But I know it's a long time". She said, "31 years and I taught Mr Suzman all he knows about shopkeeping. I had to look after his mother, the chairman's wife, and this is the first time you've acknowledged that I belong because a wage package, it doesn't do it. You can't take a wage packet to the bank and say, 'I belong at Woolworth's'". Tears ran down her cheeks and mine too, because what we'd missed was, everybody needs a sense of belonging. Not to say "I work at Woolworth's", but I belong, I matter, I've got a voice.

Leadership is a nurturing process. It's about enabling people to want to follow me. It makes me nicer to follow, easier to follow. So, for me, the journey to becoming a good leader is becoming easier to follow.

If I had known, at 20 or 25, that the rest of my life would be determined by the extent to which I played blue more than red, that I created energy more than negative energy, I think I would have had some much more interesting things.