If there is one thing I would like to change about South Africa, and I am not talking about the State President right now, it would be our culture of excuses.  We live in a society where, and I think it starts with the CCMA, that there are just excuses for everything.  One can learn a lot from economies that don’t accept excuses on everything or indeed sports that don’t accept excuses.  

If you want to play on the PGA Tour next year, you have to be in the top 125 money winners this year or otherwise, no matter how many tournaments you have won in the past or how famous you were, you will have to go back to the qualifying school and be one of the top 50 there.  It is interesting to watch the qualifying tournaments, which are not televised or given much attention in South Africa, because you will find, amongst other things, a lot of South Africans playing in it, and lots of golfers that have won major events, but have not done well enough in the past year are now basically back to qualifying.  In South Africa we seem to like a lot of sports where you can have a tied result – whether it is soccer or rugby – and to share the spoils between two teams rather than have a sudden death shootout and have one winner only, which is what golf basically provides.  It does, unfortunately make everyone a little bit softer in some ways.

I was just thinking if one applied the principles of golf to a business, how it would work.  The best example would probably be to take the attorneys in my office and say out of the 8 attorneys each year the top 4, who average the best results for the year, will be allocated cases the next year.  The bottom 4 will go into a qualifying event where they get given 5 or 6 small cases each and the top 2 of those top 4, in terms of what results they get, will have a job the next year and the other 2 will not.  That is pretty much how business and sport works in America and one cannot say it does not work when you see the size of their economy and their collection of Olympic golf medals!  It is not exactly what we are used to and it would not be our way of doing things, but I do think South Africa will be a lot more competitive when people who don’t pull their weight are moved aside far quicker and there are not people to listen to their excuses.  

When it comes to sport, on the PGA Tour, nobody is interested that on that last hole of the qualifying, that you got a bad bounce, the ball ended up in a bad position and as a result you could not make the shot you needed to make to qualify for next year.  That’s it, you are gone – there is no special “excuses” column where those with the best hard luck stories get another chance.  In South Africa if we started talking about the averages, as with my attorneys example, people will start doing the normal discussions – one case is different to another, they got unlucky here, they had a bit of misfortune there, etc.  We need to move away from a culture of excuses, but you can rest assured that I am sure most of you probably will not agree with me and those that do will usually be the top performers.  We have to decide whether we want to be a nanny state, where we look after everybody regardless of their performance, or whether we want to push people to work harder, to achieve more and to be more and the bottom line is that truthfully, it starts in every family and in every business and while in a family you can look after those who don’t do as well, in a business you should not have to carry those who get the worse results in the tests and who get the worst results in cases. It does not matter if they are nice people, friendly and wonderful – if they are not delivering they should get their marching orders because that is the only way to build something better and stronger.