I am glad to see that our data prices are finally beginning to fall.  They are still way too high compared to international prices, but for example, MTN now makes a 1 gig data bundle for R65 and 2 gigs for R99.  I think South Africa has some of the most expensive data in the world and I would certainly support the Twitter campaign #DataMustFall#DMF.

I have always designed pads for my staff over the years with reminders and to do lists, etc and I have just done a new one which I call “Today’s plan of attack”.  It is a pad for my staff to list the things that they need to do and priorities that they have to attend to.  I find these types of lists very useful, particularly when I am working on something and other ideas come up.  I don’t want to stop what I am doing, but I do need to make a note about the things that I need to do and to break them up in different lists – the things I need to do immediately as well as the things that would be nice to do that I don’t have to do now and I think that the pad as well as the index cards that I have recently created for my staff do a good job of that.   I find people that work on lists are more effective than those that don’t and those who believe that they are too bright and have too good a memory to need lists are invariably overrating their capabilities as well as their memory and in that regard I was inspired by a book called “Checklist Manifesto” by Dr Atul Gawande. 

It has been a trend for many years now for golf courses around the world to close and for golf estates, like Blair Atholl, to run into financial problems.  Golf is an extremely expensive sport and there is no doubt that far too many golf courses, golf estates and all things golf have been established.  

In recent months we have seen Nike give up making clubs – so, even the players under sponsorship, such as Rory MciIroy and Tiger Woods, will no longer have any new Nike clubs to play with Nike pulling out of the business.  Adidas owns the Taylormade made brand and they have put that up for sale and most recently, pictured in the photograph alongside this article, Golfsmith, a large range of golf retail shops in the United States, has also gone bankrupt.  There seems to be no end of trouble for the golf industry and there is a long way still to go, in terms of rationalisation and losses, etc before one gets to a healthier position where only financially stable businesses and golf courses remain open.  The number of golf courses is reducing; the number of golf club manufacturers is reducing and we now also see retail golf shops going under.  Obviously, it is still a major international sport, but the over-capacity in the industry has been getting slowly eliminated over the last few years and it is almost as if that is now in its final stages. 

I learnt a valuable lesson recently with a staff member we employed, only to discover how little work the staff member was doing.  That lesson is to always check out the references of the person.  I think there is a tendency, particularly within the legal profession in South Africa, for people to always believe it is going to cause offence or difficulty, to phone the previous employer for a reference.  Instead, we tend to automatically assume that the attorney or secretary is highly regarded in the workplace, well trained and worthy of hiring.  Often, what you get instead, is somebody else’s lemon – somebody that they could not wait to get rid of and that person leaves a trail of destruction, from one firm to another with each firm snapping them up and deciding not to phone the previous employer to find out whether the person is a good employee or not.  

I think due to my writing of my Legalnewsletter which attorneys can join at www.legalnewsletter.co.za, people have automatically assumed over the years that my staff members are all top class and well trained and so I have certainly lost staff on that basis too.  In one notable case, the employment agency phoned me up after about a week to say that the new attorney was furious, that the person they hired from my offices was incapable, had no idea of litigation and had no idea what a serious injury was either.  They asked if I would be so kind as to just give them a letter for the attorney who had hired her confirming that the secretary concerned had been trained in those fields.  I explained, in no uncertain terms, that firstly the staff member had been taken away from my firm without anybody phoning me in the first place, and that I was certainly not going to now, to try and protect the agent’s commission, give an endorsement.  I explained that the secretary concerned had worked in my bill of cost department, and had never worked in litigation and had never been trained in anything to do with litigation or serious injuries, because that is not the department in which she worked!  It is amazing how often people will exaggerate their role in their CV and prospective employers simply see a name, assume that everybody that comes from that firm has been well trained or is a superstar and snaps them up.  The reality is that every business has its weak employees and the better employees are normally well looked after and are not looking around for jobs.  

In any event, in my most recent reminder of this, we discovered to our bitter cost, when the staff member responsible for checking up references waited until the person had done a considerable amount of damage in a relatively short time, before she phoned up the previous employer.  The previous law firm in no time at all told us that they would never hire the individual ever again and as luck would have it, that individual is now off to a new law firm where they oversee even more files than they were at my firm!  An advocate friend of mine told me that the previous firm was probably laughing at us – and I said to him while it was true, the person concerned had spent 7 times longer at that firm than they did at my firm – so I am not sure how loud they would be laughing!