After four decades navigating the corporate trenches, Nyasha Zhou isn't ready for a quiet retirement. Instead, he is launching "Guile"—an ambitious initiative designed to bridge a widening "ethics gap" in modern leadership.
In this candid In Conversation with Trevor hosted by Alpha Media Holdings chairman Trevor Ncube (TN), Zhou (NZ) reflects on a career defined by integrity, sparked by a haunting question from a bystander in Gwanda: where were the leaders when values crumbled?
By pairing the "wealth of knowledge" held by seasoned retirees with the energy of a younger generation, Zhou aims to prove that success requires a backbone, not a bribe. Below are excerpts from the interview.
TN: Greetings, and welcome to In Conversation with Trevor, brought to you by Heart and Soul Broadcasting Services.
Today I'm in conversation with Nyasha Zhou, a business leader. I'm so grateful to the guests who have sat where Nyasha is sitting right now and been vulnerable.
Some have shed tears sharing their stories. Forty years in the corporate sector.
Forty years leading. One would have thought that right now, this is the time you take that experience and go cut trees, build hedges, and that kind of stuff. What's making you build another organisation again?
NZ: I actually now have more time to reflect, to think, to read, to recollect, and to say, "How can I use all these 40 years of experience to pass on to the next generation?"
TN: What are your reflections? What's your pain that you're trying to address? What issues are you trying to address?
NZ: My pain goes back to when I was commissioned by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Zimbabwe to write their 100-year history in this country. We came up with a publication — a volume celebrating the last 100 years of integrity.
In the interactions we had with people in business and the community, and while launching the book in the 10 provincial capitals of this country, issues of integrity, leadership, governance, and the ethics gap came out glaringly.
I remember in Gwanda, one old lady said to us, "Where were you guys when all these things happened the way they are?"
What dawned on me was that over time, we have lost our values, our ethos, our sense of humanity, our sense of responsibility, our sense of accountability—to ourselves and to one another.
TN: That's powerful.
NZ: I also realised there's so much talent getting into retirement, some already retired, who hold wealth in the depths of knowledge and experience that would likely go to the grave without being passed on to the next generation.
And yet the young are intelligent, ambitious men and women with great aspiration and lots of energy but they lack ethics, they lack leadership, they lack knowledge. We have lost the sense of humanity.
The idea is: how can we pick up the experience of the past and the energy of today to build a future that's more sustainable? That basically is my motivation.
TN: That's powerful, man. How are you going to fix this? You're launching an organisation. Tell us: what's the name of the organisation? What are you trying to fix? How do you fix it?
NZ: It took almost three years of reflection, chatting to people, meeting board chairs, chief executives, many of whom I know in the profession and in social life. We all realised there's a gap.
At the end of last year (2025), a few of us came together and said, "We don't have all the expertise, but we've got men and women of expertise with the experience, the knowledge, they've been on the grinding mill. Why don't we pull them together with young men and women aspiring to be new leaders, bring them together, and pass on the experience to the younger generation so they may continue to go on?"
So we set up an organisation called Guile.
G-U-I-L-E stands for: Governance, U—Integrity ("U" representing "you"), Integrity, Leadership, Excellence
So, we want to do governance with excellence, operate integrity with excellence, ethics with excellence, strategy with excellence, and leadership with excellence.
It's Guile with an "S" that swallowed the whole life—that really underlines everything.
Whatever programmes we do, we have a program focused on governance, another focused on integrity.
Rather than me pouring out what I know or what I Googled or found somewhere, I go out to a reservoir of men and women of experience who can come and share their experience.
We've run a few courses and programs now where we have invited experienced leaders to spend three days with young talent. And boy, oh boy, when they go out, you should see what I find out.
TN: You say something important here people think that sharpening the axe is a waste of time. They're in a hurry. There's a generation right now that's always in a hurry. I don't know where they're hurrying to.
They're not present at all. They don't sharpen the sword, and you can tell.
We've got chief executives at the top of the board, who have no clue about what's happening in their society, let alone caring about what's happening in their society.
The thing that's important to them is the big car, going on holiday in Dubai, and all those things. They don't speak about issues that affect society or impact their bottom line.
NZ: Let me tell you every one of the corporates who sell products with (US)$1 or whatever simply survive and thrive on the ordinary men and women in the community. So, you need to be able to smell them, to understand them.
You only pick that out of experience, not out of a book. The King Report is amazing. The code in Zimbabwe is great. You can go to the Companies and Business Act — if you read through it, no business in this country would do any corrupt act if you followed it. It's all on paper.
TN: Why is that not happening? Why is it not going from paper into the heart, into the bloodstream, into living?
NZ: Because people choose just not to do it.
But the reason for getting those who have walked the path to share their experiences is that we are hoping and striving that the new layer will be like blotting paper, saying, "Yeah, you can actually walk without paying a bribe.
You can walk without compromising your policy. You can say no without losing your integrity. You can say no to a demand in a very nice manner, and you will be right. And nobody's going to chase you."
TN: You're making me share a story that I've shared in my writings before. I had a young man, knowing me, who nonetheless saw an opportunity to say to me, "Trevor, you can make US$38 000 dollars here if we do this thing my way.
The money comes to me and my company."
I took umbrage at that. I called him to my home and sat him down. I said, "Why the hell would you think that's the right thing to say?" I spoke to him on a Saturday. His Mercedes-Benz was parked out there.
Long story short, Nyasha, he said to me, "Nobody's ever spoken to me like this. You're right."
NZ: I went to an event one evening, and sitting in a corner, some young man, a professional, said to me, "You think you can live without a bribe? Can you live without this in this economy, in this country?"
I said, "Yes, you can. Everyone is desperate. You're earning enough to keep going unless you have ability—and greed will make you worry."
To challenge him, I said, "If your mum knew this is what you wanted to do, what would she say?"
The young man said, "My mom would die."
I said to him, "What your mom taught you is what is going to take you through life, respect and all."
TN: Powerful. You need men and women who stand for truth and speak it. We have lived it.
Speak it to our young generation. If we all came together with an ethical manner and took ethical decisions and behaved like our mums and dads groomed us to become, this country would have so much opportunity—it's unbelievable.
I absolutely love your values and the culture you're pushing through your organisation. For me, it speaks to the heart of the matter. Talk to me about how you arrived at those.
NZ: Like I said, when we were researching the book, I was in Gwanda, and an old lady said to me, a very simple statement which hit me. I called back to my institute and said, "This is what I've heard."
She said, "When the president was walking in the streets talking about anti-corruption, where were you? Why didn't all of you, all you chartered accountants of integrity, walk in the thunder with the anti-corruption?"
I couldn't answer.
I was upset. In the actual code in the ICAZ, I've been asked a question: "Why, where were you?" This is an old lady in a public hall at Joshua Nkomo Polytechnicwhere we had come with the children to launch the book.
So often we sit and become bystanders and are not active citizens on issues that impact the market.
When you plan strategies, you talk about the 5 Forces model, demand, supply, market, customers. Other customers are ordinary men and women, ordinary people. Their welfare, their quality of life impacts our demand power.
Our focus in our business is to focus on leadership. We say, "Leaders of significance." Let us not stand back and say, "That's our market." How do we enhance the market? If the market looks good, we are good ourselves. The market is better, we are better ourselves.
You know, Trevor, I look back to when HIV and Aids came into this country. Initially, it looked distant.
But every corporate organisation went into an age policy. We had programmes in companies, we invited those who knew to talk about it. The country achieved something. To me, that is corporate citizenship.