During Helen Zille’s State of the Province address earlier this year she announced some ambitious targets for rolling out high-speed broadband across the Western Cape. I think it’s a great initiative, which will be beneficial to both business and education.

One of the obvious ways in which the internet supports business is through ecommerce, a lot of which – admittedly – involves digital delivery (e.g. music, software or books) or the sale of tickets (i.e. airline, theatre etc). However, a sizeable chunk of online purchases are physical items that need to be delivered. In a time of Facebook, Twitter, and other cutting-edge tech applications, physical delivery is a seriously mundane concept. In fact, it’s so mundane that ecommerce insiders even have to resort to jargon – fulfillment – rather than call it what it is.

Word from commercial real estate in the UK is that retailers are shifting investment from high street stores to warehouses supporting online retail. To borrow from the title of a popular book a few years ago, there’s a lot of cheese being moved.

I always tell my clients that the perfect physical item to sell online is high value and light. That way one can afford to sell with free courier delivery. The reality is that much of what is sold online is both low value and relatively heavy or bulky. For these items the Post Office offers the most practical solution.

I’ll give you an example: as long as the dimensions fit within prescribed parameters, and the item weighs less than 1kg, the Post Office will send it counter-to-counter for around R20. Via courier, the same item can cost up to R100 in metropolitan areas, and up to double that in outlying areas. Yes, it’s possible to negotiate the courier fees, but they will remain many multiples of R20.

While the Post Office’s letter business was killed by email, the internet has created an entirely new one in the form of delivery of online purchases. It’s a hugely important role, both for existing businesses, and for ones that are yet to be founded.

Sadly, the Post Office has no sense of its importance to the economy, or, if it has, it’s doing an excellent job of keeping it a secret. The Post Office – in my experience – is without peer in its depths of utter uselessness to fulfill even its most basic mandate. This is an organisation that is dysfunctional, with a capital D.

For starters, there is no guarantee that your local branch will have the particular stamps you need (imagine going to KFC, only to be told that they have no chicken). The special boxes for the under-R20 shipments are rarely in stock, along with various other articles essential for the postage of an item, either locally or overseas. Systems and procedures vary from branch to branch.

Bulk postal drops have to endure the same interminably long queues as people collecting their pension payout. In Cape Town, Cape Mail is the only option for bulk drops. However, Goodwood/Epping is not necessarily cost-effective or convenient for many businesses.

Once the item has been passed over the counter (to a well-meaning and usually helpful employee) a further sequence of frustrations await. These, admittedly, apply mostly to international parcels sent via surface mail, which are then sent to Durban to await a ship. This wait can be two months, or occasionally, forever.

All the while the online retailer has to placate increasingly irate overseas customers. Calls to Post Office customer service can take an hour to be answered, and their online tracking facility is often not operational. Someone commented on Twitter last year: “How can the Post Office deliver letters if they can’t even deliver a web page?”

Interesting-looking items without a tracking number are often targeted by light-fingered employees. For example, I developed a special package for NoMUshop.co.za that qualifies as a letter, and can therefore be sent cost-effectively via airmail, anywhere in the world. The problem is that some of these envelopes go missing.

So, you can see, there are many ways in which the Post Office frustrates the efficient and effective functioning of businesses that are trying to grow. This beast desperately needs to be fixed. I do need to stress that the individual employees manning the counters, in the majority of cases, try very hard under difficult circumstances, but there is only so much they can do if the entire organisation is broken.

In his fabulous book, The Quest, Daniel Yergin quotes Andris Piebalgs (on energy efficiency) as saying: “It’s very important [for politicians] to be able to cut a red ribbon.”

I think that quote is pertinent with respect to the Post Office. Fixing it doesn’t give politicians photo opportunities at a ribbon-cutting ceremony (like opening the Gautrain, or a new airport building, for example), but it’s just as important for business.

Five years ago I went to a lot of trouble to make contact with the leadership of the Post Office, because I thought that its branches were the most underexploited retail space in the country (and I thought I could improve it). I still think that, but I have subsequently learnt that the problems on the other side of the Post Office counter make its retail underperformance appear quite trivial.

Getting South Africa working isn’t just about large projects. Sometimes, the first step is to get some basics right. The Post Office is an excellent place to start.

I love this explanation of social media.

Fifteen years ago, I visited a barber shop in San Gimignano, where I treated myself to a proper, old-fashioned shave. The man wielding the cutthroat spent the entire time conducting a conversation with his waiting customers, apparently maintaining eye contact with them throughout. You can imagine that this was quite nerve wracking for me, although less so than if I had been in a more bloodthirsty part of Italy.

Shaving in the modern era is quite different. A couple of years ago, I wrote admiringly of the efforts by Procter & Gamble to increase the sales of its Gillette products in India. While price (which they irritatingly trimmed to a quarter of the price in South Africa) was a consideration, the biggest issues they faced were religious and cultural.

For the purposes of that piece I was able to observe the exercise objectively, from the perspective of a marketing practitioner. However, as a consumer, I find it impossible to be objective about Gillette.

I don’t buy into conspiracy theories. There is no cabal of elites pulling the marionette strings on what happens all around the world. However, when it comes to the cost of shaving, there is a pretty good equivalent, in the form of Gillette.

Let’s first get the shaving foam out of the way. As a child, I thought the foam was there to show my father where he still needed to shave. The adult me knows that the lubrication makes the shave more comfortable. However, there are various ways of achieving the same effect, with humble bath soap doing a perfectly good job. Legend has it that Einstein had the same view on the matter.

I think we’re all agreed that the safety razor was an advance on the old cutthroat, and that swivel head, multi-blade razors are a further improvement. But, for eff’s sake, do we really need five blades on the damn things?

This is the basis of Gillette’s bid for world shaving domination. Every few years they change the technology, which not only gives them an excuse to increase their prices, but also traps consumers because the blades are designed to fit specific generations of the razors.

While there may be special offers on the new razors (with a token number of blades), special offers on blades alone are rare. At most, they’ll toss in some shaving foam. And, with the level of shoplifting of blades, supermarkets now keep the blades behind a special counter. So, it gets harder to spend a few minutes deliberating your options before making a purchase.

A couple of months ago I switched to Schick. The blades are almost half the price, and give me a perfectly smooth shave. In my cupboard I also have two generations of Gillette razors, which enables me to take advantage of special offers, should they ever materialise. But, with just two brands on the shelves, price discounting seems a remote prospect.

The options in disposable razors appear to be greater, but apart from the sub-standard experiences I’ve had with disposables, I just can’t cope with the concept of dumping that much plastic.

Why don’t we have more competitors in this arena? Surely the technology isn’t that difficult to replicate. I suspect there are two main barriers to entry. The first comes in the form of the hundreds of millions of existing razors, for which men unthinkingly simply buy replacement blades every month, or two.

Retail distribution is factor number two. The new brand is going to be dead in the water without shelf space.

Finally, while extortionate, the price of blades isn’t high enough to incite revolution amongst consumers. A monthly cost of something between R20 and R50 is irritating, but not a significant enough chunk of anyone’s household budget.

So, unless a bold entrepreneur leaps into the market, we’re stuck with the two brands.

(Apologies to women; I know that we men aren’t the only customers, but most of us shave every day. While we have the choice of not shaving (like you), waxing our faces is not an option. Ouch!)

I’ve subsequently discovered exactly the “bold entrepreneur” I referred to above. Their deal is based upon 4 blades per month, which is faster than I use them, but I can’t fail to be impressed by their sales pitch. Check out this video they posted on YouTube:

I happened to be looking yesterday at the staff complement of a hugely successful investment banking business. Well, my visit to their website wasn’t entirely coincidental, because I wanted to pitch an idea to one of their team.

What struck me was the number of them with Accountancy or Law degrees, and how many had done time at PWC. My immediate response was that this was the perfect team for management by Excel. You know, where the entire venture is modelled on spreadsheets, which is all good and well.

The problem is this, no matter how complex the financial modelling, somewhere in the continuum from raw material to consumer someone needs to be creative. Quite a few people, actually.

I had a little moment in which I could see the lopsidedness of their skills base, and how they desperately need to have crazies like myself floating around from time to time (to keep their business plans sane).

Then, this morning I tuned into Sir Ken Robinson’s talk about the way in which education is killing creativity (yes, that’s the video above). I loved the way he describes us as first being educated from the waist up, and then, once the education starts to focus on the brain, all the attention is skewed to the logical, analytical side.

I can be as analytical as any one of the smart-degree types on the aforementioned investment banker’s payroll. The difference is that I am also completely at home operating on the intuitive, or creative side.

The kind of training that gets someone to the point of wearing a dark suit at an investment bank is designed to eradicate any tolerance for ambiguity or grey areas. I know it’s a gross generalisation to suggest that everyone with that kind of training is going to believe only the tangible output of a spreadsheet. To those who have seen the light (or should I say, the grey), I apologise unreservedly.

Professionally, I often feel a bit ‘square-peggish’. The views of Sir Ken would suggest that perhaps it’s the round hole that needs to have a turn at feeling frustrated.

Cricket, even when played by the likes of Merv Hughes, is the most civilised of sports. Yes, the brashness of twenty-over cricket brings a less genteel dimension, but the sound of willow striking a shiny, red Kookaburra (or vice versa) is the most satisfying “thwack” imaginable.

That, and the hopeful shouts of: “How’s that?” are the sounds of a cricket field. Polite claps, following a good shot, or good bit of fielding, or anything else noteworthy, are the aural contributions that spectators make.

One of the benefits of having flexible work arrangements is that I can park myself next to a cricket field once a week, MacBook on lap, to watch my son’s matches.

So, there I was at the first match of 2011, getting busy with some work, when the calm of the charming, tree-rimmed field was broken by a sound that could only have been produced by a cork exuberantly departing a champagne bottle. And so, with the actions of a couple of fun-loving mothers, started a tradition that has continued into a second season (and even gets a mention in the school magazine!).

It may well be indulgent of me to allocate a couple of hours during a workday, and frivolity of the bubbly aside, it’s something that I find hugely rewarding. During the season, the team also managed to finish two matches on tied scores, which were two of the most exciting limited overs matches I have ever watched (internationals included).

And, when either the work or cricket is boring, there is always the conviviality of sharing a bottle of chilled bubbly with other parents.

For me, holidays are a prime opportunity to pack in a LOT of reading. In previous years I’ve kicked off by diving into a Robert Goddard, or something similar. You know, a plot into which one escapes for a day, or so, and by the time you emerge from the book the daily grind has magically vanished.

This year, I dived straight into the more serious stuff:

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, by Daniel Yergin
If you think the title of this book is daunting, wait until you encounter the book itself. Well, I didn’t because I read it on iPad, but it must be quite a tome in physical form. Yergin won a Pullitzer Prize for his 1992 book The Prize (about oil), and he is something of a one-man energy think-tank. I won’t deny that reading the book requires a fairly substantial commitment; apart from its length, Yergin is not the most polished writer around (and, there are irritating errors, like “amuck” instead of “amok”)

The Quest is a bit like a semester course on oil, gas, coal, nuclear, geo-politics, prospecting, renewables, conservation, electricity, cars, and environmental issues. There is quite a large technical component to the book, but Yergin keeps it all interesting by incorporating some fascinating history (and a suprising cast of characters).

Energy, in its various forms, is something we consume – usually without even thinking about it – every second of every day. The world couldn’t be what it is without electricity and our various forms of vehicular transport, all of which require energy.

I give The Quest a definite thumbs-up. It’s worth making the effort to read this fascinating book.

The 52 Seductions, by Betty Herbert
This book is listed in chronological order of reading; there is absolutely nothing that ties 52 Seductions to The Quest. For starters, Herbert is a good – and funny – writer. Secondly, while the title and plot line suggest that sex is the subject, the book is actually about long term relationship, and marriage in particular.

The (real life) story is based upon a pact made by the author and her husband when they realise after 10 years of marriage that they seldom have sex. It’s not as if love has departed the relationship, far from it. No, desire is the missing ingredient. So they agree to take weekly turns at ‘seducing’ each other. Yes, it is a bit of date night with a twist (not all of them have what you might euphimistically call ‘happy endings’), but it’s really about marriage from the woman’s perspective, which is always a good thing for men to know about.

This is a light and easy read, which I’d also recommend.

Even Silence Has an End, by Ingrid Betancourt
By the time I’d finished this book I’d had a rather intense dose of woman-focused literature. Betancourt was a Colombian politician when she was captured by FARC rebels. It’s not that they were targeting her, but once they had serendipitously netted her they weren’t about to release this valuable bit of political capital. This book is about the six-and-a-half years she was in the jungle as their hostage.

She suffered all kinds of abuse – including being chained to a tree by her neck – and deprivations, which at times included a prohibition from speaking, or being spoken to. What preserves her throughout the ordeal is the realisation that, while she is a captive, she remains free to choose how she is going to respond, and what kind of person she is going to be. This is pretty much the same conclusion reached by Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, which deals with his experiences in Nazi concentration camps.

There were so many FARC hostages in various parts of the jungle that one of the radio stations would broadcast messages recorded by friends and family, which they were able to listen to, sometimes covertly. This component made me think of the fixation we’ve developed with various forms of social media, which enable all kinds of conversations to happen. Betancourt was not only deprived of her liberty, but was restricted to receiving one-way communication only.

Betancourt has written a powerful and thought-provoking book, which I definitely recommend.

Chasing the Devil, by Tim Butcher
Butcher has previously reported from Liberia and Sierra Leone. He returns in order to – literally – follow in the footsteps of Graham Greene, who trekked in 1935 from Freetown, through Sierra Leone, into Liberia, then through Guinea, back into Liberia, and then by boat from Buchanan to Monrovia.

When Greene made the trip he was disenchanted with Europeans. He went in search of a kind of simplicity or purity, which he found in the jungle-dwelling Africans. Butcher has a somewhat different interest, in that he is trying to make sense of the extreme brutality and murderousness which characterised the various internecine wars that have taken place in the region over the past couple of decades.

Butcher observes that the jungle is a harsh environment in which to live. The locals’ best chance at survival is to stick together, which usually means towing the ‘bush’ line. Young men are trained – and indoctrinated – by highly secretive bush societies, or cults. In this context, the local tribe will carry far more sway than a distant government administration which makes no positive contribution to people’s lives, and which may in fact make their lives worse, through corruption and discrimination. He makes the (depressing) observation that, in Africa, Africans survive. In order to thrive they need to go elsewhere.

The presence of valuable natural resources has not improved their lives; if anything, minerals have resulted in more misery, as aggressors seek to control the assets.

Butcher is not only a deep an observant thinker, but also an excellent writer. I’ll be making to effort to read his other book, Blood River, soon.

I previously did a post about our three Weimaraners (here). The puppy, Oliver, has grown up into a seriously athletic dog, who has his own set of idiosyncrasies.

We couldn’t understand how he kept escaping, until we caught him in the act!

This scene, from the movie City Slickers, is one of the few bits of a movie that I can remember vividly. I suppose it addresses something I’ve always struggled with, given my wide range of interests, and I often think of it.

Edmund de Waal, a ceramic artist, is bequeathed a collection of 264 netsuke (small and intricate Japanese carvings) by a great-uncle living in Tokyo. They entered the once-wealthy Ephrussi family in the 1870s when a Paris-based relative, Charles, bought the collection, which he later gave to a Viennese cousin as a wedding gift.

In The Hare With Amber Eyes, de Waal tells the fabulously engaging story of how his family, originating in Odessa, established something of a trans-European trading and banking empire similar to the Rothschilds’. He follows the story of the netsuke to Vienna, where the Jewish Ephrussi have an inevitable assignation with history.

The Ephrussi escape Nazi Austria, but forfeit their business, property and art. Through the intervention of a maid the netsuke are saved, which leads de Waal to ask the question: “Why should they have got through this war in a hiding place, when so many hidden people did not?”

Cape Town art dealer Michael Stevenson’s PhD thesis, Art & Aspirations, deals with the role that art collecting played in the Randlords validating their mining fortunes. The Ephrussi family, having settled in Paris and Vienna, did much the same thing.

Regardless of how nouveau the riche, old objects trace a path through history, and de Waal has told a wonderful tale around these netsuke. The Hare With Amber Eyes is unquestionably one of my favourite reads of the year.

I’m approaching my keyboard hesitantly. I have a little story to tell, but it strikes me as being one that will paint me as something of a chancer (the 10-year-old me can still remember the sneer with which my father referred to some people as chancers).

It goes like this. My family – like many others in South Africa – was glued to both series of Masterchef Australia that have aired here. I do most of the cooking at home, and what’s an 11-year-old boy who looks up to his father going to do, except say: “Come on, Dad, you must enter Masterchef!”

So, with my son’s entreaties growing louder by the day, I logged on and started the entry. The first question, I will admit, did worry me a little: “Have you cooked in a professional kitchen?”

Well, yes and no. Yes (which is how I answered), in that I have on occasion assisted Dish Food & Social when they’ve been very busy. And, yes, I did spend many nights running the kitchen at Vaudeville, but this was more an act of traffic management than cooking. In my opinion, I remain a culinary amateur, without any formal training, and skills to match.

The questionnaire went on a little, and is probably more aimed at people in their 20s than their mid-40s. So, when they asked: “What would you like to be in five years time?” my answer was a simple and straightforward “Alive”.

They phoned me a couple of weeks later with some probing questions about the extent of my professional kitchen experience. I was completely candid with them, and thought this would be the end of the road for my Masterchef aspirations.

Imagine my surprise, when a couple of weeks later, I received an email inviting me to the Cape Town audition. I spent a great deal of time deliberating over my choice of dish, which has to be served at a temperature of between 0 and 4 °C. It was all quite exciting, I must admit, and without getting ahead of myself, I was thinking about how I was going to cope with being out of the loop for the 10 weeks of production (assuming I didn’t get eliminated early, of course).

What I finally decided upon was a little platter of cured salmon – one piece hot-smoked with dill, one cold-smoked, and one cured gravadlax-style with Szechuan pepper and Scotch. This would be accompanied by homemade mayonnaise, my sourdough bread, and a couple of other sauces or accompaniments. Of course, all three different fish treatments would be done by me, giving the judges a little demonstration of my culinary range.

The only part that was worrying me was finishing everything off with a mini-hangover early on the Saturday morning in question (we have a friend’s 50th birthday the night before).

But all my planning came to nothing, because this morning I received an email advising me that I’d been disqualified from the competition, which must break a world record for the fastest elimination – ever – from Masterchef!

If, by some miracle, I had remained in the competition until near the end, I’m guessing the producers would have copped some flak for the grey area around my professional status. So, I get where they’re coming from, but couldn’t they have made their minds up about this before they invited me to the audition?

OK, so now we get to second part of the ‘chancer’ label. In 1999, I entered the Diners Club Winemaker of the Year with a wine I had blended from wines made in two different cellars. I was delighted to be told that I was one of the ten finalists. A few days later I received a phone call from Bill Cooper-Williams, the convenor, who was very alarmed that I was potentially going to get a winemaker’s award for a wine that was not fermented under my supervision (ironically, in professional kitchens, the real work is mostly done by the juniors, rather than the one doing the supervision).

My explanation to him was that, in Champagne, the person who is credited as the winemaker is the one who has assembled the blend, which could have components from dozens of cellars. I believe I may also have got a little philosophical with him, posing questions about what made the wine what it was – the components, or the sum of them? And, without in any way intending to get ahead of myself, had the example been available to me at the time, I was as much the maker of that wine as Steve Jobs was the inventor of the mouse and graphical user interface (which he discovered at Xerox’s Palo Alto facility).

Ultimately, they left me in the top ten, which was far as I got. They must have taken the view that the wine’s quality was more important than philosophical debates about who should get the credit for its deliciousness.

There are people who will get onto Masterchef who are passionate about spending their lives cooking professionally, and the show will open doors for them. I love food, I love cooking, but in all honesty I don’t have the same ambitions. I entered because I was badgered into it, and because the competition would have been an interesting challenge. I may even have lasted an episode or two – assuming, of course, that I made it through the audition. But for me to deprive a young person of a life-changing opportunity would not be fair.

May the best (non-professional) chef win!