Fanus Nothnagel
Fanus Nothnagel
You create the future of course. And that’s just what Coco-Cola Sabco’s current CEO Fanus Nothnagel managed to do in his previous job as Chief Operating Officer of Massmart Holdings in 2005. He looks set to continue this successful tradition in his current position.
“Business is about doing simple things right,” Nothnagel told an enthusiastic group of business people, students and school pupils at Rhodes Investec Business School’s (RIBS) first business Forum in 2009.
His advice is to get your head out of the past and into the future. “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
He said most companies reside in a “current reality” and set their strategic goals in terms of that current reality in what he terms “left to right” thinking. You start with the current reality (on the left) and work on improving that (as you move to the right into the future)
This focus on improving a current reality leads only to incremental improvement. “All you are doing is planning to avoid losing.”
He says if companies chose to set themselves above the current reality and focus only on what they wanted to achieve, they could “create a future without boundaries”.
“You create a future and then look at the consequences” in what he terms “right to left” thinking. YOU start with the future you want to create (on the right) and then work back to what you hve to do to get to your created future. Once this was done, action planning and implementation could take place.
Nothnagel believes this approach forces “breakthrough” thinking. “Strategic action defines and directs short term actions. You are playing to win.”
Senior management in particular should spend more time in the future rather than in the past. “We spend too much time digging around in the figures to see what went wrong in the past.”
His advice: “Allow yourself five priorities a year. If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.” His priorities for Coca-Cola Sabco in 2009 include increase headline and bottom line earnings, improved scores with regard to employee engagement, entry into another emerging market, improved productivity, and improved sales.
Asked about the biggest challenges facing Coca-Cola during the coming years within the context of a global recession, Nothnagel said he believed the multinational would be affected in only a “very small way”.
All of Coca-Cola Sabco’s companies were in developing markets and none of them had yet felt the effects of the recession to any great extent and there had been no huge volume losses, he said. Coca-Cola Sabco operates in seven Southern and East African countries and five Asian countries.
However, he said he felt “sorry” for multinationals based in America and other developed countries. He said demand for products in developed markets had died down as a result of the recession. He predicted that countries such as China would “take a knock” but would come out of it. He said he believed the older more mature economies were going to “struggle”.
On a lighter note, Nothnagel was asked how Coco-Cola Sabco would cope with increased demand during the 2010 soccer World Cup, particularly given the current shortages of carbon dioxide which is used for carbonation of soft drinks. Coca-Cola produces a wide range of products including coke, sprite, just juice, minute maid, sparletta, fanta, tisers, powerade, valpre and several other beverages.
“Unfortunately,” he says, the company will cope “very easily”.
With his head firmly in the future, Nothnagel has already realised that the 2010 World Cup is scheduled to kick off in mid winter with most matches scheduled to start at between 8pm and 10pm each night. Brrrrr!
“So if you are sitting in Port Elizabeth or Polokwane, or Bloemfontein in mid winter at night, I don’t know how many coke’s you are going to want,” he quipped. “We will most definitely have more than enough.”
It would have been better for business if the games had been scheduled to take place in November, he added.
