The turtle outraced the hare, so the legend goes. The turtle was slow but steady and its strategy paid off. There are limits to turtle tactics, though. Planning much more slowly than global competitors, and then taking longer still to implement strategy changes, is rife among large South African businesses, according to a recent global survey.

It doesn’t help that South African managers know they are working on old data, with a large number admitting to working on data more than six months old. And then they rely more heavily on spreadsheets for planning than managers elsewhere in the world, says Thomas Popp-Madsen, director of EPM at Oracle MEA.