Viridezest advises South African boards and chief executives on modernisation and what artificial intelligence actually changes — mentors the people carrying that work, and holds shares in businesses it believes in.
What we do
Viridezest is a small company and deliberately narrow. It takes on work in three forms.
Sitting with a board or an executive team on modernisation: what artificial intelligence changes about the economics of their business, what it does not, and which of the two the thing in front of them actually is. Delivered as written argument and time in the room, not as a slide pack.
Standing, confidential work with chief executives and senior managers carrying a modernisation mandate — usually a recurring conversation over months rather than a course or a workshop.
The company holds shares in businesses it believes in, and trades in its own name. Where it holds a stake it expects to be useful to the people running it, not merely present on the register.
Viridezest does not resell software, take implementation contracts, or place staff. Where that is what is needed, we will say so and point elsewhere.
Approach
Everything below was borrowed from someone who worked it out first. They are set down here because a board is entitled to know how the person in the room is going to think before he opens his mouth.
Greenleaf’s test is uncomfortable and it is the right one: do those served grow as people — do they become healthier, wiser, freer, more likely themselves to serve? Authority is something lent by the people being led, and it is withdrawn the moment it stops being earned.
In practice that means the chief executive’s job is to remove what is in the way of the people doing the work, not to be the one deciding everything.
Robert K. Greenleaf, The Servant as Leader, 1970Say where we are. Say what has changed or what is in the way. Say what we are going to do about it. In that order, every time — in a board paper, in a meeting, in an email.
It is a discipline of thought before it is a format. Most arguments that cannot be put in that shape have not yet been thought through, and the structure exposes it before the audience does.
After Barbara Minto, The Pyramid PrincipleA fact is not an insight. Every observation has to survive the question asked of it — and then asked again of the answer, until what is left is something a reader can actually act on.
It is the fastest way to find the difference between a report and a recommendation.
Carnegie’s first principle, and the hardest of the four to keep. Criticism puts a person on the defensive and sets them to justifying themselves; it almost never changes what they do next.
It is not an argument for avoiding hard conversations. It is an argument for having them about the problem rather than about the person.
Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, 1936What this is for, now
The forces reshaping how businesses are run — artificial intelligence foremost among them — are moving faster than most boards can absorb, and a good deal faster than the advice being sold about them.
The honest position is that this requires re-learning rather than expertise: working with the tools directly, finding where they genuinely change the economics of a business and where they merely sound as though they do, and being willing to say which is which.
That is the work Viridezest brings to the boards it sits on — mentorship for the people carrying it, and structured argument for the decisions it forces.
The company
Viridezest is registered with the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission of South Africa.
Contact
Who you will deal with
Magnus Rademeyer
Email reaches a person and is answered during South African business hours, 08:00–17:00 SAST, Monday to Friday. If you would rather be introduced than write to someone you have not met, Magnus Rademeyer is on LinkedIn — or ask your own network. Someone in it is likely to know us.