Great leaders lead through inspiration, persuasion and personal relations and others through authority and power. Great leaders have the confidence to stand alone, the compassion to listen to the needs of others, and the courage to make tough decisions. Great leaders become leaders by the fairness of their actions and the truthfulness of their focus…
If you’re looking to invest some new capital in the markets during early 2014, you are facing some tough choices. Analysts vary as to their opinions, but the consensus seems to be that local markets are already expensive in the wake of a four-year bull market and hold considerable downside risks, while the value of…
Most developmental psychologists agree that what differentiates leaders is not so much their philosophy of leadership, their personality, or their style of management. Rather, it’s their internal ‘action logic’– how they interpret their surroundings and react when their power or safety is challenged. Relatively few leaders, however, try to understand their own action logic, and…
The December holidays are generally celebrated as time away from the office and with friends and family. But these past holidays had me spending a little bit of quality time … with none other than my boss! It wasn’t in a meeting room and we didn’t focus on work – it was driving through a…
We don’t live in the world for which conventional risk-management textbooks prepare us. No forecasting model predicted the impact of the current economic crisis, and its consequences continue to take establishment economists and business academics by surprise. Moreover, as we all know, the crisis has been compounded by the banks’ so-called risk-management models, which increased…
New products and services are created to enable people to do tasks better than they previously could, or to do things that they couldn’t before. But innovations also carry risks. Just how risky an innovation proves to be depends in great measure on the choices people make in using it. Ask yourself this: If you…
Let’s start with a question. You’re offered the chance to take part in a little bet. A fair coin will be tossed. If you win, you’ll receive R100. If you lose, you need to give up R100. Would you take up the bet? Let’s change it up a bit. You still need to pay R100…
Risk management can feel like going to war: there are threats on the horizon and it could take substantial investments of time, resources and effort to achieve victory. Some of the threats your business will face are bad debts, theft or fraud, loss or theft of data and natural disasters. The good news is your…
Information technology is one of the most valuable yet often least understood assets in a business. It takes an insightful enterprise to recognise the benefits of information technology and use it to drive stakeholder value. Moreover, successfully managing information technology in a business also means understanding and mitigating the risks associated with it, including increased…
The release of the definitive International Integrated Reporting <IR> Framework in December 2013 has cleared the confusion about what an integrated report actually is and how companies should implement it. Until now many ‘integrated reports’ were anything but except in title, with one survey concluding that only 30% of so-called integrated reports truly made the…