Good morning. I’m Alec Hogg and this is The Rational Perspective. When I was putting on my cufflinks this morning, I picked up this one. Now, it’s probably a little bit too small for you to see but it’s from an organisation, called NOSA, which used to be (and probably still is) responsible for safety in industry and mining in South Africa. They had a paradigm in the past anyway (and they probably did a pretty good job from the way they were looking at it) that dozens of debts on the mines were actually, an acceptable hazard of doing business. Of course, that paradigm is very different today.
I had a chat with Impala’s Chief Executive, Terence Goodlace and one of the great achievements he felt; of the past six months of his company was that in the last three months of the year the tens of thousands of people who went down under the ground to do the mining for Impala, all came back up safely. He was most distressed about an issue that happened in August where five lives were lost. He felt it was a consequence of a bit of slackness coming in after the long strike.
The reason I’m talking about paradigms is that maybe we need one in South Africa – a new paradigm. Who better to give us advice on this, than Clay Christensen – the world’s greatest business thinker? I got to meet my hero again at the Accenture Conference and I spent 20 minutes interviewing Clay. I asked him if he were to have a look at the South African dilemma, what he would do.  His view was ‘well, you can apply theories to everything, including the social area and the issues/challenges that South Africa faces’. He said that in the theory of disruption (for which, he is of course, world famous) what happened there was an enabling or the entry of poorly resourced people at the bottom end of the market – poorly resourced companies, rather. – and the way that they eventually built their way up the chain and became equal or even better than the more privileged market participants.  What does that mean?
Well, the key there is ‘entry’. Labour legislation that is tight and inflexible stops people from entering into the great scheme of the marketplace. It reinforces the status quo and reinforces issues that South Africa is trying to deal with. Time for a new paradigm. Let people into the market. Make entry easy. Attack those inflexible labour laws and flourish.
