I have always been fascinated by bosses, my admiration mixed with a sort of feral unease stirred by the reckoning that their breed is not mine, nor ever was.
Part of the distance felt by the likes of me and my fellow army ants is that bosses seem born to the role. From the playground onward they’re genetically marked for the corner office.
At university you’d take care not to be cornered in the territory of future bosses, such as the bar at the Victoria Hotel in Grahamstown. Faced with them in a pack, outnumbered arts students would emit the anxious chittering of vervet monkeys.
These were accountants and economists, nothing special, who happened to have aptitudes not shared by the lesser ink-spotted likes of us. There they were in their veldskoens and rugby shorts, their tucked-in khaki shirts and little-boy haircuts. And on their right flank the lawyers, the ones who forever looked too old for their years.
I guess we were resigned to be mere drones, doomed to take orders from these by-the-book jocks. We certainly weren’t going to make a big noise about it. We’d provide a bit of background colour but otherwise let the pushy buggers get on with it.
In Johannesburg the commerce boys and lawyers were bolstered by engineers, a righteously scary sect that stood so far apart from the usual play-play seditionary spirit of varsity that they appeared to be another strain of human altogether.
One did not lightly go to a gig by Dog Detachment, a rock group made up of engineers whose most cutting style statement was to wear white overalls stitched with the old SA flag. They maintained it was ironic, anarchic, like British punks wearing swastika armbands.
Donkeys’ years later, I interviewed the singer and guitarist from Dog Detachment, Brian Armstrong, for the Sunday Times. I wasn’t surprised to find he’d swaggered straight into the white-collar world, but I was mildly tickled to see where he ended up: it had to be Telkom, it had to be in Pretoria. And of course he had to be a boss.
There will be bosses aplenty at the Top 100 annual prize-giving on Thursday. In the old days the organisers would dragoon all the working stiffs in the Sunday Times office to “host” tables full of these aliens. The journalists would all be in tuxes or cocktail frocks, straining visibly to socialise with managers in suits who made incomprehensible mouth noises to each other.
And yet, beyond the cowed cynicism of us outsiders, one cannot but recognise the achievement of some of these people. In their lifetimes they’ve built companies that employ thousands, that are worth billions. Ridiculous, when seen through the eyes of an unreconstructed worker bee who knows his lowly place. No FirstRand, no Bidvest, no Investec, no Pick n Pay. No Capitec, no PSG, no Naspers. Crazy.
Every year the Top 100 awards function tells you the companies (and the bosses behind them) that yokels like you or I can make money from. (This assumes we ever had spare money to invest, but you know what I mean.)
The winning companies are measured simply on how much their share prices have risen, compounded over five years. There is nowhere to hide, no fiddling about. And as much as it is a retroactive wish list of companies you ruefully know you should have invested in, it also suggests which sectors of the SA economy might be worth keeping an eye on in future.
In 2008 and 2009, when Basil Read won, it was fun to watch the ranks of shambling construction engineers move from table to table, slapping backs and pulling strings — an ill-dressed fraternity of geeks that somehow, miraculously, had got its act together for five years while the born journeymen among us sat back and criticised, nitpicked, belittled, mocked and otherwise made merry sport.
Good for you, bosses. Now go get yourselves a decent haircut and change those shoes.
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