Description
by Paul Steenkamp
Hardcopy: R389.00 incl vat • ISBN: 978-1-991272-85-0
Published: September 2026
A New Operating System inspired by the Back-to-Back World Cup Rugby Champions
The Springboks lost 57-0 to the All Blacks at North Harbour Stadium in Albany on 16 September 2017. It was the heaviest defeat in 126 years of Springbok Rugby, at the hands of their greatest rival. Six years and one month later, on 28 October 2023 in Paris, the Springboks beat the All Blacks 12-11 to win their fourth Rugby World Cup. They became the first nation in history to win the title four times, and the first to win back-to-back World Cups, both away from home.
Many of the men on the field at Albany were on the field in Paris. Many went on to lift the Webb Ellis Cup. Some twice, in 2019 and 2023. Eben Etzebeth, Siya Kolisi, Malcolm Marx, Bongi Mbonambi, Pieter-Steph du Toit, Handré Pollard, Trevor Nyakane, Steven Kitshoff, Lood de Jager, Damian de Allende.
Same talent. Different result. The question is what changed in between.
That question is where Stacked begins.
And if you have ever led a team full of talented people and wondered why the results still do not match the potential, it is a question worth asking about your own organisation too.
The Springboks built something that works in a company, a team, or a career: it finds high-potential talent from all walks of life, develops them, holds them to the highest standard, and asks each one to build the one who comes next. That is what this book is about.
The answer is not Rassie Erasmus. Not him alone. Rassie is extraordinary. Tactically. Strategically. As a developer of people. Rassie did not change Springbok Rugby alone. He built, and runs, a working group designed to outlive him.
The answer the rest of the book makes is that the social architecture produced the tactical innovation, not the other way round. The conditions are simple: people are asked to think out loud, told the truth about what is working, and trusted to run experiments without being punished when they fail.
The architecture is the platform. The tactics are what the platform produces.
The deepest innovations are systemic rather than tactical. They run through everything this book is about: how the Springboks set strategy, plan and execute, hire, build a team and manage its performance, and grow the people who come next. The rest of this book is the argument for that stack.
WHAT DID THEY BUILD THAT THE REST OF US CAN USE?
Most of the time, this kind of building happens where you cannot watch it. It goes on inside companies, behind closed doors, and you see the results long after the conversations that made them. That is part of what makes it so hard to learn. The Springboks do it in the open, win or lose.
Not just on camera, but in press conferences, documentaries, on podcasts, and in the books the players and coaches have written. Much of the material for reading the pattern sits out in the open.
Paul Steenkamp has spent years studying that pattern and asking what the rest of us can take from it.
The result is The Stack, a practical operating system for people building organisations, teams and careers. Not a formula for copying a rugby team. A framework for examining your own.
The book is a launchpad for your own work. Test it against your own building. Keep what helps. Discard the rest.
The Stack diagram is the whole book in one picture. Read it from the bottom up.
It begins with The Foundation, the conditions that allow people and everything built above them to work.
From there comes The Organisation, where strategy, execution and hiring turn ambition into something practical. The Team looks at what it takes for talented individuals to become stronger together. The Career turns the focus towards professional growth and the responsibility to strengthen those who come next.
At the top sits The Country, widening the question beyond one organisation to the talent, opportunity and capability we build around us.
Across the Stack runs one of the book’s central ideas: Diversity, genuinely recognised and developed, is the engine of excellence. The diversity of South Africa’s high-potential talent is its world-beating advantage.
The challenge is not simply to find talented people. It is to recognise potential, develop it, hold it to meaningful standards and create the conditions in which people can make those around them stronger.
Which leaves every leader with a question worth asking: Who are we not seeing yet?
The Stack works at any scale: a handful of people, a department, a whole organisation.
You do not need a dedicated HR function or a strategy team to run it. You need willingness to do the work.
THIS IS NOT A BOOK TO READ AND FORGET
The ideas in Stacked are designed to be used.
Chapters 2 to 8 each close with exercises and templates that turn the chapter’s argument into experiments you can start this week. Most are made for you and your team to work through together. Chapter 8’s exercises, on your own career, are for you to work through yourself.
Every chapter’s exercises and templates are collected in a workbook, which you can download and use.
The Stacked toolkit helps you put the thinking into practice. Use it to:
- surface the conversations your team has been avoiding;
- compare how you see yourself with how others actually experience you;
- identify the people who quietly make everyone around them better;
- make it safer for people to tell the truth, including upwards;
- turn purpose and strategy into clear commitments, ownership and working rhythms;
- run experiments, learn from the evidence and adjust; and
- make development and succession part of how the work gets done.
This is part leadership book, part operating manual and part workbook. Read it. Debate it. Write in it. Take the tools into your next team meeting. Test what works.
WHO IS STACKED FOR?
This book is for builders. People building organisations, teams, and careers. People building the country.
For the CEO trying to build an organisation that can succeed without everything flowing through the CEO.
For the founder discovering that adding talented people does not automatically create a talented team.
For the HR or People leader who wants culture to show up in how people actually work, not only in values statements.
For the L&D and talent professional trying to make development matter to the work rather than sit beside it.
For the manager who knows there are difficult conversations the team needs to have.
For the senior professional beginning to ask what they are leaving behind in the people coming after them.
For the coach trying to create a team that competes hard without turning that competition against itself.
And for anyone fascinated by one of the most remarkable transformations in modern sport and asking: How did they do it?
More importantly: What could we build if we learned from it?
ENDORSEMENTS
“Most leadership books describe success after the fact. Stacked does something rarer: it gives you the operating system before you build. Paul has turned the Springboks’ transformation into something any founder, CEO or team leader can actually use.”
Michael Jordaan
Chairman of Bank Zero and former CEO of FNB
“Paul has distilled one of the greatest team transformations of our time into a practical blueprint for leaders. Stacked is not a book about rugby; it is a thoughtful and actionable operating system for building organisations, developing people and creating cultures that compound over time.”
Arno von Helden
Chief Information Officer, Business & Commercial Banking, Investec
“An absolute must-read. The analogy with rugby truly resonates. Each chapter provides simple and very effective tools, tips, techniques, exercises and experiments with helpful workbooks that you can immediately action as you read.”
Dr Shirley Zinn
Chair and Independent Non-Executive Board Director: Sanlam, MTN (SA), V&A, Spur Corporation
