You can also listen to this podcast on iono.fm here. ADVERTISEMENT CONTINUE READING BELOW JEREMY MAGGS: Hello everybody, and welcome to FixSA here on Moneyweb. I’m Jeremy Maggs. Every fortnight we ask our guests how we can make things a little better in this country. How do we improve matters? How in the shortest space of time can we become a competitive and successful nation once again?
MIRIAM ALTMAN: You might be surprised by what I say, but the absolutely most important thing for us is that we should be investing in human capability. That probably sounds like a tall order and maybe abstract, but it is I think the most important ingredient to success in any high-growth developing country, and it’s something that we underplay so significantly in South Africa. I think it’s the reason we don’t make progress.
When I went to Telkom, you’re right, I was chief of strategy at Telkom for the turnaround. I was brought in by Sipho Maseko. It doesn’t matter what the detail is, but you’ve got the characters who are eating, sleeping, dreaming, and have the capability to do it. We just don’t take that seriously enough at the other end of the spectrum, and I’ll stop there.
MIRIAM ALTMAN: It’s an interesting thing, that. First, you do need the quality of leadership. You need people who are in place for a long time, and you need to be able to drive performance. So when Eskom, for example, sets up a transmission company, it’ll be something like what we had to do at Telkom, where we broke up our wholesale and retail businesses. I don’t know if that makes sense to your listeners.
So the point is that he’s pushing extremely hard on that now, because Eskom has been pushing on it for years, I’ve got to tell you. Now he’s pushing on that. MIRIAM ALTMAN: When we went into Telkom this was a specific choice, and I’m giving this as an example. So we started with that assumption that you can’t fix a company that’s as sort of customer-facing as a company like Telkom is, and then think that you’re smarter than everybody – people who’ve been in the company for like 40 years – sometimes their fathers worked there, and their grandfathers worked for the Post Office. They really love the company and know it, but feel so angry that they’re not being enabled.
MIRIAM ALTMAN: Well, okay, I’ll give you another example from Telkom, because I think it’s quite a good example because we moved fast. I don’t know if you remember, but I had in mind that I wanted people to be able to see the financials change by the mid-year results. I joined in June or July and our mid-year results were in October, and I wanted it to be clear so people would start believing in the storyline that things were going to improve. That was part of the strategy.