“Culture is the glue that keeps your company together,” Asher Bohbot, CEO of EOH Holdings

1# CULTURE: The culture of a business is the glue that keeps your company together. It’s the environment, the feeling, the connection to your people and the thread that runs throughout the organisation. In today’s world, a strong office culture means that employees generally happier and tend to enjoy themselves more. A company’s culture is what drives people to get up in the mornings and come to work, rather to go somewhere else. Culture is paramount. It’s also the most difficult thing to get right. It requires time and effort and you have to LIVE IT!”

2# PURPOSE: “Your company must have a specific purpose in society and the economy. If it doesn’t, people cannot relate to their place of work. People don’t work for the sole purpose to earn a salary, pay the house bond or support their habits. People want to get up in the mornings, and come to work for a business with a purpose. EOH’s purpose is to provide technology, skills and know-how that are critical to developing countries like South Africa.”

3# THE ROLE OF BUSINESS: “The business role, according to our belief, is to take up human development over society, the employment of people and giving life and purpose to its employees and people. Government’s role is to provide the right environment and everything it takes for people and companies to want to invest. But what really makes society go around is business. Only business. Business is life.”

4# BUSINESS DRIVERS: “We believe that in business, a company needs to decide on one dominant driver and everything else will be attended to by focusing on that one specific element. At EOH, our driver is people. Everything you look at, you look through the eyes of people. You need to look at your business with the focus on one dominant element, and the rest will fall in place. That way, you know exactly what you are doing.”

5# STRATEGY: “Business schools talk about strategy all day long. In today’s world, things keep changing and evolving all the time – not just in the technology space, but all industries are disrupted at some point or another. One should have a business philosophy that’s always opportunistic; always looking at what’s changing; and always be willing to capitalise on the opportunity, as opposed to implementing a a strategy that’s rigid and unyielding. We have no idea what’s going to happen in the future, so how are you going to make decisions and assumptions, and build businesses around it, only to discover that it’s not going to happen. The one thing I know for certain is that whatever you think is going to happen, I can guarantee you that it WILL NOT happen.”