Topic of the week

Strategic intuition

Strategic intuition When Sabine Hulsman saw children of friends glued to the TV watching Teletubbies she immediately realised this could be business. The Dutch had just started a company organising th...

Gain market share on a modest budget

Gain market share on a modest budget Dawn Wing, a South African courier company active in over 40 countries, managed to capture the market from bigger players within 18 months. Initially, it concentra...

Get a venture capitalist on board

Get a venture capitalist on board You are a business owner who starts from zero or wishes to expand her existing business and has no family or friends with excess cash on hand. What to do? Banks? Forg...

Networking: Make the first move

Networking: Make the first move Networking is an effective business strategy.Deliah Soares, a young independent consultant from Brazil, often walks up to the President of the organising committee afte...

How to avoid dumb-sizing!

How to avoid dumb-sizing! It was an American marketer from Silicon Valley who first coined the phrase ‘avoid the bozo* explosion’. He meant to say that if you hire one clueless manager in your company...

Fretting and mulling

Fretting and mulling In a recent South African survey, CEO’s were asked what keeps them awake at night. None of them came up with anything related to work. All fretted about issues with crime. T...

Youth rocking business

Youth rocking business Stories of guys and girls who start a company whilst still in university are mind blowing. Take the Hungarian born Tom Szaky . At the age of 19 he noticed that the excrement of ...

Scare your employees, stop whining and get back to work

Scare your employees, stop whining and get back to work That’s the remarkable anti-recession recipe of George Cloutier*, interviewed recently in the New York Times business section. Cloutier advises s...

Cultural gaps

Cultural gaps Remember the once all important Emotional Intelligence? And the debate on Spiritual Intelligence that some preferred to remodel as Existential Intelligence? The hottest thing now is Cult...