Every couple of months, one of the country’s finest writers, Gus Silber, encourages me to apply my mind for The Comet, an e-zine he compiles for another friend, Brightrock’s Suzanne Stevens. Given the demands of Biznews, my freelance writing is restricted to this single client. So I actually look forward to applying my mind – it is for Gus after all – and thoroughly enjoy the assignment. A bonus is that Gus and Suzanne are happy for me to republish on our own website. Here’s my recent contribution on the importance of having dreams. Hope it lifts your spirits. – AH
By Alec Hogg*Every year, Warren Buffett (83), superstar investor and creator of America’s 5th most valuable business plays host to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway. I’ve been seven times to this unique event in Buffett’s hometown of Omaha and this year joined a record 38 000 “pilgrims”.
Buffett and his 54-year business partner Charlie Munger (90), Berkshire’s deputy chairman, spend five hours answering spontaneously posed questions – about the economy, their company, investing and life. Both are avid readers, so usually throw in a book recommendation. This year’s selection was Dream Big, a recent translation from Portuguese which chronicles Berkshire’s new private equity partners 3G Capital of Brazil.
Dream Big. Think about it a moment. Here are two of the world’s most talented business practitioners urging us to read a book promoting the apparent antithesis of their rationality. Dreaming is, well, for dreamers. Business, we’re taught, is about logic and numbers. Not all that airy-fairy stuff. That’s for artists. But there you have it from two of the world’s greatest exponents of wealth creation. If you want success in business, they say, don’t just dream. Dream big.
By the time I got to the Berkshire bookshop the 3G book was, predictably, sold out. So I haven’t read it yet. But I do get what the Oracle of Omaha and his wise sidekick are trying to tell us. Accounting might be the language of business. But it is just the scorekeeper. Imagination and planning makes the difference between a good and great company. Between thriving and just surviving.
Having recently started Biznews.com, this kind of stuff is very appropriate right now. As it is for every entrepreneur. When creating Moneyweb from the room above my garage in 1997, I was able to dream as big as anyone. But a couple years later we listed the company’s shares on the JSE. Priorities changed. Instead of dreaming up schemes my life switched to engaging with shareholders, ensuring we delivered acceptable margins. Strict “corporate governance” – ergo long, boring meetings – suddenly became the priority.
Part of the human condition is that once you get something knocked out of you, it’s hard to rekindle. Especially if, like dreams, that thing is perceived by the world as childish – unsuitable for “mature” beings. But over the past few weeks there’s been this encouragement to dream again. Not just from the Berkshire duo.
I’d never heard of Kevin Gaskell. He’s a tall, slim Brit who describes himself as a businessman who occasionally gives talks. It was my good fortune to be in the audience for his keynote at this year’s PSG Konsult annual conference. Gaskell is a business turnaround specialist – a person bankers and investors call in when all hope appears lost. He delights in achieving the impossible.
Like at Porsche UK where sales had dropped 90% and customer satisfaction surveys ranked the business 31 of the 31 companies operating in the country. Gaskell happily shares his secrets. Because to him they aren’t that. They start, he says, with a dream to create something extraordinary. That’s the only thing to inspire passion, provide a common purpose. And then, he reckons, the magic happens. Within four years, Porsche topped the UK’s customer satisfaction polls and sales surged to new records. And Gaskell has done the same thing a number of times for various other lost causes.
He says every plan starts with a dream big enough to align the team, to provoke them to make a difference. Most of us, he says, are overworked and under-utilised: “People are extraordinary and they enjoy making a difference. Having a dream is the start of that process. It’s rare that you are able to out-spend the competition. But you can always out-think them.”
Host at that conference was Jannie Mouton, one of South Africa’s great entrepreneurs and a personal inspiration for many. Fired just shy of his 50th birthday from the business he created, Mouton has spent the last 18 years building the PSG Group into a R20bn empire. His genius has given us Capitec Bank, the Curro schools and a financial services group that manages R165bn worth of savings for its 150 000 clients.
Mouton’s advice: “Believe in yourself. Have a dream. Read a lot, look at every opportunity, dream it and then formulate your plan. A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.” And keep dreaming of the upside. Mouton’s favourite quote is from Winston Churchill who said “a pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; the optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”
As we are all on this mortal coil for such a short spell, why not make the most of it? By dreaming again. And dreaming big.
* This article first appeared in The Comet, an e-publication produced by Brightrock.
