As it happened, I moved up through the ranks at Sappi quite quickly. True, I had a great mentor and coach to guide me, and he became a very good friend over the years. Chris often reminds me of my pitching up at the initial job interview at the Lanzerac Hotel in the midst of summer [...]
In my Sappi days, like in many large corporations, leadership and management were mostly executed by different people. The CEO, Eugene van As, had a number of MDs report to him. This obviously presented its own challenges and Ian Forbes replaced Ian Heron overnight. The strategy to move up the Sappi corporate ladder was simple - make sure your [...]
What a year 2020 has turned out to be. For most of us, not the twenty plenty that was envisioned at the onset. Who would have thought that a flu virus reported in China would have such a devastating effect on the world economy? And ourselves. Many people can’t wait to close this chapter. [...]
In the previous post, we looked at the importance of knowing your numbers. This, however, is not enough. You must do something with this information. For years, I have been reading about Ray Kroc and how he took McDonald’s from a family run business to the world’s highest turning restaurant chain. I recently watched [...]
Back in my student days, I had to make a plan to earn some extra cash. Cars still had distributors, drum brakes and plugs and points, so I played mechanic from time to time. I installed car radios when the opportunity presented itself. And as it happened, I ran the iconic Stirling Fisheries in [...]
A common trait shared by many well-regarded business leaders is a constant thirst for knowledge. They want to grow what they know, learn about the latest trends, master new crafts. Many of us, though, stop the active process of learning when we leave our last institution of tertiary or higher education. After I obtained [...]
This post started out in some frustration, and perhaps embarrassment. How often has it happened to you that you know you’ve saved a document, or snap as in this case, but cannot find it? How many hours have you wasted trying to find that spreadsheet that you now want to use again? I’ve certainly [...]
The Cape of Storms was lashed by a fierce one recently, with the strongest winds, biggest swell and most snow experienced in a while. After conditions returned to some normalcy, we took to the waves. There was a lot of water moving around, and inevitably the waves were bigger than they looked from the [...]
For a very long time, I have had a tenuous relationship with marketing activities and expenses. Primarily, I think, because there is no direct correlation, or rather measurement, between activity and outcome. I was often enough the beneficiary of marketing expenses though, and fondly remember a marketing conference to the Kariba Dam on [...]
All businesses face four lasting challenges that must be overcome. They must create and maintain an attractive business concept, establish lasting customer relations to attract and retain clients, build a strong organisation through developing teams and partnerships to execute their key activities, and do so while maintaining profitable operations. This is the basis used [...]
