American entrepreneur Jim Rohn once said, "A good objective of leadership is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better."
For me, leadership is like climbing a huge hill and turning around to see a formidable army supporting you from behind.
Leadership represents strength in numbers. And most of all, leadership is about setting direction based on identifying the needs of your army, standing up for their rights and calling out any activity that negatively impacts on businesses and livelihoods.
With this in mind, I would like to acknowledge Roslyn Baker, who, in her current role as CEO of Sugar Research Australia has succeeded in quickly turning around what can only be described as a dramatically downward spiralling fiasco.
The clean-up involved making some harsh decisions, which only a leader of Ros's calibre could make, and the organisation has made some great leaps.
But sadly, like a house which has absorbed years of negative energy from unhappy inhabitants, SRA is struggling to shake off its gloomy past - leaving it at the mercy of industry politicking and interference.
One good way to clear and clean out bad energy in a house is by burning sage. It all comes down to having good spiritual hygiene.
In SRA's case, the CEO needs to be able to spread her wings further to continue to make a difference.
As an industry, we require a research and development body such as SRA to be evolutional and move with the times.
Going forward, the focus needs to be on developing new technologies. Crystal sugar production can no longer be the single focus - this is a crazy mentality, and quite frankly selfish and irresponsible for certain individuals to persist with this line of thinking.
The cane industry can no longer be held ransom by notions of agrarian socialism.
It's time to let dynamic leaders such as Ros fully take the reins on the journey to the next long sought-after paradigm.
