I’m sitting in my room in Cape Town, the silhouette of Table Mountain cutting a familiar shape against the morning sky. In front of me, there’s a tension that I’ve spent my career trying to resolve—the space between the tactile, dusty reality of a jeweler’s bench and the abstract, digital logic of a global boardroom….
I’m sitting in my room in Cape Town, Table Mountain visible through the window, and I have been arguing with ghosts. Milgrom, Roberts, Porter, Teece — the titans of organisational economics and competitive strategy, the architects of the frameworks I’ve built my life’s work upon. Their voices echo in my head, a Greek chorus interrogating…
I did not plan to spend a morning in a library discovering that Luca Pacioli and Vitalik Buterin solved the same problem. Nobody plans that. It happens when the pattern-recognition firmware that came pre-installed with the autism refuses to stop cross-referencing until every thread connects to every other thread, and suddenly a Franciscan friar from…
There is a particular kind of intellectual dishonesty that infects industries in transition. It is the insistence that the domains of knowledge are separate — that the person who writes Solidity smart contracts has nothing to learn from the person who studies psychological empowerment, that the SEO architect optimising JSON-LD schema markup inhabits a different…
For more than a decade, the leadership development industry has sold practitioner frameworks as though they were science. Robin Sharma’s The Leader Who Had No Title. Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz’s The Power of Full Engagement. Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit. Each has sold millions of copies. Each has shaped how real people think…
Author: Erwee Coetzee Date: March 19, 2026 Subject: Management Science & Luxury Strategy Abstract The luxury jewellery industry remains one of the last bastions of the “founder bottleneck,” where artisan excellence is frequently throttled by centralized command-and-control structures. This paper introduces the Coetzee Convergence Framework (CCF), a tripartite operating system designed to transition the traditional…
I’ve spent the last six months staring at a paradox that keeps me awake at night. On one hand, I have the Coetzee Convergence Framework—a leadership methodology backed by 30,000+ academic citations proving that Multiplier behaviors can transform a jewellery business from the inside out. On the other hand, I’m facing the brutal truth that…
My First Mentor Taught Me Hiring Is Multiplication, Not Addition I still remember the tandem Topgrading interview that got me into Netsurit. It wasn’t with Orrin Klopper directly—that was run by Grenville Salmon (who would become my second mentor, more on him in future pieces), Dewaldt du Plessis, and Brian Cooper. They followed the rigorous…
In the high-end jewellery trade, we are obsessed with the “leaks.” We track stone paracels to the milligram and audit security protocols with religious fervour. Yet, the most expensive leak in your business isn’t happening in the workshop or the vault. It’s happening in the boardroom. It is called the Diminisher’s Tax. Based on recent…
There is a jewellery studio in Observatory, Cape Town, where the owner arrives at seven each morning, switches on the extraction fan, and begins answering every question before anyone has asked one. He assigns the day’s work. He checks the previous day’s settings under the loupe himself. He approves every design amendment, every quote, every…