Miriam Altman Quotes

Staff were quite probably going to say one thing, do another, and wait for Maseko to pass through.

I've learned over the years that leadership is everything.

When a lot of other kids during breaks from school were playing or doing other fun activities, I was going to work with my dad, which maybe didn’t seem that fun at the time but I actually thought it was a pretty cool experience. Early entrepreneurship shapens mind

Eskom will have to convince creditors that there is commitment to good governance and a pathway to sustainability. Eskom’s new board is the most important first milestone. Next steps will be to urgently appoint a permanent CEO and round out the Exco in a way that demonstrates a new beginning. Eskom’s communication needs to be open, humble and give stakeholders a true reflection of the state of affairs whether good or bad.

I'm a very driven personality, there's no doubt about that. For success in bringing about this kind of change, you have to be pretty ruthlessly focused. I deal with intense stuff at Telkom and it's an enormous challenge and there's pain and pleasure. It's very exciting, but what if you fail? You can't fail.

The absolutely most important thing for us is that we should be investing in human capability. It is, I think, the most important ingredient to success in any high-growth developing country, and it’s something that we underplay so significantly in South Africa. I think it’s the reason we don’t make progress.

I think that the key problem we face is unproductive ways of doing things. I don't think it’s the technical problem.

Eskom could not build up sufficient reserves to cover the costs of maintenance, replacement or new capacity.

China has moved beyond the stage of imitation and has a growing community of designers and innovators.

Leadership instability is the top challenge faced by many SOEs, and this was certainly the case at Telkom.

People ask about growth. The only way to have sustained growth is actually to have inclusion. It is physically whatever anybody thinks.

Communications is everything for people. It’s the most fundamental thing. And people are getting cut out of communication if they’re not online. It is an incredible enabler, especially when you have an urban configuration like we do, or spatial configuration, where people are very far from opportunity. So it could be a game changer.

Chinese urban planning is legendary, and great thought has been devoted to public spaces.

Young people should leave school with a recognised certificate, be channelled into post-school education and training, and then enabled to access to earning opportunities.

You could see that one of the problems in the company, even though it wasn’t in a competitive market, was that people still had this idea like they were in a monopoly.