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So what's beyond my C.V.?
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Resumés are usually fairly dry documents, presenting only the bare facts, an
overview of career milestones and little else.
In this section I have endeavoured to add a little colour the the monochrome of my resumé!
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| January 21, 1961 |
Hmmmm...I was born in party mode I guess - 20h00 on a Saturday night. The not so hip venue
was the Frere Hospital in East London, South Africa (S32º59´48.5"
E027º53´33.1"). It must have been a good one as I don't recall any of the
details! My mother took one look at my long hair and sideburns and swore that I was a new
member of The Beatles!
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| 1961 – 1965 |
East London, South Africa. First at Flat 1, St James Mansions, 63 St James Road, and then
to a house my parents built in Beaconhurst, on the hill overlooking the Buffalo River. Beau
and Joan both worked, so I spent the mornings with our child-minder, Aimee, and I remember
her wheeling me around the local park in my pram! When we moved to the house, I got a dog -
a fox terrier called "Socks". My gran, Caroline Catherine Pautz (nee Wright) stayed
with us at the house. I went to nursery school. Happy memories for me.
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| 1965 – 1978 |
Beau, Joan and I made the BIG move upcountry in 1965, relocating from East London to
Pretoria. We moved into number 3 Stellanine, 7 Daventry Street in Lynnwood Manor - the
address at which I have spent most of my life. I made a lifelong friend, Piers Relly, who
lived in number 1 Stellanine. As fate would have it, Débra and I bought the place 30
years later!
If I remember correctly, I turned 6 on my first day of primary school at the Loretto Convent. I met Mike Zeller on that day as well, and we are still the best of friends). Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and then i was in "big school" - Christian Brothers College - where I stayed till the bitter end. I was a fairly good pupil, usually rating in the top three of my class in both primary and high school ...until I discovered motorcycles and girls in 1976 and became a little distracted! I had a serious motorcycle accident in 1977 (en route to my karate class), knocking out my teeth, breaking my jaw and arm, and picking up some serious scars. I missed a significant block of school as a consequence and my Matric results in 1978 thus left a lot to be desired. In 1974 I did my first overseas trip with my parents, visiting Germany, Denmark and the UK. That five weeks abroad changed my life, and I returned to South Africa determined to travel as much as possible. In December 1978 (after graduating from High School), my friend Lex Maas and I did our first independent tour of Europe, taking in Germany, France, the Netherlands, England and Austria (where we spent two weeks learning to ski). I was hooked, and travel & adventure became an integral part of my life.
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| 1979-1981 |
The first six months were great! I worked as a counter clerk at the Waterkloof Pharmacy on
Brooklyn Circle in Pretoria. This was not my first job as I had worked every Saturday
morning since the age of 12 in 1973 (initially at Jix Hobby Shop on van der Walt Street and,
in my final year of high school, at Auto Align on Pretorius Street where I fitted tyres and
balanced and aligned wheels.
The period till June 1979 was probably the happiest time of my life. I had a job, I had money, I had very little responsibility, I had a motorcycle, I had some wild friends, I had my girlfriend, Jillian and I was free! Sheer bliss. The darkest phase of my existence began in July 1979 when I was conscripted into PW Botha's army for two years of compulsory "National Service". I was posted to the 7th SA Infantry Battalion at Bourke's Luck. A hell-hole where people mysteriously died in training. Our base then relocated to Phalaborwa, another god-forsaken place. In April 1980, after 9 months of brutal training and indoctrination, my unit was posted to the South West Africa/Namibian "Operational Area" where I spent the best part of the next 15 months keeping my head down and trying to stay alive under perilous conditions. There are many stories I could tell, but I'll save them for another web site! Suffice it to so, with my left-wing, liberal, anti-regime opinions, I was not very popular with the racist totalitarians who were our commanding officers! I spent my final weeks in the Army in a cell in the Caprivi Strip! I cleared out of the SADF at the the beginning of July 1981, without any form of debriefing but with enough "danger pay" to keep me going for a while. I ended up spending a month in Cape Town and on the road up the east coast back to Pretoria. I also bought a car (a 1974 Fiat 125-S) and a one of the first Windsurfers in Pretoria. I grew my hair and a moustache and goatee! It was tough trying to fit back into society after the war, but I had a personal goal, a driving ambition to make up for lost time and recover the two years that an unhappy and ignoble regime had stolen from me at the prime of my life. I felt defiled and short changed and was determined to make a success of everything I did. The first thing I did was to get a job. With no marketable skills, the best I could find was a position with Pretoria Wholesale Druggists as manager of the inward goods department. Essentially a warehouse packer! Great fun, and I met some good people. I then moved back to Waterkloof Pharmacy as I hoped to study to be a Chemist. As I mentioned, my Matric results were pathetic, and I did not get accepted for my first two choices, namely Pharmacy and Optometry. My third choice was Psychology...but I was not too keen on the clinical side of the profession. Some career counselling at the University of Pretoria sorted that out, and I enrolled for their Bachelor of Commerce degree in Industrial Psychology (with the unflattering tag "Personnel Management").
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| 1982-1989 |
Before university started in January 1982, I enrolled in a refresher course in Mathematics.
I did this because I really needed to get my brain back into shape, and because I needed to
get some exposure to the Afrikaans language! In those days, the UP was an Afrikaans medium
university, and English was my home language. It was tough going for me, but well worth it,
if just for the mind aerobics.
Why the University of Pretoria? Well, my folks could only support the first year of my studies and so I needed to conserve my finances. It was a lot cheaper to stay at home than to go into a residence at one of the out of town English language universities. I got a part time job at the Glenfair Liquor Store, working Wednesday afternoons and Saturday mornings. It paid for my fuel and entertainment...and I got a whopping 30% staff discount!!! I found my niche at University and, together with the close circle of friend that I made, was consistently one of the top students in both the Faculty and the Department. We worked hard, challenged and complemented each other, and played even harder! Wine, women and song were the order of the day. My academic success had another positive spin-off - I was awarded bursaries every year, and this paid for my registration fees and books. My studies became self-funding, and I was actually making a fair amount of money while living my dream! However, the biggest payoff was the individuality, self-esteem and confidence that I reclaimed after they had been all but extinguished by the military machine. I met my future wife, Débra Childs, in 1983. She was a fellow Industrial Psychology student and a talented Flamenco dancer. We dated for 13 years before tieing the knot in 1995. I passed my Bachelors, Honours and masters degrees cum laude and was awarded the university's Academic Honours Colours. A prerequisite for enrolling in the Honours degree was a full time job! As I had accepted a bursary from the Council for Scientific & Industrial Research, that's where I started working in 1995. I had worked there during my vacations which had enabled my to do something that ultimately changed my life, namely buy a single lens reflex camera. I learned a lot during my first year at work - primarily about organisational politics, bureaucracy, frustration and what I did not want to do! In my first performance appraisal, for example, I was told in no uncertain terms that I was not going to be awarded a bonus as I had "long hair, was English speaking and was arrogant"! Objective criteria, to be sure! Management training was not what I wanted to be doing all my life and the only reason that I hung in there as long as I did is that I had to work back my bursary commitment. Frustrating, but I learned some valuable lessons that have stood me in good stead since then. A group of us could take it no longer and in 1988 left CSIR to join a new company called Groman Consulting that had been established primarily to serve the management training needs of CSIR. We rented a building from CSIR but were an autonomous outfit. It was great fun - a group of enthusiastic young (and young at heart) consultants applying their creativity, experimenting and making good money to boot. I was responsible for running Paul Hersey's "Situational Leadership Programme" and enjoyed the 5 day course so much that I used it as the topic of my M.Com dissertation that I wrote in 1988-89 (thanks for the idea Sas ;-) and which received a distinction. With my pre-internship, internship and dissertation behind me I had accomplished what I set out to do, and registered as an Industrial Psychologist with the (then) SA Medical Council. I was "free" from the shackles of academia, and the fleshpots of Europe beckoned!
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| 1989-1991 |
In mid-1989, at the height of Apartheid, under severe international sanctions and under a
state of emergency imposed by PW Botha, I made my escape to Europe. The cheapest route north
was via Luxembourg with a free bus to Belgium. From there I skipped over to France and crossed
the Channel to the UK. Wow! London - what a place. I met up with some old friend, met a
whole bunch of new ones, and started peeling off the years of oppression and angst. It was
a remarkably liberating experience, and probably the best decision I have ever made.
In total I spent 12 months abroad, and some of the highlights were:
This wasn't part of my plan! Nevertheless, the Guys at Groman Consulting offered me a job and I immersed myself in work to escape. Good friends and Debra - thank God for them; they were there when I needed them. As an only child in a very small family it was my moral obligation to be with and support my mother, and we became closer that ever. In fact all of my relationships became more important to me and Debs and I became inseparable. I started putting the pieces back together. I was driven to do new things and to learn, learn, learn...in the shadow of my own mortality I unconsciously decided to do and experience as much as possible in the time I had left in this world:
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| 1992-1995 |
At the end of 1991 I was "head-hunted" by Deloitte & Touche and started working in
the Johannesburg office in early 1992. I moved out of a specialist niche and into an HR
generalist role. Working for a multi-national was a whole new experience and I was on a two
year exponential learning curve. What an opportunity! My assignment had an international
component to it, and that was one of the reasons I took the job in the first place. I
travelled around South Africa as well as to exotic destinations like Zimbabwe and Kenya.
It was an exciting time for me, and I made some good new friends at work. Debs and I did some
wonderful vacation trips too, visiting places like Brazil, the Czech Republic, the Maldive
Islands, Peru, Hungary, the Comores Islands, Bolivia and the usual string of European
countries (we tried to ski every European winter).
In early-1995 an opportunity presented itself - the opportunity to work with Deloitte & Touche in one of their developing regions, namely Central Europe. I was in London for a meeting, was interviewed while out there, and accepted the job soon thereafter (encouraged to do so by a series of burglaries at home). Oh yeah - when it became apparent that a move to the Czech Republic was on the cards, Debra and I got married! We decided to use the chapel at my high school, and it was a joyous occasion. We went on honeymoon after my interviews in the UK...and were joined by a friend from Deloittes in South Africa who just happened to be in London at the time! At this stage Débra had a great job with Sappi in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, so when I moved to Prague in October 1995, I moved on my own. It did not make sense for her to give up a good job and to sit in the Czech Republic unemployed. She moved out of our new house in Pretoria and back to her mother's place. I found a two bedroom apartment close to the Old Town - with no lights, no curtains and no furniture. I literally started from zero, as a lot of what we owned had been stolen in a burglary in Pretoria a few months earlier.
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| 1996 to present |
Work in the Prague office was incredibly challenging. A once in a lifetime opportunity
really - building an HR department from scratch under the wing of a multi-national, but with
huge degrees of freedom. An opportunity to be creative, to learn new things and to put in
long, satisfying hours. I had to be really creative and inventive, and I liked that. The
office was small back then, and in a dark corner I found a single computer dedicated to a
new communication medium - the internet. As no one else seemed to be interested, I started
playing with the system after hours, and within a year had mastered cyber-space.
Debs came to visit, went for an interview with a telco (GSM) start-up and was offered a senior HR position! She moved from South Africa in August 1996, and we took of to Turkey to spend some quality time together. Out in Capadocia we rented a motorcycle, and this sowed the seeds of an idea - motorcycle travel! Within a year I had bought a BMW R80GS and we began adventure travelling. Since then we have done rides to:
My career has flourished in Central Europe, and I really enjoy what I'm doing and where I'm doing it. After two and a half years in the Prague office, I transferred to a regional Functional role, operating across the 17 Central European countries in our geography. After two and a half years in that slot I moved into the role of Regional HR Director for Deloitte & Touche Central Europe, a position I still hold today.
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| Quo Vadis? |
So, where to from here? Difficult to say. I have a full life and I enjoy it, but I do need
to be continually challenged. I will go where the challenge takes me.
It was not my intention to be so verbose or so personal in this section! But what the hell, I'll edit it some other time!
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