Tiger Brands’ Mohammed Gause. Photo: Karolina Komendera

Joni Mitchell’s ballad about life, Both Sides Now, has the line, ‘I’ve looked at life from both sides now’, and it seems an appropriate summation of the career of Mohammed Gause, CIO of Tiger Brands. The rest of the song – all that ‘angel-hair, and ice-cream castles in the air’– is somewhat less appropriate to a man who sees his scientific, enquiring mind as a defining characteristic.

He credits his father with encouraging him to find answers – something that required a certain amount of commitment in the pre- Google age.