The tricky tale of Mandela's BMW

In the early 1990s, my job as head of strategic planning at BMW South Africa became a little more important than very ‘strategically’ planning to just happen to be in the neighbourhood of St Andrew’s in Scotland around about the time the Open Championship was being played. Or, trying to develop a five-year plan without actually knowing what the social, political or economic environment was going to be like by tea time the following day.

Anyway, an important part of our corporate strategic plan in those days centred around the man who was going to become the new president of South Africa. On one hand, it did not take rocket science to know that under his leadership South Africa would prosper and that multi-nationals such as BMW would be able to start exporting from this country at long last.

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