Bruce Whitfield is an award-winning financial journalist. His daily Money Show on 702 and Cape Talk is compulsory listening for anyone who wants to know what is happening in the political economy. Whitfield presents Taking Stock on eNCA and is a contributing editor at the Financial Mail. He thrives on challenging audiences to think differently about the risks and challenges posed by the complex South African environment.

Tony is currently the CIO – Vice President of Information Technology & Process Excellence for the EMEA region (Middle East, Europe, and Africa) of a Global Fortune 500 company, American Tower Corporation. ATC is a provider of wireless communications infrastructure. They are the leading independent owner, operator and developer of wireless and broadcast communication real estate and offer solutions and services to deploy and support wireless networks in 20 countries across 5 continents with a global portfolio of 181,000+ sites.

Tony is a Senior Global Executive, strategic, operational & execution specialist with broad experience in many avenues of business from Digital business transformation to merges and acquisitions, largely in the Financial and Telecommunications Sector. Tony has managed many large complex cross-border portfolios’ and has strategically derived Business/I.T/Digital Strategies and driven their effective execution and in all aspects from Operations, Compliance to process efficiencies Innovation and integration within Retail/Corporate Banking and Telco infrastructure, Tower deployments and operations across the globe. He Managed work-streams within the Barclays-Absa merger and acquisition in 2006, driven strategic alignment (from standardisation to decentralisation initiatives), was heavily involved in the American Tower-Airtel Acquisition and integration in Nigeria in 2015, the ATC/FPS Tower France Acquisition in 2017, the Telkom assets acquisition in Kenya in 2018 and in 2020 the $2 Billion Acquisition of Eaton Towers across Africa and the Middle East for American tower. Now with the recent announcement of ATC’s intention to acquire Telxius Towers ($9.4 billion investment with a portfolio of 31,000 communication sites across Europe and LATAM) Tony will be leading the IT strategy and delivery to ensure its success and business adoption.
Tony is also an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (rated number one Business School in Africa and in the top 50 globally) on their suite of programmes (such as the MBA, PDBA, PMD, MPHIL, open and custom programmes), passionate in the field of Digital Sociology, Digital Disruption, Technology Strategy, Effective Execution & Project Management, Strategic Project Leadership, Process Excellence, I.T as a strategic business enabler, The Art Of Innovation, Information and Knowledge Management. Will be 10 years with GIBS Business School as of August 2021.
Academically, Tony has completed two degrees at Bond University (Australian University), the first in BIS (Bachelor of Information Systems) and the second in B-COM Marketing. In 2008 he completed his Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) through GIBS Business School and an Executive course in Building National Competitiveness through GIBS & Harvard Business School. In 2016, Tony completed the Innovative Technology Leader (ITL) Executive Program through Stanford University Graduate School of Business in San Francisco, U.S. In 2018 completed his executive education in Boston at Harvard Business School in Competing on Business Analytics and Big Data. Tony is also an accredited
PRINCE2 Practitioner, MSP certified and has done studies in strategic project management applications, business process optimisation, Agile, Lean manufacturing and has become passionate in the field of effective execution and I.T strategic implementation.
Tony frequently participates as a guest speaker and facilitator to numerous conferences and events across the globe that focus on ICT Strategy, Business Digitisation, Information Technology Enablement, Execution Strategy and many more. In 2018 he was invited by the South African National Treasury to come speak and facilitate a session for the Jobs Fund Learning Forum on the topic: “Job Transitioning in the digital age: Building capabilities – The role of individuals and leaders”. Also spoke at the IT Leaders Africa Summit in Cape Town in 2018 on Monetising Data and in 2019 The Transformation role of the CIO.

Tony is a Member of the PMSA (Project Management South Africa) and a member of the CIO Council of South Africa. Tony has been featured in the CIO Directory over the past 6 years, a guide to the country’s IT decision-makers, they feature the profiles of over 200 chief information officers and IT directors from top South African private and public sector organisations.

Emma El-Karout is a Johannesburg-based future work innovator who founded One Circle, an online HR collaboration platform scheduled to launch in 2019. Born and raised in Lebanon, her formative academic phase in Lebanon was capped with an MBA from LAU, an undergraduate degree from AUB and two school leaving certificates, one French and one English. No bad, as her mother tongue is actually Arabic! Emma almost immediately began challenging existing systems and traditions as she entered the consulting world helping NGO’s and private companies with their HR and training agendas.

She developed her own bespoke content when existing material didn’t serve her clients’ needs and during this phase of her career, operated from Beirut but assignments took her to Syria and Jordan as well. Her effectiveness in HR consulting led her to corporate HR roles in the hospitality sector, and the Arabian Gulf states of UAE (Dubai) and Qatar. She quickly built a reputation as a hotel property preopening and opening specialist with global hotel operators, and an HR leader who operated from a business perspective. She then shifted into one of the other major Gulf industries, joining Qatar Petroleum, the second largest national oil and gas company in the Middle East. As a senior policy advisor, she impacted the HR practices of all employers in Qatar’s Energy sector and was on the working team drafting the (then) new Qatar HR Law. She received a commendation from the Qatar Deputy Prime Minister for her related contributions. Continuing a trend of working in regionally iconic industries, Emma then moved into retail in Dubai, heading up HR for the leading luxury fashion retailer in the Middle East, Etoile Group. Here, Emma managed HR across the Group’s footprint in the Gulf and Levant. After a 7 year period, Emma witnessed the people impact of the economic ebbs and flows in the region and began thinking about a solution whereby individuals could be more empowered to offer their skills and services to employers, instead of through traditional recruitment. Emma continued developing this idea during her next role with one of the largest non-specific retailers in the Middle East, North Africa, and India, Landmark Group. She started to realize the potential impact that technology was bringing to the world of work, coupled with her passion to democratize employment, started designing One Circle. Today, Emma is based in Johannesburg with her family where she intends to launch One Circle (www.onecirclehr.com) in 2019, as a means to combat few of the major societal issues in South Africa, being unemployment, gender and age bias, and the retention of experienced workers in the economy post-retirement.

Greg Cress is an experienced, dynamic and forward-thinking ICT industry professional with a successful 20-year career growth record with blue-chip organisations in the South African, Middle-East and European telecommunications markets.

A recognised industry professional in the areas of telecommunications value added services, innovation and strategy consulting, he is highly effective in the areas of thought leadership, the conception of new product ideas, the product development process and the stimulation of the market and revenue around innovative mobile and Internet services.

He is the founder and director of ConnectedFutures (Pty) Ltd, a strategy consulting firm specialising in providing scenario planning services to medium and large organisations.

He constantly seeks out global and technological megatrends that signal disruption and market shift – crucial for detecting early indicators of radical technological change that often provide the greatest opportunities for business model innovation.

He qualified in 1997 with a Bachelors Degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Natal, and received his MBA with a top distinction from Oxford Brookes University UK in 2003.

A trained psychologist and executive coach, Hope has over 16 years’ experience in private practice and consulting. She joined BCX as Chief Human Resources Officer in October 2018 and sees herself as a transformer and problem solver, with a vision for the future. Hope has a special interest in acting as a catalyst for change, coaching leaders who are in transition, and helping them to identify and develop strategies for employee engagement.

Her goal is to empower and inspire the employees within her organisation and to develop her team of Human Resources (HR) professionals into strategic business partners.
Before joining BCX, Hope held Human Resources positions at BMW and First National Bank, where she worked for nine years, before launching her own coaching company.
Hope has several qualifications, including a Master of Arts in Clinical Psychology from the University of Pretoria and an advanced Human Resources Executive Programme Certificate from the Michigan Ross School of Business. Hope is registered with the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA).

Nkuli is Executive at MicroStrategy Inc., the largest independent publicly traded Business Intelligence company globally with the leading enterprise analytics platform.

Nkuli is responsible for market development of BI & Analytics solutions in Sub Sahara Africa. His focus is on delivering the business’s vision of “Intelligence Everywhere” to the respective geographies and market verticals.

He was previously Managing Executive: Revenue of XLink Communications, a wholly owned Vodacom subsidiary and tasked with sales transformation, business development and customer experience, leading the sales and marketing organizations. Nkuli previously led the Vodacom Business’s Mining & Manufacturing vertical as Executive Head of Department. In this role, he successfully transformed the vertical’s sales capability & competence from legacy mobile to digital.

Prior to that Nkuli was the Country Manager for EMC2 Enterprise Content Division (ECD) before the acquisition by Dell to form DellEMC. In this role, he was responsible for the end to end ECD business reporting to EMEA. In his earlier roles at Ericsson and Sun Microsystems, was sales manager and Global Account Manager for the MTN Group, working and travelling in 18 countries. Nkuli started his career at Cisco Systems as account manager in 1998. Throughout his career, Nkuli has been an over achiever with a number of sales awards both at a global and local stage.

Nkuli has Sales Leadership and General Management competencies in the areas of Enterprise Content, Telecommunications, Analytics, Storage, Computing and Networking having run sales organizations upwards of $400m in revenue.

His key differentiator is the ability to conceptualize a strategic direction, build, lead and coach diverse, high performing teams, orchestrating iterative execution to arrive at the vision.

Roderick is the Africa Markets Leader at EY.

He is an accomplished leader who is passionate about realising business and human potential and has demonstrated the ability to build and grow businesses; to develop strong C-Suite client relationships; and to shape and lead high performance teams. He is a strategic thinker with a ‘big picture’ perspective but is also able to shift from concept to execution of strategy. He is articulate and has highly developed communication skills. Roderick has worked for and advised organisations across Africa and Europe and his expertise lies in the areas of Strategy development and execution, Business Development and large transformation program execution.

Siphumelele Zondi is a South African radio and television reporter, current affairs presenter, producer and journalism lecturer. Siphumelele grew up in Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal and studied in Durban, Pretoria and England.

Zondi also works as a current affairs presenter for Channel Africa Radio, a radio station within the SABC. He has also worked as a senior producer and anchor for CNBC Africa and did some work as a reporter for eTV in his earlier years.

Siphumelele Zondi has also lectured on broadcast journalism at Tshwane University of Technology, where he did his journalism degree, and he launched a blog there with his students that was nominated for the South African Blog Awards. In 2010 and 2011 he was part of the EVA Junior Business Fellows, a group of young people from around the world identified as future leaders by the Finnish business sector.

In the face of disruptive change, Zanele assists organizations organizations going through transitions to unlearn.
She does this by facilitating the understanding that learning, unlearning and relearning must be the crux and heart of an organisation’s DNA if they are serious about being future-fit..

Zanele presents with uncanny wit, humour and engaging insights wrapped in memo- rable stories. She is a well-seasoned and thought-provoking speaker who engages and captures various audiences.

Past clients have experienced:

• Gained knowledge that building and strengthening organizational cultures of learning (and unlearning) is para- mount in developing future-proof teams and organizations.

• An understanding of how to use a positive culture of learning to drive business metrics and influence employee performance.

• A grasp of tools and methods to enhance and build a future-focused development culture

Shamalan Soobiah is a seasoned Business Executive and skilled strategist with over 35 years’ experience and an MBA and BSc in Computer Science and Mathematical Statistics.
He has worked for respected global organisations such as Accenture, Standard Bank, Deloitte and Business Connexion.

He is a leader with exceptional business transformation and turnaround skills. This includes the ability to solve complex business and technology challenges and come up with practical real-world solutions. He has worked locally and internationally, for extended periods, in the USA, Europe and Africa.