Miriam Altman Quotes

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.

The last three years at Telkom have been intense, challenging, rewarding - overall an incredible and life-changing experience.

Learning some Mandarin can really change the overall experience.

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

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

Stuck in a ditch on that lonely Lesotho mountain road, one can try to drive out of it, wait, or walk to the next village for help. One thing is certain. If the truck does not lift out of the ditch, it is going to be a long time before one is back on course to deliver services.

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.

It's true that past efforts have failed. There's been a lot of energy and a lot of great ideas, but it's been inconsistent.

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

Was a teacher in a NYC high school and noticed absenteeism was a huge problem from the first day I stood in front of my students. I realized that parents, an essential partner to help get kids to class, were often uninformed, parents play major role in education besides we teachers.

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

when they do understand, I’ve experienced more random acts of kindness in China than anywhere else.

The only way to have sustained growth is by building human capability, and the reality is the economy. You know, economists, I guess, confuse people, and we're all trained to think about business, but it's not actually a bunch of businesses; it's actually a bunch of people doing a whole lot of things. It’s actually a human system, and that's how we need to treat it to move on.

If you walk away when things aren't going well, I can guarantee you it's a recipe for failure. Participation doesn't guarantee success, but that grip, commitment, and continuation step by step is what's going to make us win.