25 July 2008
	FM Campus Recruitment Edition Defy a dreary destiny By Rob Rose

Your qualifications needn't be the sum total of your career. In fact, many of industry's most powerful people work in specialities they didn't qualify for For a guy who mused an awful lot nearly 2 300 years ago and probably had constant olive breath, Aristotle sure had remarkable foresight about the drudgery of modern employment when he said that all paid jobs "absorb and degrade the mind". Elizabeth Bradley Of course, it was easy for him to be poncey about the capitalist ethic. As a member of the aristocracy, he had a thronging kennel of well-trained slaves to do everything from polishing the family silver to fishing out the R2 coins for the local chariot guards. But Aristotle had it right in one respect: there is no point shackling yourself to a dreary career simply because you've trained for it. Cynthia Carroll The top echelon of S A business is littered with people who did not train for the high office from which they now boss people around. And whisper it, but some of those people hold nothing more than a BA degree, the modern equivalent of picking up your neolithic hammer to go and sort out that bothersome mammoth making a racket outside the cave once and for all. Bobby Godsell, who quit last year as CEO of AngloGold Ashanti, began his business career at Anglo in 1974 with not much more than a BA in sociology and philosophy from Natal University and a master's in liberal ethics from Cape Town. Peter Matlare, who has taken the poisoned chalice of rooting out evil in price-fixer extraordinaire Tiger Brands, holds a master's degree in political economy from the University of York and a BA in political science. Elizabeth Bradley, the richest woman in SA, with R1,4bn in wealth, according to Who Owns Whom, got to where she is by virtue of a BSc from the University of the Free State, supplemented by a master's degree in science from the University of London. The noble pursuit of geology was the choice of Anglo American CEO Cynthia Carroll, (Skidmore College in New York, 1978) who is now the seventh most powerful woman in the world, according to Forbes. John Copelyn, the CEO of Hoskens Consolidated Investments (HCI), held only a BA, specialising in African governments. Today, he is in charge of things like e.tv and Southern Sun and has a personal wealth estimated north of R800m. Themba Gamedze Equally, the exceedingly eloquent Themba Gamedze came to be a director of Sanlam by way of a BA and BSc specialising in mathematics. Eddie Keizan, the chair of Tiger Wheels, came to his illustrious position based not so much on engineering expertise, but a 12-year career in motor sports spanning the 1970s, punctuated by winning the Roof of Africa Rally a few times and the SA Formula 5000 championship. This is not just a local phenomenon. "iGod" Steve Jobs, a man whose personal fortune is now estimated at about US$5,4bn, is perhaps the coolest university dropout. He made his name after leaving Reed College, Oregon, to work at video game company Atari. This all suggests that former US president Teddy Roosevelt had it right when he said that if someone asks you if you can do a job, tell them, "Certainly I can," then get busy and find out how to do it. Roosevelt certainly did a better job of running the country than George Bush, who had an immaculate grooming in business schools throughout the US, yet through a curious political autism, cannot seem to find his way around any word with more than three syllables. The point is that thinking outside the "qualifications box" can result in you finding a career you could never have imagined. Finally, a cautionary tale that expert scholarship does not always produce the finished product can be found in Allan Knott-Craig, the CEO of Vodacom. Knott-Craig's degree in electrical engineering from UCT was a good start, but you would expect that a man with a master's degree in business leadership from Unisa should avoid subjecting people to that creepy meerkat on such a regular basis with "branding" as his only excuse. His legacy as the "father of SA's cellphone industry" will be tainted by his dubious reputation for having inspired a 16 000-strong Facebook group against the Vodacom meerkat. But, then, if the world was fair and a university degree guaranteed good taste, there would probably be fewer architects conspiring to build Tuscan developments in Fourways. Rob Rose writes for the FM