AFRICAN SPEAKER BUREAU · CURATED FOR COCA-COLA SOUTH AFRICA
A Strategy Lands When the Team Owns It
Corporate affairs teams carry a company's commitments to government, partners and communities every day. When the people doing that work help shape how the strategy is delivered, they explain it with conviction, and leaders start asking for their advice.
In 2026 the Coca-Cola system in South Africa made three commitments in public. It announced R17.6 billion of investment through 2030. It received Competition Tribunal approval, with conditions, for a change in ownership of Coca-Cola Beverages Africa, the continent's largest Coca-Cola bottler. And after a meeting with President Ramaphosa, it launched a R500 million water partnership with government. Each of these commitments now depends on a corporate affairs team that explains it, protects it and reports on it for years. We propose to begin small, with one Strategy to Action session: a facilitated half or full day with the corporate affairs team, built on the strategy its leadership has already set. The team leaves with a shared reading of the priorities, three to five commitments with named owners, the decisions it needs from leadership and a 90-day tracking plan. It also leaves with a one-page statement for commercial leadership: what the function contributes, which risks it helps manage and what information executives should expect from it. A review follows 30 days later. When the team wants to build capability further, Speak So You Are Heard, ASB's cohort programme, follows as an optional second phase. Groups of ten to twelve work on scenarios approved by the business, learn to turn complex issues into clear recommendations, and present them to leaders who respond to what they hear. The practitioners on this page give no motivational talks. Each one has led or rebuilt a function under public scrutiny.
About this collection
Corporate affairs connects a company's commercial priorities with the parts of its environment it cannot control alone: government, regulators, municipalities, communities, employees and the public. For a commercial leader, a capable corporate affairs team does five things: - It protects the licence to operate, the trust and relationships that let the business keep running and growing. - It sees policy changes and stakeholder concerns early, before they become expensive surprises. - It shows leaders which external conditions, partners and decisions open or close commercial opportunities. - It turns what it hears from stakeholders into options and a clear recommendation, written in the language of volume, cost and risk. - And it keeps the company's public promises in line with what the business delivers, so progress is reported on evidence. Meetings attended, events hosted and statements issued are the inputs. The return is better decisions, earlier action on risk and the trust the business needs to grow. The water partnership shows how that works in practice. When a municipality raises a concern about implementation, corporate affairs identifies the issue, brings the right government and business people together, advises leadership on the risks and options, and makes sure public statements match what has been delivered. The engineers remain responsible for the pipes. Deloitte's 2026 report on the function, "Corporate Affairs: The Road to 2030", found that chief executives now expect this kind of commercial advice from their corporate affairs leaders, and that only 36 per cent of the functions it surveyed have a clearly defined strategy or mission. Building that capability inside an established team takes more than a plan. McKinsey's work on executive transitions found that 68 per cent of transitions run into trouble over politics, culture and people, and that 92 per cent of leaders hired from outside need well over 90 days to reach full impact. Hesitation during a transition has several possible causes, from uncertainty about the new direction to skill gaps, competing priorities and unclear decision rights. Clarity, involvement and consistent expectations help a leader tell them apart and give each one the right response. The engagement on this page follows that sequence: the team first, then the way the strategy is communicated, then the value commercial leaders see. Each practitioner is matched to one of those outcomes.
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