This year’s Pulitzer Prize went to a book called “Black Flags” by Joby Warrick.  The subtitle of the book, and that is the topic of the book, is the rise of ISIS and it is all about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian head of ISIS and how ISIS has grown as a result of the strategic mistakes of President Bush and Obama.  

In fact, his rise to fame started with President Bush who initially proclaimed that he was involved in the 2001 World Trade Centre terrorism, when planes were flown into the two towers and used that as a basis to invade Iraq.  He was falsely identified as the link between Saddam Husain and Osama Bin Laden and in some ways George Bush gave him fame, and a chance to rise by giving him a notoriety that he had not in fact “earned”.   It is a fascinating read by a journalist who has won a Pulitzer Prize previously with his book, “The Triple Agent” and I certainly found it very informative and of great interest.

I must say one of the new trends I find very irritating is when people apply for a job and copy in the addresses of up to 100 other companies.  In fact, the picture accompanying this particular article is an actual screenshot of some of the recipients, because there were actually more than are included in the screenshot, in an e-mail I received recently.  

I think it is unprofessional, I think it puts people off and while I understand that people are doing it to save them the time of sending out the individual e-mails, or to save the costs at a shop where they are paying for internet time, it just looks awful.  There is also a high probability, with the way that spamming filters work, that all of the people that are listed in the e-mail will have their e-mails considered as spam and being listed on spam engines.  It may explain why, amongst other things, at the moment whenever my staff members send me an e-mail, from my own domain, it shows as a spam e-mail.  

When people include your e-mail address, amongst a whole host of other e-mails and regularly send them out, they increase your risk of having your address listed as a spam e-mail.  Quite often these are from relatively sophisticated people, you potential candidate attorneys applying for jobs and sometimes they make a bad situation even worse and what they do, apart from sending the e-mail to 5, 20 or 100 people at a time, it includes an introduction as how they would very much like to work at your company, having a high regard for it and they list you with all sorts of companies that firstly I may or may not have a high regard for and secondly, many of which do nothing even remotely in the same field or doing the same work as my firm.  Ultimately, I think it is just rude and I think it is a good way to make sure that you will not be taken seriously. 

I enjoyed a recent cover of Time magazine, on the cover of 12 to 19 September edition, headlined “The exercise cure”.  We all know about the benefits of exercise, but this was yet another article taking this further and as they say it is the surprising science of a life changing workout.  The bottom line, for those of you who have not read the article, is that we need to do at least 150 minutes of moderate intense aerobic physical activity each week and do muscle strengthening with weights or bands at least twice a week.  Aerobic exercise alone is not good enough – you need weight training, although that does not have to be with weights, you can do it with resistance bands as well.  Weights basically make muscles grow and the growth of those muscles put pressure on the bones, increasing the density of the bones and so it is absolutely crucial to do weights if you want stronger bones as you get older.  

The rest of the article basically went on to say that essentially doctors should often prescribe, instead of actual antibiotics, exercise and tell people what specific exercise they should use.  Again, with experiments on mice who are sedentary and basically don’t do much exercise, had their muscles shrivel earlier, their hearts weakened, their skin thinned, their hearing worsened and they lost their hair much faster than mice that exercised.  The research again indicates what previous research has, that exercise appears to slow aging at a cellular level.  They also proved that if somebody did 10 minutes of intense workout they could get the same improvements in heart functioning and blood sugar control as a 50 minute workout and so, and it is something I always believed in, they basically said that if you are willing to push hard, which I always describe as hurting yourself, you can get away with surprisingly little exercise.  If you want to take things more slowly and enjoy your exercise, then you would obviously need a little bit more. 

The golf at the Olympics was a huge success.  In fact, let’s quote Gary Player on the golfers who decided not to show up for the Olympics, “Their excuses for missing look pretty feeble now.”  What impressed me the most was the bronze medal winner, Matt Kuchar, who had after all come third, giving interviews for hours.  His parents were phoned to ask how proud they were of their son winning a medal at the Olympics, etc.  He has won numerous PGA events before and he would have come second and third a number of times without anybody bothering to phone his parents – in fact, they don’t phone your parents when you normally win a weekly PGA event, even though the prize money is typically about $1,2 million.  It just shows you how important the Olympics are in that regard and there is no doubt, as I wrote in a blog some weeks ago, before the Olympics, that those who missed out on the Olympics now feel pretty stupid.  

Some of them of course will not be good enough, or highly enough rated in four years’ time to get a chance again and so for some of them it is a once in a lifetime opportunity that has gone missing. Three South African golfers who would have qualified this time were Brandon Grace, Louis Oosthuizen and Charl Schwartzel and it will be very interesting to see, because guaranteed one or two of those will miss out in four years’ time, who it is going to be that will now never get a chance to take part in an Olympics, to represent their country, to take part in opening and closing ceremonies and to mix with the superstar athletes of the world, from a variety of different sports.  In fact, Jordan Spieth, the number two player in the world, took all of about 1 hour, after the men’s Olympic golf finished, to tweet that he will be working hard to make sure he gets to go next time.  That does not exactly reflect any confidence in those who advised him not to go or his own decision to accept that advice and not turn up.  At the end of the day, irony of ironies the gold medal was won by Justin Rose.  The British National Anthem played, he collected his gold medal and once again, he is yet another athlete, although he left a long time ago when he was a small child, born and bred in Johannesburg.   

I was going through the comments on an article in the New York Times, and invariably it was about politics, but the person’s comment, which was selected as one of the best picks of the comments, related to more than just the issue being discussed.  

It was just a reminder, and it is one of those kinds of stories that need to go in those books about not stressing the small stuff.  They said that years ago, when they have just moved to the suburbs from a city, they were planning an elaborate house party, so that they could introduce themselves to all the neighbours and make a good impression and a local advised them, “Don’t worry, your guests will find something bad to say about you anyway.”  It is always good to remember that, no matter what you do, and sometimes in spite of your best efforts, and just because you have actually made the effort, people will find time to criticise you, they will find time to say things about you and however hard it is to accept the advice, you must always appreciate the fact that there is something threatening or worrying to them about you, that they continually have to make such stories.

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. 

I’ve had quite a few people tell me about how well they expect the DA to do in 2019.  I hope that they are right, but I think people get too enthusiastic as a result of the municipal elections.  I don’t believe that the turnout of voters is the same when it comes to the national elections and while I expect the DA to improve on their previous national election results, I don’t think they will improve that much on the municipal election results they achieved this year, on an overall percentage basis.  

I’ve had people go so far as to tell me that when the DA comes into power in 2019 the RABS Bill will not be put into place and while I love to hear things like that, I do not, for one second, believe that the DA will be in power as soon as 2019.  If you ask me for an optimistic scenario for 2019, from a DA perspective, I would imagine at most they will grow 3% to 4% from their current municipal election results of 26,7%, but personally I think that is pushing it somewhat.  One should bear in mind in the last national election in 2014 they got 22,2% and so I think about 28/29% would be a more reasonable percentage now – and that’s an optimistic scenario – a very optimistic one in my opinion. They got that 22,2% after the 2011 municipal elections where they received 23,8% of the vote so there is a trend that they do better in the municipal elections and then when the national elections come they don’t improve much, or go backwards on the results in the municipal elections. They are certainly a party with momentum, they are growing, and the areas that they control seem to be far better run than most other municipalities.  

A growing threat however will also be the growing popularity of the EFF and their policies are not particularly exciting for anybody who is really serious about the economic future of South Africa.  It is so easy to appeal to the disaffected youth, with pipe dreams, when you don’t actually have to rule and put your policies into play, and most of the EFF’s policies, when tested in other countries around the world, particularly in Zimbabwe, have ended in absolute ruin.  One hopes that they do not grow too much, even though they will ultimately contribute as well to a weakened ANC.