National Sorghum Breweries, South Africa

National Sorghum Breweries was regarded by some as a sleepy, loss making, state owned brewer of traditional African beers. By undertaking IMCA courses the company aimed to improve the organization’s vision and re-vitalize it. It was proposed that this should be done by empowering the organization’s employees. IMCA set up one of the largest single corporate educational and development initiatives ever undertaken in South Africa. In a period of twelve months, 200 of the managers joined a series of in-company courses.
The courses were a great success and transformed the company into a very successful business. Some of the success can be put down to the work of one of the MBA’s associates who produced a real-issue project which addressed the social, political and economic disadvantages for black South Africans in the wake of apartheid. He proposed doing something about it. From the project he gained inspiration to plan the buy out and a turn around of the brewery. As a result, the National Sorghum Breweries turned into a successful company, which is largely owned and managed by black people. His project proved that through education and empowerment, change could be achieved quickly and peacefully. The aim was twofold. First, the organization was turned inside out by the energy of the action learning projects. And, second, many of their graduates went from NSB into other South African organizations so as to replicate the educational and development process. NSB made itself an enterprise school of management with IMCA - and found, interestingly enough, that it is wholly complementary to its commercial ambitions.
The success story is the privatization of the enterprise and the pride it gave to the black community at the time it was achieved. The next challenge was to stabilize the management structure. It failed, but nonetheless those who took over had something to take over, and have pulled it through. Is that not the nature of many enterprises? It is now owned by a European company. It had suffered previously by the monopolistic behaviour of South African Breweries. Remember, too, that the bulk of the work was being undertaken at the time when the country was awaiting the date of the first election.