Address by Dr Chris Stals, Governor of the South African Reserve Bank, on the acceptance of the Award for Management Excellence presented by the Wits Business School. When Professor Mike Ward first approached me with the suggestion of making a special award of Management to me, I was slightly flabbergasted. Why should I, with my responsibilities for monetary policy, qualify for such an award? On second thoughts, I realised however, that my long career of more than 43 years in the Reserve Bank was indeed a career of management. Let me explain: 1. The management of timeIn 1955, when I first joined the Reserve Bank, I was also a part-time student at the Extramural Division of the University of Pretoria. With lectures early in the morning, strict working hours during the day and lectures in the evening, I was disciplined to manage time. Long before Blanchard and Johnson wrote their best-seller The One Minute Manager, I learned how to use the 24 hours of each day to maximum advantage. Even today, management of time for me remains critical. 2. The management of projectsIn my early days in the Bank, as a research assistant in the Economics Department, I was forced to pursue with my colleagues at times rather monotonous projects on the collection and manual processing of balance of payments statistics, foreign assets and liabilities, and national accounts for South Africa. A lot of it was donkey work, but in the words of my hard master of the time, Dr Bob De Jongh, one could not use a donkey to do the work. The satisfaction was in perseverance, and in producing results. These were important basic lessons in self-discipline and in management. 3. The management of programmesDuring my long career in the Reserve Bank, I participated, albeit sometimes as a very junior partner, in the management of important programmes that often stretched over many years. I can, for example, refer to the introduction of exchange controls in the 1960's and, perhaps of more importance, the gradual phasing out of exchange controls over the past five years. There was the programme for the implementation of the De Kock Commission recommendations in the 1980's for the gradual liberal-isation of the banking sector, the domestic financial market and the market for foreign exchange in South Africa. I can also refer to the determined programme introduced since 1990 for managing inflation downwards from almost 20 per cent in the late 1980's to its present level of well below 10 per cent per annum.Once again, the discipline of management is in persistence, consistency and unflinching confidence in the cause of the objective. The reward is in the outcome, even if it takes years to reach the ultimate destination. 4. The management of crisesPerhaps the most daunting challenges for central bankers come in the moment of national financial crisis. I can refer back to the gold marketing crisis of March 1968, when the two-tier marketing system for gold was introduced, and South Africa was directed to the private market for the disposal of its total gold production. With the price threatening to decline below $35.00 per ounce, the Reserve Bank had a hazardous task to dispose of a production that at that stage was still close to 1 000 tons per annum. How great was the achievement for the South African team, consisting of Dr Nico Diederichs, Dr Bob De Jongh, Dr Gerhard De Kock, Mr Gerald Browne, Mr Sandy De Villiers, and myself, in December 1969 when we reached an agreement with representatives of the International Monetary Fund and the Government of the United States of America on the marketing of South Africa's gold at a price that could never decline below $34.80 per ounce.There was also the international debt crisis of September 1985, and the frustrating task to negotiate and manage South Africa's foreign debt in an adverse inter-national environment. Our approach was to offer to our foreign creditors only what the country could afford, and then to meet to the letter of the word all the obligations
