Few could dispute that Discovery CEO Adrian Gore has emerged as the most influential South African business leader of his generation. Even those, or perhaps especially those, who do everything from tying their smartwatch to their dog’s collar to get their 10 0000 steps, or who make that special trip to the gym on a Friday simply to tag-in so as to earn those last 100 points needed to meet that week’s fitness goal.
Gore and Discovery are so fully integrated into South Africa’s cultural imagination that dinner-table discussions regularly turn to whether they are dictating everything from how and when we sleep to where we buy our groceries. Pontifications veer wildly from whether Vitality is akin to an Orwellian ‘Big Brother’ to facetious questions about why Discovery has not created a rewards programme to incentivise municipal officials to fix chronically broken traffic lights.
More recently, Gore’s impact has taken a more explicitly political turn. He is playing a central role in the Government-Business Partnership and was key in mobilising fellow CEOs to pledge support for unlocking the country’s potential at a time when that potential risked being blacked out by extreme and intensifying loadshedding.
