Top Corporate Picks

Futureproof your business, career and family with these invaluable insights. This is an essential compendium of trends for anyone who is anxious or excited about thriving in the uncertain decade ahead. Along with accompanying actionable insights to pre-empt and solve the challenges and problems they represent to the serious South African with business, career and family interests to look after, it's a must-have. 

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is upending life, work, and play as we know it and it’s only just getting started. The rise of AI is a milestone on par with the discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel, and the creation of the internet. In short, AI is going to change everything. For some, that’s an exciting prospect. For others, it’s terrifying. However, you feel about AI, there’s no escaping it, whether you’re in a global metropolis or a farmer in rural KwaZulu-Natal. Dr Mark Nasila has been watching AI’s ascent for over a decade, studying its effects on everything from agriculture and aviation to healthcare, education, entertainment, crime prevention, energy management, policy creation, finance, and anything in between, and applying them to his role at one of South Africa’s most successful financial institutions, First National Bank, a division of FirstRand Group. African Artificial Intelligence is a comprehensive and fascinating journey, tracing the rise of AI and its evolution into the emerging technology underpinning all others – from connected devices and smart chatbots to the metaverse. Mark combines unexpected use cases and tales of cutting-edge innovation with a unique and potent argument: harnessing AI to solve Africa’s problems requires embracing it from an African perspective. African nations can’t afford to simply import AI solutions from afar. Instead, Mark contends, they need to rework, remix, and refine AI so it’s able to meet uniquely African challenges in uniquely African ways, and to take advantage of the once-in-a-generation opportunities.

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When a thoughtless tweet by Zelda la Grange unleashed a storm, she was asked: ‘Have you learnt nothing from Nelson Mandela?’ This book is her answer. For years, she was the closest witness of Mandela’s interactions with people both famous and ordinary, and here she draws out his lessons on humility, respect, honesty, how to truly listen and what to do if you realise you have made a grave mistake, a lesson she herself had to learn the hard way.

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In the world of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, capitalists built and controlled mills and factories. That relationship between capital and labour continued in the automobile assembly lines and petrochemical plants of the twentieth century. But no longer: products and production have dematerialised. The goods and services provided by the leading companies of the twenty-first century appear on your screen, fit in your pocket, or occupy your head. Ownership of the means of production is a redundant concept. Workers are the means of production; increasingly, they take the plant home. Capital is a service bought from a specialist supplier with little influence over customer businesses. The professional managers who run modern corporations do not exert authority because they are wealthy; they are wealthy because they exert authority. The pharmaceutical industry (or Big Pharma) creates life-saving vaccines and ramps drug prices up to near-unaffordable levels. Amazon gives us next-day delivery on almost everything and has its workers urinate in bottles rather than take breaks. John Kay's incisive overhaul of our ideas about business redefines our understanding of successful commercial activity and the corporation - and describes how we have come to 'love the product' as we 'hate the producer.' This is a brilliant and original work from one of the greatest economists.

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This book is one of the most consequential intellectual interventions in Africa’s questfor redemption in the 21st century. – Professor Somadoda Fikeni Leaders of the African liberation movements proclaimed ambitious objectives and promised swift dismantling of colonial policies and practices. It was believed that poverty and underdevelopment were consequences of the exploitative policies of the colonial masters, who had no interest in improving living conditions for local communities. Independence and freedom were anticipated to eradicate poverty, ignorance and disease, and the new leadership would accelerateeconomic development and prosperity. However, after more than 50 years of independence, most African countries are still poor and underdeveloped, and this poses a few questions: Have African leaders abandoned their ambitions? Are African challenges more complex than in other regions? Has the political leadership failed to rise to the challenge? In his relentless pursuit of African excellence and development, Professor Lumkile Wiseman Nkuhlu offers profound insights and solutions to the challenges Africa has faced and continues to encounter. He wrestles with the vexing question of how a continent with such a rich history and heritage, as well as potential, remains an underperforming region of the world and offers insights into potential pathways andstrategies for breaking free from the vicious cycle of underdevelopment. Africa can become the world’s production powerhouse in the second half of this century, provided that intentional and purposeful leadership emerges. Purposeful Leadership for Africa in the 21st Century delves into the leadership strategies, qualities and policies needed for an African renewal, aiming to reposition the continent as a strategic and competitive global player.

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