I have recently started reading a book by Susan Caine called “Quiet – the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking.” I find it particularly interesting, because although with all of my advertising campaigns, TV and radio appearances and speeches that I have given over the years, people assume that I am an extrovert but I am very much the opposite.

Typically speaking, introverts are people who enjoy solitude, expressing themselves in writing, have a horror of small talk and generally prefer to be at home. The problem for introverts is that this is very much a world that rewards extroverted behaviour, where people prefer to be surrounded by those who are the life and soul of the party and who enjoy socialising.

The book also gives advices on how to assist any children that you have who may be introverted, and of course being introverted yourself does not mean that your children are introverted – I have some extremely extroverted children, as well as one child, who at the moment, is very introverted. Apparently the key is to try and teach introverted children how to at least “fake it” by smiling and in making eye contact. Making solid eye contact is much easier said than done for those who are introverted as it is something many are extremely uncomfortable with – which once again is a problem in the modern world, where in particular a lot of extroverts mistakenly believe that a long steady stare is a sign of trustworthiness, and your desire to not make too much eye contact means you must be dishonest or “up to something”.
Again, we make the mistake of judging people by their race, religion or their cultural background and a lot more study needs to be done about different personalities and teachers and parents in particular need to understand that extroverted and introverted people both have different talents and to understand that. While it is certainly easier to succeed in a society when you are extroverted, it certainly has not stopped introverts like Warren Buffett or Bill Gates from being successful.

I think it is important that we all strive to be the best that we can be, and when things go right, one accepts that there are many other factors that make each of us who we are. Some of those factors are about good luck or bad luck, and for example, the parents that you are born too and their economic status can really determine your future to a large extent. If you grow up in the right family, with a culture, for example, of reading, and parents who promote University and further education, then you are very likely to go and do those things, and so usually, but not guaranteed of course, get a little further ahead in life. If you don’t, you are at a considerable disadvantage – and it is one of the reasons that I never really had problems with reasonable taxes.

The bottom line is that nobody is self-made, you don’t just become who you are because you are “talented”, but it rather depends on a lot of factors, for example, in my case, getting lucky with parents and a mother who promoted education very heavily. I was reading newspapers at the age of 8, and I cannot help but feel that that focus that I got is entirely responsible for what I have managed to achieve in terms of my education and a little bit of business success. It is always important to understand that there are so many people out there who never got the chance. By the same token, there are people who sit and do jobs, who do get lots of chances, who blow every cent that they earn, who decide that indulging themselves is better than giving their children an education, and who ruin all the opportunities they get in life and for those, I have never really had any sympathy. The one thing they always have lots of are excuses.

Most people are familiar with the Iron Man movies, and Tony Stark, the millionaire who wears the mechanised suit and becomes the Iron Man. A company called Ekso Bionics is busy designing the robotic Ekso skeletons, which can either replace or assist with some of our functions as humans.

Ultimately, they are planning suits that can be worn, so as to allow people to lift heavier things or do jobs that human beings cannot at the moment, but they are also working with paralysed people, and people injured in military conflict. The suit costs $130 000,00 but basically it allows somebody to get up out of a wheelchair, and with the aid of the robotic suit, to walk, even if they are paralysed. They have also, as one could guess, been given funding to develop a military product. There is a long way to go and they plan for a more personal device to be available in 2014 for a then reduced cost of $50 000,00, but there is clearly a lot of hope for people who are currently in wheelchairs and who may wish to try something like this.

There were a lot of comments about my last blog article of the CCMA. A lot of people basically said that there is another side to the story, and that is when employees are working for terrible firms which don’t pay them and abuse them, etc they need to have rights. I don’t think anybody would disagree, but the point I am making is that the vast majority of big or medium size firms have a vast majority of staff members who are either happy or at least satisfied and are not having problems. The minority – whether it is 5% or 10% of staff members – that do have a problem are normally the problem themselves. There are just simply people who don’t have an ability to work, don’t want to work and are begrudgingly there because they need the money, whereas the best workers will always take pride in achieving their goals and doing well irrespective of whether they get the praise that they deserve, or are not noticed. A good work ethic, which normally comes from the parents, is not all that common but from what I have learned, people either have it or they don’t and it really does not matter on who the employer is or isn’t – something that comes from within the individual.

I think a few or so misunderstood my perspective as an employer, when it comes to somebody having a history of CCMA complaints, for example at their previous company. It is very easy as an employee to see your perspective but if you were an employer, or you do employ somebody in your private capacity, you will very quickly understand and appreciate that no employer, with any experience of hiring people, is interested in hiring somebody who left their previous job and brought a CCMA complaint against their employer. It spells trouble to an employer, whether employees like to hear that or not. I must distinguish that from the case where, for example, somebody tells me that their previous employer never paid them for the last three months, had financial difficulties and they had to approach the CCMA, but you hardly need to say things that sound like a troubled person – for example the now stripped of her title, FHM model, Jessica Leandra, who as her excuse for using a derogatory racist term, is now going for training on dealing with sexual harassment! In other words, everywhere she goes, men love her so much, that she is so totally harassed that she cannot help but use racist terminology. Most normal people reading that would say, “Please, get over yourself and get counselling for racism, because that is the real problem.” Some people just don’t see what the problem is and mostly in those types of case it is the individual. The bottom line though, is whether people who commented on my last blog like it or not, they do need to understand that indeed you are judged by prospective employers, by your previous work experience, and what your previous employer has to say about you in a reference and if it is bad, it is going to be extremely difficult to get a job at any decent company. It may however not be a problem at those companies where the staff members are not paid for 2 or 3 months!

Any parent will be familiar with the Madelein McCann case, a three year old toddler who vanished while on holiday with her parents in Portugal. It makes one realise how quickly time passes and how we all get older, to be told that that is now six years ago.

The parents still have not given up hope, even after being accused of being murderers by some of the media, who they subsequently sued successfully, and are still hoping their missing daughter will be found. The metropolitan police in England, who the rest of the world typically refer to as Scotland Yard, have announced that they are reopening the investigation and one can only hope that they are finally going to be closer to solving this mystery. Special task forces spent the last year investigating evidence, making repeated visits to Spain and Portugal, and one only hopes for the parents that they do get lucky and she is found alive. Tomorrow is her 9th birthday.

Social networks are beginning to take on more and more collaborative methods, and another example of that is the Waze application available for iPhones. This is basically traffic outsourcing, done for free, although it does drain your battery, by all of those using the application. It allows you, amongst other things, to indicate the presence of police. For example, with absolute pinpoint accuracy, it indicated the presence of a police officer hidden behind a tree, trapping on William Nicol the other day and while there are those that have gripes about that, there certainly cannot be gripes about people, for example posting information about accident scenes, routes to avoid and being able, before commencing your journey each day, to get an accurate report on any possible problems along the road and robots out of order.

The application also allows people to interact with the application by voice control – so you can report traffic and alert others to road hazards just by speaking to your phone. Obviously, it is early days for the application in South Africa, and while it is very popular in Israel, and it will get more powerful in South Africa the more that people are using it. It is also an example of what is to follow – one can for example easily imagine an application showing everybody where all their friends are partying at night, or even for sports events, an application to be able to locate where all your other friends are seated in the same arena and when people get to even start complaining about the same thing, the impact on business or government is also going to be even greater than it is now.

Jessica Leandra dos Santos has had her share of attention in recent days following on her racist tweet. It again illustrates the dangers of giving your personal opinions via BBM or Twitter, especially if they are racist, homophobic or insulting to your company or family. People get fired over comments they write, especially if it’s about a company they work for or people they work with. Facebook or BBM is not the place to express disgust with fellow employee’s, supervisors or employers. Those conversations used to be kept private for the family dining room table at dinner, and its probably safest to continue to do so!

Jessica’s tweets of course were racist and there is no excuse for talking like she did in public or private. It says much about her upbringing. A lot has been made of her winning the FHM Model competition which is really for models who are not well known, and who now promote themselves on the internet via the FHM site hoping to get votes. FHM quickly dismissed what is their own competition by calling it a “mere online poll”. How precisely you get stripped of a title you have already won and been paid for, I don’t know, but the loss of sponsorships – albeit likely to be very small with very small companies – must at least sting as I doubt the sponsorships amount to much more than R1000 a month.

Jessica’s photo’s which can be found on her website at www.jessicaleandra.com illustrate that she campaigned very effectively for votes. She won the bikini/lingerie style competition by using a number of artistic nude photographs undoubtedly to attract votes. So, she clearly know how to go the extra mile – and now what she needs to do, rather than blaming it on men always sexually harassing her, is get over herself, admit that the real problem is racism and go for counselling to tackle that. A quick history of apartheid South Africa would certainly help.

I was reading about the Zappos experience recently and one of the things Zappos do is to ask would-be staff members to make a video of themselves and send it to the company, so that they can decide whether to hire that person or not. In South Africa, firstly you would get some very strange videos and you would also get some complaints from prospective employees that it was inappropriate, but it is surprising, particularly in the legal field, that there are not more would-be candidate attorneys, for example, who send a short video of themselves talking or discussing issues because that would allow you to judge them.
Quite honestly in this day and age you need to do different things to stand out and videos are not that extraordinary anymore – after all, you can already buy 3D video cameras and cameras, and yet nobody is actually attending to presenting themselves via the video format, which, if you are presentable and well-spoken, it is only going to work to your advantage. I guess I will try with the next few candidate attorneys, as that would be quite a good test of their technical abilities as well, and see what responses I get.

Pick ‘n Pay has not been very active at petrol stations such as the Woolworths branches at Engen and some Caltex branches which have Fruit & Veg City stores at the services stations. Pick ‘n Pay is now going to roll out mini Pick ‘n Pay branches at 120 BP petrol stations over the next 5 years. Woolworths and Engen currently have 42 stores and are planning another 34, but it clearly means that Pick ‘n Pay intends to be a big player in this market – which quite frankly, for consumers it is quite convenient late at night when you run out of milk and are on your way home and can fill up with petrol and buy some household goods at the same time.

I think that the new iPad has a fantastic quality to it – at first glance you can notice that the resolution is better and apparently it has a much better camera as well. Against that however, in a world where everything is becoming lighter, the new iPad actually weighs more than the previous iPad, and that is not a great point.
The other consideration is that Apple intends to release a new version every year of each product, but the major upgrade is every two years, so one would expect the major upgrade, in a substantially different iPad in 2013, just as one would expect the iPhone to be released later this year to be a considerable improvement on the current 4S one, which was just the normal yearly upgrade and not the once every two years major facelift and revision.

This is the title of a recent book dealing with the origins of power, prosperity and poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson details what they believe is why any countries have failed, and why some succeed.

The central theory of the book is the link between inclusive economic and political institutions and prosperity. They say that inclusive economic institutions enforce property rights, create level playing fields and encourage investments in new technologies and skills which ultimately lead to more economic growth. The opposite to this is extractive economic institutions that are designed to extract resources from the many, by the few, and fail to protect property rights or provide incentives for economic activity.
Inclusive economic institutions are generally supported by inclusive political institutions where political power is widely distributed and that allows the economy to secure property rights and have an inclusive market economy.

The opposite of this, and which is normally the sign of a nation that will fail in the end, according to the book, are extractive political institutions, “… which concentrate power in the hands of a few, who will then have incentives to maintain and develop extractive economic institutions for their benefit and use the resources they obtain to cement their hold on political power.” The book also points out that because in those types of political institutions those in power benefit a lot, that power in those countries is highly coveted, “…making many groups and individuals fight to obtain it. As a consequence, there will be powerful forces pushing societies under extractive institutions towards political instability.”

I have written before about the labour laws in South Africa which I think are one of the many reasons that most big international companies don’t want to become involved in doing business in South Africa and the experiences of Walmart are certainly not going to impress any other major foreign investors.

The one thing that trigger happy employees forget, when rushing off to labour consultants and people who just ultimately want a share of any compensation that they may or may not get, is that it has a major impact on their future. A CV with gaps in it does not get you a job anywhere because it says you are hiding something and a CV that details a company that you worked for leads to that firm being called about how you work. I had reason the other day to phone a company, to ask for a reference on somebody and was told, “I really don’t want to discuss her at all, the last time I saw her was at the CCMA …”. As an employer, that does not just set off alarm bells, but it is pretty much the funeral of that particular person’s prospects of working with you.

In my own experience, good and competent employees have no trouble in moving from one firm to another, and while there are rare exceptions, and I am personally not interested in them, or hearing them as is the case with most prospective employers, the kind of people that generally go to the CCMA are either very difficult or very poor employees and once I hear that somebody has been involved in disputes with their previous employer, I am simply not interested in hiring them at all.  I certainly didn't this time either.