Johannesburg - South Africa’s largest financial daily launched a business show on Monday on CliffCentral.com, the multi-platform broadcaster that debuted earlier this month. Candid Business is anchored by Business Report editor Ellis Mnyandu, the show’s executive producer.
The show is broadcast live on Mondays from 1pm to 2pm and is Business Report’s first foray into digital broadcasting.
Business Report’s partnership with CliffCentral.com also involves a show on leadership matters, hosted by Business Report leadership page contributor Adriaan Groenewald. The show, called The Leadership Platform, features Mnyandu and Gareth Armstrong as co-hosts and is broadcast on Mondays from noon to 1pm.
“By putting the business show and the leadership show back to back, we want to give listeners unrivalled access to top business minds and top leaders in a seamless way,” Mnyandu said after the launch.
Groenewald said: “The essence is that we want to revolutionise leadership development, leadership conversations and confront leadership challenges in our society that prevent us from achieving our full potential.”
On Monday former Eskom chief executive Jacob Maroga was the guest on the leadership show. He reflected on his tenure at the helm of this complex organisation, tasked with keeping the lights burning.
Meanwhile, Candid Business focused on the outlook for President Jacob Zuma’s second administration, with expert views from Econometrix chief economist Azar Jammine.
He highlighted the need for education and training to improve in order to reduce unemployment in South Africa.
Jammine felt it was a good idea for Pravin Gordhan to be reappointed as finance minster. On the other hand, he called for the number of cabinet ministers to be reduced.
A final point made by Jammine was that it was vital for South Africa to have good leadership in order to realise its potential.
Mnyandu and Arnie Hicks, the co-host and associate producer of Candid Business, then interviewed the Reputation Institute’s country manager, Trevor Ndlazi, regarding its recent survey on the reputations of South African corporations. Woolworths came out tops.
When asked to reflect on the country’s reputation, Ndlazi said that South Africans had a poor view of their own nation.
South Africa has suffered a series of incidents that had knocked the national psyche, such as the Marikana tragedy, where 34 people died on August 16, 2012 when police opened fire on striking mineworkers at the Lonmin mine, he said.
On the positive front, Ndlazi said that the Oscar Pistorius murder trial had enhanced the country’s reputation as it showed that South Africa had a working judiciary.
The Reputation Institute recently found that Woolworths had the best reputation among local companies. It led the field on all reputation dimensions: leadership, citizenship, governance, workplace, innovation, products and services, and performance.
Mnyandu queried Woolworths’s ranking given incidents such as the plagiarism battle with Frankie’s Olde Soft Drink Company.
“We gave Woolworths the benefit of the doubt when it came to the Frankie's incident,” Ndlazi said, adding that this was a testament to what a good reputation could do for a company.
In 2012, the Advertising Standards Authority ruled that Woolworths’s vintage cold drink range was an imitation of Frankie’s soft drink range and as a result Woolworths agreed to withdraw the private label beverages.
When asked why Vodacom’s reputation had declined, Ndlazi said the cellular giant’s standing could have dropped because of its handling of the mobile termination rates saga. However, he reiterated that the annual survey was not about finding winners or losers. - Business Report