Listening to the considered and measured tones of McLean Sibanda, head of the Innovation Fund's patent office, it's hard to imagine that he finds it almost impossible to have a round of golf without playing to win.
It's not only on the golf course that he competes but in almost every aspect of his life.
As a child growing up in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, he was always in the top three in his class - quite a feat, considering he was at Plumtree High School, a school that has reportedly produced more Rhodes Scholars than any other in the world.
Sibanda won a scholarship from De Beers to study materials and metallurgical engineering at Wits and moved to SA in 1989 to do so.
De Beers also sponsored his master's degree, for which he did research into better ways of manufacturing synthetic diamond.
While he was learning about the movement of carbon, he was also learning a bit about SA politics. Informed by his black comrades at Wits that it was not acceptable to play for a traditionally white tennis club, Sibanda promptly established the All Sports Council. Few of his fellow students played tennis, so with the support of Wits, he qualified as a professional tennis coach and began coaching fellow students, later becoming a member of Tennis SA's national board of examiners.
Sibanda joined De Beers Industrial Diamonds as a researcher and worked on a number of projects involving synthetic diamond and cubic boron nitride. As time went by he noticed that few "pure" engineers ever seemed to reach board level. "I wanted a qualification that would position me for a leadership role," he says. So a year after joining De Beers he began studying for his LLB.
"I had been exposed to intellectual property (IP) issues - one of my first projects involved the modified properties of diamonds for grinding - so I thought I'd look at law."
By the time he had finished his law degree in 2001 he was leading De Beers' IP management team. But he left De Beers soon after qualifying. "The company was restructuring and didn't seem to have a fully developed IP strategy. I felt there was not much opportunity for me."
So Sibanda went to practical legal training school for six months to consolidate his legal training and prepare for the board exam. He completed his articles at Adams & Adams and qualified as a patent attorney in 2003. "It was challenging and quite mind-boggling at times. It was like learning a new language. You have to think carefully about what you have said and what you will say as you can't be inconsistent in thinking."
But he persevered. "At the time there were no black patent attorneys. I wanted to change that."
It was his mother who brought him up to strive for the best, he says. She was once the lay president of the Methodist C hurch in Zimbabwe, and said " you can do anything you want but have to work hard for it".
In 2004 he moved again, this time to the Innovation Fund. "I was doing too much litigation and too much drafting of specifications and agreements. I wanted to get into commercialisation."
His brief was to establish the fund's IP management office, with the emphasis on commercialisation. And he loves it. "IP is a new field in SA. We haven't really seen IP management here. This is the first generation. What's next is not just protection of IP, but exploitation, where you convert what you have protected into a tangible output. For a developing country, this emphasis is key.
"We've set up a patent attorney development programme to increase IP capacity and the number of black patent attorneys. I've also been involved with national IP policy and setting up technology transfer offices at SA's universities. It is exciting ; this thinking will be the foundation for IP development in this country."
It must be this passion for his job that keeps him there despite the efforts of head-hunters. "What I'm doing feeds into a greater purpose and agenda. I want to see some things I am working on come to fruition. Because when you move on, your projects die."
