Wake-up call for cellular messiah
Less than 10 months later, he’s producing books and calendars on his passion: birds — of the feathered variety.
Alan Knott-Craig, Vodacom’s founding CEO who put cellphones on the map in SA, has also been turning his massive organisation into a company of bird watchers. He gets calls all the time from excited employees telling him they’ve just spotted a particularly rare specimen somewhere.
Chances are that the next day, Knott Craig’s out there, photographing it. The day we meet in his luscious, airy, glass fronted and rose-gardened Midrand headquarters, he is up early, photographing red-knobbed coots on a dam near Irene. “A wonderful way to start a working day,” he reflects as he, rather reticently for someone of his photographic prowess, shows me a work in-progress 2008 Vodacom calendar of birds. He’s clearly astonished at my fulsome praise for his pictures, yet any professional bird photographer would be proud of such results.
He came to his hobby after having a heart attack in August 2006. Doctors usually advise proper time out. Though Knott-Craig travels to exotic locations — Thailand among them — to get away from the pressures of work, his doctor advised him to find something he could really focus on with totally absorbing concentration that wouldn’t stress him. So he got going the day before Christmas, and anybody who’s tried to photograph birds will know this fills those criteria perfectly. “You need big lenses, time, and patience,” says Knott-Craig.
He drives into an area, switches off his engine and then waits, in the deathly hush that always accompanies an intrusion into nature, for the birds to start singing and flying again.
For the next few hours he forgets everything and everybody in the world. “I go home and process more than 1000 images, select about 10 and then decide which ones to put into a book. I can happily do this for the rest of my life,” he says with satisfaction.
“We need to love things outside work to have a balance in life. A large part of mine has just been work, 18 hours, seven days a week, and I am paying for it now in learning that lesson a bit late,” he says.
Work, he says, is supposed to be fun. Every year he speaks to every single employee in the company telling them “if they are not happy here, then get out, but don’t feel powerless”.
He has been involved with telecommunications since he was 17, when he was awarded a bursary in electrical engineering with Telkom. His employers asked him to do a study on the potential of a cellular telephone industry in 1992. That investigation, in time, turned into SA’s largest cellular network operation. It’s hard to believe it was only 14 years ago that the future Vodacom consisted of about 10 people crammed into a couple of offices on the 24th floor of Telkom Towers in Pretoria.
Knott-Craig had to convince people it was not crazy to imagine that one day people would want to walk around with a telephone in their hand ,and many remember him as “messianic” in presentations to business and industry.
The toll that kind of pressure put on him began to emerge about seven years ago when he had his first heart attack. He subsequently began to read a great deal about food and health, although he says wryly: “That didn’t help much last year when I had another heart attack.”
Indeed, he diagnosed the attack himself and probably helped to save his own life. He has a home gym and was doing increasingly difficult workouts. This can be tricky for people, like him, with unstable plaque in their arteries. Though he was fit and healthy on the fateful day he got on to the treadmill, his heart rate rose dramatically. He was driven to hospital and rushed into theatre where he had a heart attack.
Today, and for the past few years, he has regular tests for cholesterol, sugar levels and PSA levels (to alert him to potential prostate cancer). He has the tests three times a year, “because it costs relatively little and can prevent so much”.
He urges under-40-year-olds who spend their younger years, “thinking they are bullet-proof and taking their health for granted”, to wise up. “We have a big drive on health in my company. Our executives have to be health-tested (blood pressure, sugar levels, cholesterol, etc). If there’s something wrong with them, and they do not try to correct this with our help, we have a Wellness Centre. Some of the benefits we can give them when they are sick just might go away.”
He’s so health conscious that he is introducing a new boardroom and restaurant policy at Vodacom: no peppermints and biscuits. If staffers want them, they have to buy them. Fruit and nuts are provided instead.
He says weight is probably the most critical factor in terms of health: “It’s one of the best indicators of heart disease.”
He is appalled that SA is the third most-obese nation in the world. “People think it’s their right to be fat, but I am not sure that it is their right.” He weighs himself every day and says he is currently 3kg too heavy for his height and build, even though people compliment him on his slim physique: “The scale doesn’t lie.” His view on weight is that if you have it under control, “then you’re disciplined, and a disciplined approach to life is a good thing”.
He takes supplements, including potassium, magnesium and zinc, as well as a multivitamin each day, “even though the doctor insists it only produces expensive urine”. He eats potatoes, which he doesn’t find fattening, and bananas, which give him an energy boost. Both foods contain potassium.
In spite of his health warnings, he still works a 24-hour day “because if there’s a crisis at 10pm, I have to be available”. That’s not the case for all company employees, he says.
Working long hours is “not necessary” and “if you have nothing to do, either go to the gym or go home. I think people often do unnecessary work and in the process create work for everybody else.”
He says he is looking forward to leaving Vodacom before 2009 when his contract is up, “if the shareholders will let me”. His other hobbies include sailing and stamp collecting, and he’s begun to write books (“journalism runs in the family”). Clearly, he has passions outside work and he cannot wait to focus that incisive mind on them.
Breakfast: He wakes up each day to a cup of black, weak chamomile tea because it’s calming and has no caffeine. This is followed by a smoothie made of fresh fruit and low fat yoghurt, plus a plate of oat porridge with pumpkin pips and raw molasses (for the minerals and unprocessed sugar). At weekends, breakfast can include smoked trout or salmon.
Lunch: A sandwich made of home baked seed bread with avocado, tuna and tomato. Other ingredients can be trout, salmon, sardines or mackerel. At weekends or during holidays, he prefers a more substantial lunch and a lighter dinner.
Dinner: He seldom eats meat, but will occasionally eat fillet steak because of its lower fat content. Otherwise it’s a vegetable bake of squash, pumpkin, potato and seasonal vegetables. Sometimes dinner is grilled sole or salmon with baby potatoes, accompanied by a salad.
Drinks: He drinks water, and no tea or coffee. He has a gin and tonic at night to help relax the arteries.
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