I sit around board room tables every week helping companies to reason on what constitutes the most appropriate black equity partner. One thing they all agree on is that the biggest risk lies not in the corporate structure itself or even the terms and conditions of the transaction, but in who the future partner should…
I recently came across research by Dr Felienne Hermans that got me thinking. She had the opportunity to analyse 16 000 spreadsheets from within Enron, and her research highlighted some uncomfortable facts on spreadsheets. There is a repository of spreadsheets that researchers use as a data point. It contains spreadsheets from a variety of sources,…
Are you fit enough for your board’s marathon, asks Julanie Basson Ask any runner standing at the start of a 42 km marathon and they will tell you the fitter and better prepared you are, the easier the gruelling race will be. Many runners, including me, have attempted to run a marathon very well knowing…
It is said that hard work and discipline lead to self-mastery. In this article, I share those habits that have shaped me into the speaker I am today. Habit 1: Never turn down stage time! Regardless, if you are presenting to two or 200 people, every audience is there to shape and groom you. If…
Oh, how a picture (which is worth more than a thousand words) can change depending on the type of frame you put it in. The same applies to the decisions we make. Framing is how we make sense of the world. By framing situations we are able to make sense of the world, without which,…
Golden handshakes seem to be becoming increasingly popular at the moment. The Oxford Dictionary defines a golden handshake as ‘a payment given to someone who has been made redundant or retires early’. The term ‘golden handshake’ is not defined in the Income Tax Act. A ‘severance benefit’ is defined in section 1 of the Act.…
In business, there’s a story that lives on about a mistake once made by Sheryl Sandberg, former Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google – not because of the error itself, but because of co-founder Larry Page’s response. When Sandberg realised she’d made a bad decision that would cost the company millions…
SME State of Play 2015 Special Report Of all SMEs, two-thirds will start at least two businesses, a third will start at least three, and 3% will valiantly launch at least ten. The 2015 SME report provides insight and guidance for SMEs in the realm of government policy, financial reporting and corporate governance, and offers…
Congratulations to all our Top 35-under-35 candidates – you are all winners and leaders. After hundreds of entries, months of anticipation, a gruelling judging process and a difficult task to select only three category winners and one overall winner, we can finally announce who they are and why they were chosen. Hundreds of high-quality entries…
For every buyer there is a seller. Mathematically, this implies that the full universe of asset managers can only achieve the average return of the market. Add in fees, and actively managed investment funds should theoretically consistently underperform passive investments. However, the counter-argument is that there are some really good managers out there who generate…