What World Class really means – and why so few people get it

As you’ll see from the quality of today’s Rational Perspective video, we’re upping our game. Because while our team at Biznews is obsessed at becoming World Class. In every possible way. And that’s the subject of today’s contribution. Being World Class takes so much more than simply claiming it. Indeed, at the time when the New SA dawned two decades back, the country’s leading business strategist Tony Manning reckoned that the country possessed only one World Class business – SA Breweries. An interesting topic. And for any developing country, especially those suffering from Drift, a critically important one. – AH 

ALEC HOGG: It’s Friday, the 5^th of December. I’m Alec Hogg and this is the Rational Perspective. I’d like to talk this morning, about world class, what it means, and why so few people actually get it.

I had an experience yesterday with a U.S.-based company that really was world class. We did a two-year contract in a few minutes, all electronically, all with the press of a few keys and a short phone call from their New York office. It got me thinking about a talk that I gave on Monday at which, one of the members of the audience stood up and said ‘what is this low-hanging fruit that you talk about, in Africa’. Anyone who’s travelled into Africa would know the opportunities are abundant, perhaps not so in South Africa but elsewhere, it certainly is.

The reason why he wasn’t aware of this is because he hadn’t travelled into those parts of the world. I got to thinking about this. How can we be called world class if you haven’t compared it with the best that there is elsewhere? One of my mentors who became the Chairman of a major banking corporation had a Doctorate in Economics. He said to me that every time he took an overseas trip, it was like another new degree because he got to see what was really happening in other parts of the world and he got to judge what is, and isn’t world class.

Then you have to think about what’s going on in Zimbabwe at the moment where there is a Shakespearean tragedy being written. A 90-year old despot, but even more so, his young companion (now wife) to whom she bore two children while his first wife was dying with a kidney disease. Anyway, this 49-year old woman – Grace – is the feature of an article on Biznews this morning. A village girl who thinks nothing of spending $5m on a wedding while her country is one of the poorest in the world, and she believes that she is there through her own aspiration and her own intellect, rather than the patronage of her husband.

Be that as it may, Zimbabweans accept it. Why? Perhaps because they don’t really know what world class means…perhaps because they haven’t had the opportunity to travel…perhaps because that is the fate to which poor people in the world are always subjected. Get out there. Go and see what world class is, and then you’ll laugh when you see a banner from the Johannesburg City Council saying ‘Johannesburg – a world class city’.

This has been the Rational Perspective.

eMail response from Baadier Sydow:

I think this is indicative of the majority of the larger companies in agencies locally in my experience. Every time we deal with foreign companies it is an absolute pleasure regardless of the time of day in there timezones. The staff are knowledgeable and display a level of empathy that is sadly lacking when dealing with local companies. It’s a blanket statement and I’m sure there are local companies that do well but there’s no surprise in the fact that we get most of the software services we use on daily basis from overseas.