Still leaving no room for mediocrity
LIA Vangelatos remembers her first job interview, as a teenager at Anglo American in 1979, as if it happened yesterday.
Vangelatos recalls the head of human resources setting out the company’s operational structure and rules, listing what was expected of employees, including the dress code, which forbade trousers and miniskirts.
“I thought I’d better listen to all this,” she says.
As one of Anglo’s longestserving employees, Vangelatos was a participant in 38 of its often turbulent 100 years.
During nearly four decades with the company she has worked under five executive chairmen and CEOs, and seen the company go through a number of major transformations as it has adapted to changing economic and legislative imperatives.
But despite the upheavals and a slightly less stringent dress code, the working culture remains largely unchanged.
Vangelatos says the emphasis has always been on doing what is required and getting it right — the first time. There has never been room for mediocrity.
It is an ethos that continues to pervade the atmosphere at the company’s former headquarters at 44 Main Street in Johannesburg ’s CBD, she says.
And although the company’s public persona may appear to have become a little less uptight, there is no denying the gravitas projected by the building and its interiors.
Vangelatos says there has never been a choice at Anglo but to learn quickly.
She had just finished studying finance through Unisa when she applied for a job at the company because her father, a mining engineer, had told her that there was no better place to work.
When she started working at 44 Main Street, in the finance
The emphasis was on doing what was required and getting it right An employee never had to leave the group to experience other sectors
department, Harry Oppenheimer was the executive chairman of the company.
“He was a very caring person. He used to greet people in the lift and inquire about you — and you felt like a family.”
Following a stint in the finance department, Vangelatos moved to the group’s accounting department before taking on an operations role in Anglo’s coal business.
In the 1980s, Anglo was unable to invest outside the country due to apartheid and foreignexchange controls. It was a conglomerate with interests in newspapers, transport, banking and insurance, as well as mining.
As a result, Vangelatos says, an employee never had to leave the group to gain experience of other sectors.
Recalling that she also worked in the industries department, which no longer exists, she describes a meeting at which then Naspers CEO Koos Bekker asked Anglo’s industries executives to invest in his company, Media24, adding the caveat that he did not know when it would show profits.
“Here was a tech man telling a conservative mining environment that you can take a stake but I am not sure where the cash is going to come from,” she says. The executives failed to recognise the opportunity.
Vangelatos, who is now strategy and business development manager of Anglo’s enterprise development arm Zimele, says she will be working at 44 Main Street until she retires.