I recently breakfasted with Jacques Celliers, FNB’s 45 year old CEO who shot to prominence after he tweeted for a boycott of SA Airways. Those couple hours revealed a man with engineer-trained directness and a no-nonsense intellect – an unlikely package for a financial services boss.
So, while many including Zuma’s empty suit finance minister were taken aback, I’d been sufficiently primed. Because apart from his own background, Celliers reflects so many of his generation. He is comfortable to repeat in public that which he states in private. And gatvol at the plundering by the Zuptoids, he’ll happily tell the world “enough is enough”.
This abandonment of the quiet diplomacy of predecessor suggests that the Celliers approach is right for our new times. Earlier this week, Biznews colleague Quentin Wray nailed it by suggesting as geopolitics is now so crucial to the economy, business leaders simply have to get more involved in an area they previously shunned.
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Celliers and two others who have spoken out recently, Sygnia’s Magda Wierczyka and real estate doyen Lew Geffen, “get” that. They appreciate that their customers don’t give a jot how much whispering is happening behind the scenes. We live in a transparent age. It is those business leaders who speak up, not those who seek the shadows, who are in step with global trends.
We’re seeing this play out in the US where their brash version of Jacob Zuma stumbles from one self-inflicted crisis to the next.
American business leaders were mostly delighted when one of their own (or so they thought) won election to the White House. Initially, they flocked to offer assistance, and celebrated when Donald Trump appointed respected former Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as the most powerful member of his cabinet.
Only one eighth of the way into Trump’s term of office, that’s now in full reverse. As the deeply flawed property mogul’s true colours are exposed, US business leaders are now very publicly distancing themselves from him.
Pretoria’s trailblazing export Elon Musk, who created and runs $60bn market cap Tesla Motors, was among the first to dump Trump. At the beginning of June, a day after the global warming denialist withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Change accord, Musk publicly resigned from all presidential councils.
This week, Kenneth Frazier, CEO of pharma giant Merck ($171bn market cap), made an even more public withdrawal from Trump’s manufacturing council. This time it was because of the US president’s dithering over condemning Charlottesville’s white supremacists. Frazier’s lead was quickly followed by counterparts at $168bn microchip giant Intel and the sports clothing group Under Armour.
In our new world, the value of transparent and honest communication is priceless. Businesses which fail to recognise this are going to lose big. Celliers, Musk and their like are on the right side of economic history. Those boardroom seat fillers who still think it is possible to play both sides, are not.
