Management

Many organisations are reluctant to manage their ethics performance. Why? When leading practice has moved beyond the question of whether ethics can actually be ‘managed’ (taking it as given that it can), and huge efforts are underway getting the ‘how’ of ethics management right as well, it seems perverse to ignore this aspect of organisational life.

An often misunderstood issue among entrepreneurs is the muddled duties of individuals who act in the roles of shareholder, director and employee. The court recently assisted to untangle these issues.

Boardroom efforts to make customer experience a priority is being hampered by rising costs, retention and bad debt. South African firms continue to be challenged by rising costs of customer acquisition, retention, fraud and bad debt while striving for innovation through leveraging data and AI techniques.

As a society, we are on the precipice of The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), and we are only just beginning to understand the radical effects it will have on the way we communicate, live and work.

An often-used metaphor to describe the concept of business is the armed forces. You have the general at the top and a series of levels of hierarchy below – right down to the lower ranks who go off to fight the war as soldiers, sailors or pilots.

When Finance Minister Tito Mboweni gives his Budget Speech for the 2019/20 tax year next week (20 February), I hope to hear examples of how the government will work towards boosting South Africa’s ranking in The World Bank's annual 'Doing Business Report'. Given that India climbed 23 positions in this year’s ranking and that South Africa ranked 32nd just a decade ago, this goal is highly achievable.

Corruption is a reality throughout the world. For any organisation, the financial and reputational risks that follow incidents of corrupt activity can be quite severe.

South Africa’s current woes are in large part a result of a large-scale breakdown in ethics (both personal and professional) and good governance practices. One only needs to look at the goings-on at Steinhoff, KPMG, Eskom, SARS and VBS Bank to see the impact that unethical behaviour, large scale looting and unchecked business practices have had on the South African economy and on South Africans, whose confidence in the leadership of this country and those in business is at an all-time low.

Remuneration and performance of boards of directors has been the subject of extensive conceptualisation and empirical research over many years. Internationally, most of this research has dealt with European and American based companies.

Leading organisations can be lonely and a coach and mentorship make a real difference. This is especially true when you are an inexperienced CEO in a small start-up or a fledgling scale-up.