TCS | Altron’s Collin Govender on South Africa’s challenge of leadership

Loading player...
Senior Altron executive Collin Govender is passionate about leadership – and believes South Africa needs much more of it is to solve its myriad challenges.
Govender – who started his career as a forklift operator in a Durban warehouse and who today heads two important businesses in the Altron stable, Altron Systems Integration and Altron Karabina – joins Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS) to discuss the topic.
The conversation starts with a discussion about Govender’s career in IT, which included 17 years at T-Systems, and how the Altron opportunity (now opportunities, after he took the reins at Systems Integration in addition to his role leading Karabina) came about.
He also unpacks his plans for Altron Systems Integration, where it is positioned in the market and the opportunity for acquisitions – and why systems integration has become a scale game.
The conversation then turns to leadership, and the role it plays in business and society. Govender talks about his own management style, and also shares his insights into why he believes South Africa’s biggest problems flow from a lack of decisive and accountable leadership. The fix can be applied to business and politics. But what will it take? Govender’s ideas deserve attention.
6 Jun 2023 English South Africa Technology · Business

Other recent episodes

Meet the CIO | Chris Shortt on what a supermarket becomes

Chris Shortt, chief technology officer at Shoprite Group, says the work of the next five years is meeting the customer at their point of need, wherever that is – and that this does not mean the end of the store. Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, brought to…
9 Sep 43 min

Watts & Wheels | Why electric trucks are beating electric cars to South Africa

South Africa has still not crossed 1% of new vehicle sales going to electric vehicles, well short of the 5% mark at which adoption typically accelerates, The Electric Mission executive director Hiten Parmar told TechCentral’s Watts & Wheels with Wills. Parmar, who heads the non-profit advocacy body and co-founded the…
3 Sep 31 min

Winstone Jordaan on building a national EV charging network

Winstone Jordaan was building charging infrastructure before South Africa had electric cars to plug into it. GridCars began developing its backend platform in 2010. The first EVs arrived in 2013. In this episode of Watts & Wheels with Wills, the GridCars founder tells William Kelly why the hardware was never…
2 Sep 22 min

Watts & Wheels S1E8: ‘Tesla lands in Africa, just not here’

Episode 8 of Watts & Wheels – TechCentral’s electric motoring show – opens with William Kelly on his soapbox, clipboard in hand, and a simple demand: keep left, pass right. Too many South African drivers, he argues, treat the left indicator as an invitation to be overtaken rather than a…
24 Aug 1 hr 11 min