In May 2008, Johannesburg’s Sandton City shopping complex was on the road to recovery from its experience that January, when it was hit hardest of all shopping centres in the country by Eskom’s random power cuts. Sandton City general manager, Gary Vipond, and Dorcas Ledwaba, the director of property management at Liberty Life Properties, which owns the complex, had managed to find ways of saving electricity, and had put a solution in place involving generators and inverters.

It was October 2007, and a perfect early summer’s day in Cape Town. In his small loft office, Michael Meltzer, founder of Zacron Industries CC trading as Polecat, which manufactured and marketed a patented clasp and claw device used in shopfitting as well as many other applications, was deep in thought. His business, which had shown impressive growth since 2005, was poised to take a further quantum leap forward. The question he asked himself was whether he had the capacity to cope with such extensive expansion?

Pick n Pay’s initial steps to address environmental issues in the 1980s culminated in 2007 with the launch of its Sustainable Development Vision and Action Plan. Although the plan commits the organisation to a number of environmentally-friendly goals, a particular focus is on reducing carbon emissions. Pick n Pay has identified climate change, and the carbon emissions that are contributing to the global phenomenon, as presenting a risk not only to the business, but to broader sustainability as well.

Planning and Finance Minister, Luisa Diogo, faced one of her most critical leadership challenges as a government official. She was charged with the negotiations for the approval of a poverty reduction strategy (PRSP), which was a condition for Mozambique receiving significant debt relief as part of a debt initiative sponsored by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. This ‘heavily indebted poor countries’’ (HIPC) initiative was central to Mozambique’s continued economic recovery. Diogo needed to ensure that progress towards economic development continued.

On 8 February 2017, parties to the National Economic Development and Labour Council (NEDLAC)[1] signed an agreement on the introduction of a national minimum wage (NMW). The only party that refused to sign the agreement initially was the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU)[2], but it subsequently signed on 2 March 2017.

On 15 September 2011, news of United Bank of Switzerland’s (UBS) operational failures in its investment banking division hit the market. Kweku Adoboli, a trader who worked at UBS’s central London branch, had beaten the control system and carried out a number of unauthorised trades. The trades cost UBS US$ 2.3 billion in losses – the biggest trading-related loss in the history of banking in Britain, with the impact felt across banks in Europe.

In April 2011, Hani Niayesh, owner and managing director of breakfast cereal manufacturer, Tia’s Muesli, received an unexpected phone call from the Pick n Pay Hypermarket Head Office. The retailer, which formed part of one of South Africa’s biggest supermarket chains, invited Tia’s to list with it again. In 2009, Niayesh had obtained a listing at a few Pick n Pay Hypermarkets in Johannesburg. Eighteen months later he delisted, disillusioned by his experience.

In August 2009, Eran Brill, director of The Phone Shop (Pty) Ltd, a consumer electronic goods retailer, was about to renegotiate the lease on his Sandton City store. This event marked three years since he had taken over the store, at a time when it was struggling to make sales and to meet its debt obligations. Since then, he had managed to put The Phone Shop onto a much sounder financial footing, and he had opened two more stores.

In August 2006, the lease on The Phone Shop – a business that the Brill family had run for the past 18 years – was up for renewal. In recent years, the shop had not performed well, but Eran Brill believed that because it had developed a strong brand over the years, there was potential to make it profitable once again. Still, a lot of people felt it was best simply to close the shop down. Brill wondered whether he should listen to this advice or to his own instincts, and if the latter, what he could do to turn the shop around.

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On 6 August 2012, Benjamin Lawsky, superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS), announced findings from an investigation of Standard Chartered Bank New York (SCBNY). The DFS claimed that over nine years, SCBNY had hidden 60 000 transactions totalling US$250 billion for Iranian banks on which the United States (US) government had imposed sanctions. The announcement resulted in a loss of £4.81 per share from Standard Chartered Bank’s (SCB) stock, erasing £11.5 billion from the bank’s market value.