Business School announces Clem Sunter Morning Talk for Clients and Stakeholders as Part of Community Chest’s 60^th Anniversary

Port Elizabeth, 13 September 2012 – Africa’s forward-thinking authority in management and leadership education NMMU Business School has announced that the former Chair of the Anglo American Chairman's Fund Clem Sunter will provide a morning talk entitled “The World and South Africa Beyond 2012 – The latest Scenarios,   Flags and Probabilities” in Port Elizabeth on 18 September.

Strategic stakeholders of NMMU Business School will attend this cutting-edge talk presented by one of Africa’s leading scenario planning authorities.

The event forms part of the 60^th anniversary of The Community Chest which NMMU Business School proudly supports.  Community Chest is an organization that distributes resources to support development initiatives in vulnerable communities within the Nelson Mandela Bay Metropole. Sunter was educated at Winchester College and attend Oxford before joining Charter Consolidated as a management trainee in 1966.

In the early 1980s, Sunter established a scenario planning function in Anglo with teams in London and Johannesburg. Two members were Pierre Wack and Ted Newland who headed up scenario planning at Royal Dutch Shell and then acted as consultants to Anglo for over a decade (after their retirement from Shell).

Using material from these teams, Sunter put together a presentation entitled ‘The World and South Africa in the 1990s’ which became very popular in South Africa in the mid-1980s.

In it, two scenarios were offered for South Africa: the ‘High Road’ of negotiation leading to a political settlement and the ‘Low Road’ of confrontation leading to a civil war and a wasteland. South Africa took the High Road. Two highlights were a presentation to FW De Klerk and the Cabinet in 1986 and a visit to Nelson Mandela in prison to discuss the future just before his release in 1990.

Since then he has authored and co-authored 12 books some of which have been bestsellers. One of his recent books “The Mind of a Fox” was the No. 1 selling book in South Africa in 2002, No. 2 in 2003 and is still at the top of the charts. It deals with the methodology of scenario planning and was co-written with Chantell Ilbury.