Share this
Mister Wong
Digg
Del.icio.us
Slashdot
Furl
Yahoo
Technorati
Newsvine
Googlize this
Blinklist
Facebook
Wikio
Hear this text
Print
E-mail
Tags
Nedbank’s Tom Boardman has earned his kudos through hard work, experience and dedicationNedbank Group CEO Thomas Andrew Boardman, more commonly known as Tom, has the zeal and dynamism of leaders half his age and experience. An hour in his presence is a window into a mind vehemently driven by the principles of right and wrong; the pillars of responsibility, and an innate belief that does not pay lip service to people being the cornerstone of every business.
In a promotional snippet concluded for The Prince’s Rainforest Project and broadcast via Internet video-sharing website YouTube, Boardman draws parallels between the global economic crisis and climate change.
He recognises that the international business community and business leaders have a responsibility not only to current but to future generations, to ensure the world does something about climate change now.
As a banker, he has witnessed first-hand the devastation that the financial crisis has wreaked across the world, and although South Africa was marginally cushioned by legislation limiting access to credit, the impact on livelihoods, businesses and families has been no less overwhelming.
“The early warning signals were ignored; there were many who doubted the world would have as much of a (financial) crisis as it turned out to be... (and) the reactions initially were too little too late. The reason we have to win the financial crisis battle is so we can win the climate change war, and every single business leader has a role to play,” he says.
In early September, Boardman announced that after measuring and auditing Nedbank’s carbon footprint, the banking giant had decided to become ‘carbon neutral’. The estimated cost of that commitment and the corresponding awareness campaign was potentially R20 million, but the benefits to the bank and its clients were expected to outweigh that monetary figure.
Already credited with being Africa’s greenest bank and the continent’s largest funder to the World Wide Fund for Nature (formerly the World Wildlife Fund), Nedbank has implemented several initiatives aimed at lowering its carbon footprint.
However, management realised the bank can never wholly operate without emitting some greenhouse gases and will thus purchase certified emission reduction certificates on the carbon market to offset its emissions.
In executing construction on the second phase of its Sandton headquarters, the bank is also seeking to become one of the first offices in the country to secure a Green Star rating from the Green Building Council of South Africa.
Inherent to his character and evidence of his fervour was another statement Boardman made recently that the bank in future “may not finance” big carbon-emitting companies, such as mines and electricity producers, unless they attempted to reduce their carbon footprint.
“Certainly, we would far rather be financing alternative forms of energy... so projects that are going to have to pay carbon penalties are just not going to be viable. If we go into something where we believe it is absolutely offside, then we would have to make the call,” he says.
Boardman takes his mantra from the book, Liberating the Corporate Soul by Richard Barrett, an American transformation expert and the Cultural Values Centre founder and chairperson: “The most successful organisations on the planet are vision-guided and values-driven.”
It cements his compelling foresight for Nedbank and underpins his determination that everyone within the corporation must know where the company is headed and what individual role he/she plays.
It is the essence of his people-driven management style and is grounded in communication such that everyone throughout the organisation has a common purpose when he/she enters the office doors each morning.
“Transformation begins with leaders,” says Boardman.
A qualified chartered accountant with a Bachelor of Commerce degree in Law, Boardman has earned his kudos through hard work, experience and dedication.
While a director for industrial company, Sam Newman, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he implemented layout and design changes to the retail floor which brought about a fundamental shift in South African decor presentation
and purchasing.
The discovery that women – and not the men who it was assumed included the task alongside the purchase of nails and hammers – undertook the household decor decisions, coupled with mind-broadening visits to Habitat in the United Kingdom and the newly established Ikea store in Sweden, created a uniquely South African model incorporating those two concepts.
A management buyout saw the launch of the Boardmans chain in 1982, with Tom as the founder and managing director.
Four years later followed the Rubicon Speech – that notorious delivery on 15 August 1985 by former president PW Botha – in which he blind-sided a world waiting for a radical policy shift in the Nationalist government. Expected reforms were not forthcoming as South Africa stated it was “not going to give into hostile pressure and agitation from abroad”.
The outcome was a record-low trading of the rand against the dollar and wide-sweeping economic sanctions against South Africa. It was also to become a defining moment for Boardman in his career.
Pick ‘n Pay had purchased the retail entity in the previous year, with an agreement that the brand be expanded by two stores annually for three years.
The Western Cape would be saturated before shifting the concept to the then Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging (PWV) region such that the Boardmans concept became a household name.
Yet, in 1985 Boardman was persuaded to open four new stores – two in each province – and he ignored the economic scenario planning that outlined he was doomed should the rand slip to 50 US cents. The business was particularly vulnerable to exchange rates, as the bulk of the goods were imported; and to interest rates because of the high gearing.
The Rubicon Speech decimated the rand to 38 US cents and the escalations to the repo rate saw the prime interest rate climb to 28%. The government also introduced an additional 20% surcharge on imported goods.
Only one international supplier did not renege on an earlier agreement for a 90-day payment window, rather reverting en masse to irrevocable letters of credit before it would package and dispatch the Boardmans merchandise.
Boardman was left praying for a bumper Christmas trade in 1985, a year in which retail sales collapsed 30% for that traditional
boom season.
“The only lessons in life worth learning are painful and expensive. That one was both painful and expensive and taught me that there are such things as perfect storms – where it may have been possible to survive one or maybe two elements, but not when every feasible element converges simultaneously,” he says.
In his words, he had been “wiped out and was forced to start again”, but he also believes it shaped the character he is today and taught him compassion and the value of people.
He recognises there are positives and negatives to personal business ownership and entrepreneurship.
When Board of Executors (BoE) approached him to convert the relatively unknown entity into South Africa’s first Swiss private banking-type operation, it was in recognition of his entrepreneurial flair, but had him functioning within the corporate domain. That has been the arena in which he has operated ever since.
Under his leadership, BoE listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in July 1987. That move was preceded by arguably South Africa’s first wholly encompassing employee-ownership scheme.
BoE had bought 12.5% of the shares on the employees’ behalf and when the 250c listing price rapidly scrambled to 400c, Boardman recalls the “dramatic impact that knowledge had on employees, right from the lift operator to the most senior person”.
The October 1987 global stock market crash saw the share price tumble and reveal another sad lesson in human behaviour. When the share again recovered to that illustrious 400c high, more than 60% of the staff cashed in their shares and thus lost out on the real value of their investment for a share that touched R250.
Boardman was appointed to his current position six years ago, calling again on his leadership to guide Nedbank out of its quagmire. Market capitalisation was R17 billion, roughly a third of that sustained by First Rand and Standard Bank when a year earlier the three had been separated by less than R1bn in capital value.
Several strategic management decisions highlighted the thinking of that era – investment was heavily dominated by technology companies; the focus was on the top end of the market and in closing down branches, Nedbank had dismissed lower end consumers.
Boardman’s analysis was that striving to become the biggest or the most profitable was not the goal. Rather, management had to become the most respected and highly rated bank in the country, and he wanted to shift from a culture dominated by cost to one driven by clients.
That strategy has worked with the Nedbank market capitalisation touching R60bn in September, meaning when Boardman retires next February, he will be leaving behind a legacy worthy of its place among South Africa’s top four banks.
Boardman considers his father, Leslie Grey Boardman, as his mentor.
A geologist, Boardman senior instilled an understanding of values within his protégé. The three most valuable assets parents can give their children is the knowledge that they are loved and can be loved; sound values and principles and a good education – and it is the latter with which Boardman believes South Africa has one of its greatest challenges.
The Dinokeng Scenarios, compiled by 35 eminent South Africans earlier this year (see article elsewhere in this issue), unveiled three different possible futures for this country – and, says Boardman, contained dire warnings that unless there is interactive engagement between civil society and the government, South Africa faces a very bleak future.
Facilitated by Nedbank and Old Mutual, the Dinokeng Scenarios came into being as a response to the pressing problems facing this country 15 years into democracy.
Boardman says only the Walk Together scenario holds hope, where civil society engages with a collaborative, accountable government and together share a common national vision devoid of narrow self-interests.
“Paramount in that scene is the demand for outstanding education, not benchmarked against other third-world countries, but a system producing the most highly educated people in the world. Illiteracy costs South Africa R550 billion annually – more than a quarter of the gross domestic product and a substantial hindrance to economic growth and development,” he says.
One concrete example of how the Walk Together scenario can benefit South Africa is the READ Foundation, where Boardman says the non-government organisation works alongside the government and with funding from corporates to boost literacy levels among South African youth.
“The programme has the methodology, skills and tools for success, because this country cannot afford the cost of illiteracy,” he says.
Returning to the realm of green, Boardman hopes the Copenhagen Protocol on global warming due for signing in December will cement a united world vision for protecting the planet.
His message comes with certainty that once the world reaches a tipping point, it will become virtually impossible to reverse the impact of climate change.
He hopes that prevention of deforestation and not only the replanting of trees can be counted among carbon credits, because essentially the destruction of rainforests releases more carbon dioxide than the combined effect of the world’s cars, planes and ships. Yet, the rainforests covering 5% of the earth’s surface – and halved in Boardman’s lifetime – store a fifth of global man-made emissions.
He believes his recent status as grandfather has heightened his passion for preserving the planet and challenging climate change.
Yet, Boardman is also a family man, married to Sheila since 1973 and father to a son and two daughters.
He counts philately among his hobbies, fascinated by how a seemingly universal pile of stamps reveals different kinds of paper, dissimilar watermarks embedded in the paper, variations in colour shades and altered perforations.
Comparisons with postal authority records sometimes reveal the variations were intentional, leading to further investigations among philatelists on how and why the changes happened.
Philately differs from stamp collecting, in that philatelists often do but are not bound to collecting stamps. Their interest primarily lies in studying stamps, and internationally it has often been the work of this branch of science that has unearthed fakes and forgeries.
Correspondingly, there was at least one South African who had undoubtedly more than a passing knowledge of the rare three-cent Chinese Red Revenue stamp auctioned in September.
A story printed in the Sunday Times, ahead of the Zurich Asia’s Stamps and Postal History autumn auction in Hong Kong, said there were only 32 recorded copies of the original 50 stamps where a one-dollar overprint was stamped onto the 1897 revenue stamp.
The stamp was valued between $225 000 and $250 000.
“Maybe the time has now arrived to return to entrepreneurship,” Boardman concludes.
