Join CFOs Ronel van Dijk, Andrew McMaster and Reeza Isaacs to talk about brand reputation.
“South Africa is a very exciting place to be right now – exciting and terrifying but filled with enough opportunity that businesses from across the world are still putting down roots in the country,” says Graham Fehrsen, MD of CFO South Africa. “Together with global partners, we're planning to help South Africa's finance leaders talk and network in a way that will make a significant difference in their careers and in their businesses.”
CFO South Africa’s upcoming event, which will be held on 15 March at Deloitte in Cape Town, will explore the pivotal role that CFOs play in managing, protecting and leveraging reputational risk. While CFOs have their eyes squarely on the business, the surrounding environment is increasingly unpredictable and a single misstep could have devastating consequences. Leading CFOs Reeza Isaacs (Woolworths) (pictured), Andrew McMaster (Coca-Cola Peninsula Beverages), and Ronel van Dijk (Spur), along with guest speaker Magda Wierzycka (CEO Sygnia), will tackle this; one of the most important business challenges of this year.
PROGRAMME
15h30: Registration
16h00: Keynote by Magda Wierzycka, CEO Sygnia
16h30: Contact Cafe – one-on-one directed conversations with a business leader
17h00: CFO Panel with Ronel van Dijk (Spur), Andrew McMaster (Coca-Cola Peninsula Beverages), and Reeza Isaacs (Woolworths)
18h30: Networking
Woolworths group FD Reeza Isaacs, CFO of the Year 2016 and winner of the same year’s Transformation & Empowerment Award, believes that to be an effective finance executive, you need to be a great people manager. He says in this interview,
“Two words come to mind: challenge and support. Empower is a third one. I want the best people around me. I encourage a collaborative approach, with debate and discussion. I prefer to bring people along with me, instead of telling them what to do. We have a team culture where people feel they can rely on their colleagues. That means they can build on relationships between them. It is important to make people feel empowered.”
Ronel van Dijk, CFO of Spur Group, joined Spur head office as group FM in January 2003 and was appointed CFO and company secretary in January 2005. She talks here about challenge, saying, “I believe that the greatest challenge for any company in any economic environment is to remain topical. With ‘topical’ I mean that it has to remain attractive to its customers on every level: the image, the product, the pricing and the communication.”
“Finance wasn’t specifically my chosen career, and I fell into doing a CA the hard way – my dad pulled the financial plug on me and said good luck my boy. I had no choice but to get a job,” says Andrew McMaster, FD of Coca-Cola Peninsula Beverages. In this interview, Andrew talks about the importance of big picture thinking. He says,
“One has to have context of the environment that you’re in – the micro context, the macro, the world, brands, trends, etc. Part of this context is understanding what your own purpose and vision is. We have become very clear on what our purpose is in the world. As a finance person, I’ve always stayed clear of talking about profit. I talk around this. I think, if your purpose is talking to something slightly greater than your day-to-day function, and greater than just making a profit, this drives you. Your vision has got to talk to this; you’ve got to experience the journey. If you know where you’re going, you can take diversions along the way, as long as you have the context of where you’re going to end up and what you’re going to encounter along the way.”
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