In Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell calls the kid who exposes the emperor with no clothes as the holy fool. He writes: “The Holy Fool is a truth-teller because he is an outcast.” (The whistleblower is the modern version of the holy fool)
But does the pursuit for truth-telling carry too great a cost?
Trillian whistleblower Bianca Goodson recently penned an open letter to Eskom CEO André de Ruyter in which she says: “I remained unemployed, traumatised by my loss (divorce and my career) and am on the road to recovery from PTSD.”
By exposing the R1.6bn contract with McKinsey she’s become the victim rather than the hero.
And she’s not the only one painting a picture of why it doesn’t necessarily pay to be that person.
*Sons of Zuma feel the heat, a heart-to-heart with Chris Hart, in the mind of Mick Davis, leopard SOS: save our skins and more in this week’s BizNews Digest, download the PDF here – https://bit.ly/2HMBDpl 
