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The global is becoming and, to stay up-to-date, wants local wisdom in a global context.
In this episode of The Alec Hogg Show, one of South Africa’s most influential business leaders, Clem Sunter, recounts his early days in Kensington, London and how a possible encounter with a young woman led him to a task at Anglo American. BizNews, Alec Hogg, chooses the spirit of the well-known futurist, earning his opinion on the blockade and how the global can be reshaped through Covid-19. Clem Sunter also presents his perspectives on President Cyril Ramaphosa. – Jarryd Neves
Our guest in this episode is a boy from Kensington, London, whose possible encounter with a young woman sitting on a wall in Cornwall sent him on an adventure, which was to have a massive effect on South Africa’s nonviolent transition. intervened fate, the focus of Clem Sunter’s life had been playing on the billboard of a Rolling Stones concert at his Oxford university.
He was part of a folk duo named Clem and John. Like the other visitors to this program, Clem decided on the basis that if his story was captured as a book, it would probably be a bestseller. futuristic has not yet written this autobiography.
I don’t think you know, Clem, but you’re our top popular commentator on our podcast. The one you gave about you and Julius Malema fighting for the same economic freedoms, there are still other people who come there every month. . It’s great to get in the way of you, don’t you live in Park View anymore?
No, I moved to Somerset West, I’m in a position called Helderberg Village, which is a retirement town. It’s great here. We have the mountains. But, of course, like everyone else in South Africa, and in the world, we were stuck.
What do you think of the whole lockdown story?
I’m completely in favor of that, in fact, we’re targeting a million deaths and 30 million cases. It’s more than just a flu. There’s a script I wrote about two months ago, titled “A Lot of Noise for Nothing,” that’s still considered through many other people, adding Donald Trump, that we just have to move on now. Virus. So I’m very professional.
Of course, there are many emotional disorders in which other people revel as a result of employer closure. Thank God for the virtual age, because we control to stay in touch. If that happened 50 or 100 years ago, we wouldn’t. it’s been to do that.
About 50 years ago, you were born in the war, World War II. Was it difficult to grow up in post-war Britain?
Not really. We had ration cards in Londres. No forget them when I was a kid and you went to a British restaurant and ate a cake at home. I lived in Kensington. take my style boat and sail it into the circular pond in Kensington Gardens.
You didn’t feel it when you were young, when we started to realize the kind of consequences of war, the total position had reopened, I don’t have the kind of war memories my father, for example, had because he fought there.
Is there any parallel to what we’re going through right now?Many others have called this combat opposed to Covid a war, which only rivals through global wars. Is this an exaggeration?
Clearly this is a great occasion for me. We don’t know how this will be done to replace this century of the previous one, it’s another kind of war. He opposes an invisible virus. But the blockade, in a sense, has never taken place before. Even when there were wonderful wars, you didn’t have the kind of blockade we saw in the world. Only now are we beginning to adapt to some of the long-term consequences of this blockade.
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We could even see, for example, the conversion nature of the paintings and other people leaving the city center to be more in the countryside. People don’t pass on the tube in London, Cape Town or anywhere else because they’re moving on to paintings from home. So it’s going on to have many long-term consequences, like the two wonderful wars of the last century.
Interesting point, that. I don’t forget a publisher Larry Page wrote at the FT, this will have to be five or six years ago, where he predicted that city space costs would decrease because other people live in more pleasant areas, so to speak. and the adoption of remote work. Well, it took a Covid crisis for the rest of us to start seeing that it was a possibility.
Absolute possibility. Of course, this can be just obviously genuine real estate offices and corporations that have offices and shopping malls. I mean, I just saw that Amazon is looking for 100,000 more workers because of the online shopping call.
We’re returning to a new normal, not the old normal. It will be very attractive to see how everything is going, but the only thing I think is frustrating for everyone is how long the virus lasts. It reminds me of many World War I tactics when, when it broke out, other people thought it would end at Christmas 1914. Of course, that’s not the case. It’s a long, terrible war. In a sense, we still don’t know what the overall game of this pandemic will be.
Would it be years?
Well, it’s obviously based on a vaccine and, you know, there are so many things that put that paint on a vaccine, but HIV/AIDS doesn’t have a vaccine, so we’ll have to wait and see. It’s an uncertainty. Even if we have an effective vaccine, there are the economic consequences of the blockade that we still have to do with what is happening. This virus is just a virus and we may have another virus of the same type in 10 so other people would want to be informed of that fun so that we are better prepared for the next one.
Just the scripts. Before you get to that point, your stage: Oxford University. Are you proud to be there, at the forefront of creating a vaccine?
I’m immensely proud that the university is there, in the foreground. I know you’ve only had one bad outcome regarding the judgment you’re making. But this turns out to be for something else, since they’re back. in operation with the test I wish you the most productive of luck. There is a glorious spirit in it; Oxford.
In my case, he taught me to think about the future, because I had this glorious philosopher, whom I went to every week for an instruction, named Anthony Quinson, probably the king of logic at the time at Oxford. we didn’t agree on anything. Then he would say to me, “Sometimes the Catholic Church has to go to the Moulin Rouge. “
From a South African perspective, Harry Oppenheimer has used Oxford and Cambridge and, in particular, others like you who have made PPE (politics, philosophy and economics) to provide information to Anglo American. At this stage, it was by far the largest company in South Africa. and a world-leading company. But how did they hire him?How did you know they existed?
It is one of the things that I communicate a lot about, because life is full of unforeseen crossroads and having a satisfied life is taking the right path, when you come to a concrete crossroads, in this case I had left Oxford and on holiday. in Cornwall. I met a young woman who wanted to sail with me in a race and we got here last. He invited me to dinner with his father, who turned out to be Anglo’s general manager in London at the time.
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Then he said, “Why don’t you come to an interview?” So I said, “Yes, it’s okay. I’m thinking of going back to college, but I’ll try. “I met in London and got the job of apprentice control there in 1966. C So, it’s a natural coincidence If this young woman hadn’t been sitting on an outdoor wall in a Cornish pub at one point, she would have had a totally different life.
His career at Anglo American has been impressive in every aspect. Become head of the gold and uranium department of the world’s largest gold manufacturer at the time. While there, he came to know or communicate a lot with the current president. of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa? Since he’s very active in unions?
Absolumento. Not forget my first meeting with him, in our HR guy’s workplace. at that moment. Here’s this young man dressed in a leather jacket full of charisma. They gave us good. He was a very difficult rookie, when we had to give them a rookie, however, we became very intelligent friends and even went fishing together. And I must say there wasn’t a bachelor agreement that he didn’t have.
When other people ask me if I think he will in South Africa, I tell them I’m one of the other people who thinks he’s going to put us on the right track because he’s those leadership qualities. Yes, he has a tendency to seek consensus. But like Nelson Mandela, he can lead from the front, as he has shown in this pandemic and after the pandemic.
You discussed the way and your contribution to South Africa – if you look back a hundred years from now – would be the advent of the situation by making plans for a very recalcitrant political elite in the 1980s.
Where did all this come from?Start forward and employ others like Pierre Wack of the Royal Dutch Shell to start exploring the odds of seeing where South Africa can go instead of crossing the abyss, which seemed safe for everyone.
We had a Belgian economist in our London and he learned of pierre’s paintings with Ted Newland, and either had created scenarios in the oil market, either in the early 1970s or in the last decade of 1970, catching surprises in oil prices. Time. And Shell acted at the surprise moment of oil costs and made some cash and Pierre has become a legend in London.
And we think: if he can do it for oil, maybe he can do it for a mining company as well. So we asked him to come to South Africa, which he did in the early 1980s, and give us a lecture in the English language. committee room, and at that time I was Anglo’s executive secretary. And we were impressed, not only by what he said, but also by his appearance.
He had some kind of hooded eyes, a goat beard. He looked like a futurist, and before he started, he said, “Can I beget?”So we all thought he was going to appease a Gauloises, being French. Instead, he pulled out two wands of incense, lit them, and said, “I think in the long run it’ll be much better if I smell the incense. “So he touched us.
And then Gavin Relly, who was president at the time, hired him on the spot and said, “Who can take over the service as an internal Anglo?”And that’s my kind of opportunity at the moment, so to speak. said, “Clem, would you dare do that? And that’s the story that started to spread to me.
And we established groups in London and South Africa to do many situation studies for the 1990s; We called it Le Monde in South Africa in the 1990s, and we finished it around 1985. We made the presentation internally for all of us, our employees, and there’s such an impressive response.
I went to see Gavin and said, “Would you mind if I gave one or two public lectures?And I think that shows the kind of generosity of spirit Gavin had with Harry, because he doesn’t say, ‘Oh, no, those are internal studies we can’t show. ‘He said, “Yes, it happens there.
Then, the first convention I gave was held in KwaZulu-Natal, a service organized through Mangosuthu Buthelezi in Pietermaritzburg. And it was so good that they gave us a lot of phone calls the next day to say, “Could you make this presentation?elsewhere to other groups?” And then Gavin, along with a few other guys: our economist and head of corporate affairs, Michael Spicer and Jim Bass. I said, “You go there. “
And so we talk about 25,000 people. And yes, I spoke with the firm, at that time De Klerk was chairing the assembly with Pik Botha and I have made my wonderful path of negotiation that leads to an agreement, that is the only situation, and the low trace of leading to a civil war . and a wasteland as a situation of choice.
And I can see that FW was a little worried, but he turned to Pik Botha and said, “What do you think of this guy?And Pik said, “Oh, I think it’s great, and I think he communicates with the MPs. and communicates with the army, the police and everyone. “And so it became a great conversation replacement.
I even spoke to Broederbond at Rand Afrikaans University, and that’s what she learned: she allowed the conversation to be replaced, because there were so many other actors in South Africa at the time. We all know that. But he has achieved the only thing he intends to do in making plans, which is to replace the nature of the conversation.
But is it rarely that interesting? Because until then, in 1985, a lot of people might think this was Rubicon’s speech. It was the end of the debt.
Maybe it’s a situation similar to the one we have in South Africa right now, with an economy that’s shredded in many ways, so I guess there might be some parallels you could see today.
Si. De fact, Bobby Godsell and Michael Odied, who were the main creators of the top road and low road scenarios, seemed very prophetic in the scripts. They said there are two crossroads: there is the political crossroads, where we have to negotiate with genuine leaders, rather than forcing a synthetic solution in South Africa.
And there is a moment of crossroads, which is the economic crossroads, which is that we have to place the right formula for a much more inclusive economy, that has a much more inclusive democracy, and that is precisely where we are right now of the pandemic.
We’ll have to do everything we can now to create an inclusive economy because we have nothing to lose now.
We’ll have to, like I said when I was having this remarkable debate with my partner, who’s a fighter for economic freedom. I said, “I’m in economic freedom as much as you are, Julius. It’s just that I need the freedom to do business. ” I need other people to be able to make money on their own.
And now we’re going to have to take this style seriously because the nature of paintings has replaced absolutely since the last century, when giant corporations hired tens of thousands of people and, of course, in South Africa, we had this mining industry, which is not what it used to be. We want to take a look at an absolutely different business style that puts marketing specialists and small businesses first.
I never understood what you meant about a fox until I spent 3 years in the UK when we established our overseas operations there. And look at those foxes in the cities: they were so smart. It’s an amazing animal, which we don’t know in South Africa.
We look at the jackals and think they’re foxes, but that’s not the case. These foxes are quite unusual. And you use Fox a lot in your 17 books about how humans deserve to think of an economic sense and this, from what you just said, turns out to be: if we all become really cunning, maybe we can take advantage of it. .
When I wrote A Fox’s Mind with Chantell Ilbury, we used the Greek poet Archilochus, who said the hedgehog knew a wonderful thing, while the fox knew many small things. Only heaven knows why he did it. But then it became a very popular e-book in the UK through a professor who was there when I was at Oxford named Isaiah Berlin, called The Hedgehog and the Fox.
And I think it was a glorious way to illustrate the difference between situation-making plans and the type of forecast that took a position in a kind of traditional strategy-making plans, because with situation-making plans, one looks at several futures, flags.
It then applies an intuitive probability to decision-making scenarios, while obviously with the forecast, it bets the store only on that forecast, and we wanted to show that, in fact, the first approach is greater than the second.
And what was great was an American regarded as one of the most productive futurists in the country, Philip Tetlock, who wrote an e-book about 3 years after ours: we published Mind of a Fox in 2001; in 2005, it published a report on 28,000 qualified forecasts in the Americas.
And he used the same analogy we made with hedgehog and fox, and said foxes are much better at capturing the long run and handling it than hedgehogs, so it’s a rather difficult analogy.
And one of his recent books called Calling All Foxes: his time has come, even before Covid, of course. Is this the case even more now, foxes, your time has come?
yes, right. You know, I’ve been saying for a few years that you have to be more agile those days, and what surprises me is that schools and universities haven’t understood how much the workplace has changed in the job market, because they’re probably looking to prepare. scholars for the long-term market place that market site that existed in the last century.
And, in that sense, one of the reasons foxes are adapting to their surroundings, they’re adapting to London, like you said. In addition to being clearly in the woods of the field, and we haven’t noticed that kind of adaptation in the component of many players in South Africa to the game conversion regulations here.
One of them is that if you need to go down to a moderate point of unemployment: say 5%, 6%, if you need to do all those things, you will have to have the task replaced and we ‘I have to create a much more participatory and inclusive economy.
And that’s why I feel that the expression economic freedom is fundamental, because we have cantonal economies alongside the general economy.
They need to be integrated and all the marketers who already exist and who have opened businesses and who are probably in very sensitive cases at the moment with the pandemic, but they will be the cornerstone of the new economy when we reopen.
what like?
Well, I need it to be a solitary operation. I don’t think you’re going to have the kind of overall national progression plan procedure in which you bring in combination an organization of other very smart people who expand a plan and then review to put it into effect downwards. It doesn’t seem to work.
So what I need is for municipalities like Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg to say, well, now let’s move on to all the municipalities in our specific region and look for a successful marketing and say, ‘How can we welcome you to expand your business in the classical economy?
Should we set up an electronic inventory market, for example, for a city so that you can, like eBay, put your business on the site and search crowdfunding for that business?Personally, I believe that both one and both large companies in this country spend 20% of their home chain on starting small businesses.
We did it in Anglo, we have a total assignment called Zimele, which began in the 1990s, where we looked for small black corporations to produce products that we use underground, and it was very successful. And yes, we provide support: monetary support, recommendation and everything else.
It has created a total diversity of startups that obviously now have other clients.
So it takes some kind of alliance between large and small businesses to generate this kind of business revolution.
They did it in Japan, I mean, one of the things we studied in Japan in the 1980s, dating between corporations like Toyota and the other people who made the car parts, and that called it a two-way economy: giant corporations. and small businesses running together. We want something like this in South Africa.
The first thing you need to do is choose the 1000 marketing specialists who are the most productive at Khayelitsha, who are the most productive in Soweto and say, “What can we do to facilitate your business?And we have some, marketing specialists. I mean, take a look at what’s been done so much in the United States right now: the expensive Elon Musk. I went to Pretoria Boys High. We all know he’s a pretty dubious individual, but nevertheless, he did it!
I’m still talking about Siyabulela Xusa, whom we interviewed on an Anglo scholarship panel, which created a rocket box in South Africa so admired by NASA that they called on the minor planet. don’t hire them and make them an example of a future. And that’s what I have to do. I mean, it’s the marketing specialists who replace the nations.
Look América. No’s the president: it’s Henry Ford, it’s Walt Disney, it’s Bill Gates, it’s Steve Jobs. I mean, Steve Jobs had a Syrian father who owned a place to eat in Los Angeles, and then grew up through the Jobs family. But he probably replaced other people more than anyone.
Clem, the situations you told us about, first in March and then in April again. First there were 3 situations for Covid-19, now there are four. The tightrope situation, is this the one we’re going to now?
The tightrope is surely what each and every country crosses, where the government strives not to fall into some kind of Spanish flu, a situation in Spain, as I called it, where it kills millions of people. . I mean, we’re reaching a million dead right now, but we don’t have 20 or 30 million dead, so we have to avoid that at all costs. And, as you rightly say, you should look at the increase in the mortality rate.
On the other hand, of course, is the economic downfall of the 1930s, which I called the camel straw. This is where the pandemic is not too large, but the blockade causes a kind of long and catastrophic era of recession or economic depression. And, of course, governments are looking for that, too.
It is a very prudent balancing act between those two scenarios and, of course, there are many oscillations along the way. We can see it in the UK right now, in the US and everywhere, so it’s a delicate situation.
Other New Age people communicate about the Mayan calendar, which I think began in 2012, when the global was replaced and transformed Is there anything in this that sounds true, even if you’re not a New Ager, that things want to replace, or that the Old Approach would possibly have to be another in the future?
The Alec crisis is the environment, you know. I mean, that’s where Generation Z thinks entirely of us. I mean, I’ve called it the green flag since 1989, when I wrote an e-book with Roy Siegfried and Brian Huntley, two prominent South African environmentalists, where they said the weather was going to be the biggest challenge of the next century. . .
And it may not just be the slow warming of the planet, it will be the maximum excessive weather conditions, and you can see it!You can see the fires in California, Oregon, before this year, noticed from Sydney.
It is desperate, but our generation still advances the economic progression of climate change.
This woman told me when I spoke at school. She said, “Don’t take the Green Flag seriously because guess what?You’ll be dead when it gets toxic. And then we’re going to have to face it.
And I guess that’s why other young people have another opinion about weather replacement because it’s huge. And I know there are other people who say that science is not there, but I am content that there is a link between what is decreasing most often of fires and droughts and all other excessive weather events.
The increased frequency and intensity of these occasions are similar to climate change, and therefore other young people think a lot about our planet for us.
And the effect on that will have — the other thought?
Well, the other thought means that as we get out of this pandemic, it’s probably to see how we can create a greener economy. And I just need Trump to come to the party in this case, because he withdrew from the Paris agreement and, of course, weakened the total movement to verify the creation of a new economy based on new technologies.
But like I told people, we don’t know what those technologies are until Steve Jobs comes in and says if we do it that way, we can be a lot smarter. You did it in the field of social media.
Someone like him has to come and say, “This is how we can produce energy. This is how we can buy products, the carbon footprint is much lower than before. “
There are other people with those brilliant concepts and we want to draw their imagination.
Then let the foxes through.
Absolument. Et especially here in Sud. Et Africa Now I finish any webinar or anything I do with a blessing: let the fox be with you!
Well, this is episode 4 of Alec Hogg’s show, this time starring Clem Sunter, a former leader, author, futurist and possessor of one of the most productive minds ever known.
To pay attention to the full interview, download the link here: The Alec Hogg Show: Meet Clem Sunter – The Ultimate Fox Ep four (or search for the interview on BizNews Radio on the BizNews homepage). Spotify here.
For more information about Clem Sunter:
Clem Sunter on lifting the lock: immersing himself in depression the new Covid-19 image
Inside Covid 19: what comes after the end of the lock; Stanford’s skeptical Dr. B; Clem Sunter; Virus Detector – Ep 21
Clem Sunter: What will life look like when we have the Covid-19 lock?4 scenarios
Lots of noise, camel or shrewd unit: Clem Sunter reports 3 routes for coronavirus
Hear the story of Cyril Ramaphosa in presidential power, told through our own Alec Hogg.
Narrator via Alec Hogg
From like Warren Buffett to Cyril Ramaphosa’s audiobiography.
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