About

Every business that grows beyond its own comfort zone eventually runs into a wall it didn’t build: a rule it doesn’t fully understand, written by someone with no particular interest in whether that business succeeds or fails. Getting through that wall properly, without losing years finding out the hard way, is what this site is about.

Rules of Passage sits where government-made regulation meets the people and organisations who have to operate inside it. Exchange control, anti-money-laundering requirements, competition law, corporate governance: these aren’t abstract legal categories here. They’re the actual conditions under which a business decides whether it can enter a new market, bring in a foreign partner, move money across a border, or complete a deal it has been working towards for months. Understanding them well enough to act is a different skill from simply knowing they exist, and it’s the gap this site tries to close.

South Africa is the anchor for most of what’s written here, because it’s the regulatory environment I know from the inside rather than from a textbook. But the underlying pattern (rules written by government, lived with by everyone else) plays out in much the same way in most jurisdictions, and the aim is for that to read as relevant well beyond South Africa’s own borders.

None of it requires a legal or financial background to follow. It’s written for a general reader with financial literacy and genuine curiosity, not necessarily a regulator, a banker, or a compliance officer. If a piece can’t be followed by someone meeting the subject for the first time, it hasn’t done its job, however technically accurate it might be underneath.

The site is organised into two sections that work together rather than separately. Rules shaping business is the main body of the site: real transactions, real regulatory obstacles, and how they were or weren’t overcome. How business thinks sits alongside it, covering the less visible half of the same story: the reasoning, psychology and decision-making behind how people and organisations actually behave once they’re operating inside a system someone else designed. One section is about the rule. The other is about the person or business living inside it. Neither tells the full story without the other.

I spent my career in and around bank supervision and exchange control, first at the South African Reserve Bank, later at FirstRand, where the work shifted from regulatory compliance itself into the transactional side of exchange control, enabling the cross-border acquisitions and market entries that businesses actually needed to get done under those same rules. That shift, from writing about regulation to helping people act within it, is where this site’s real starting point lies. I hold a B.Com in economics, commercial law and psychology, and an MBA, which is also why How business thinks exists: business decisions are rarely purely technical, and treating them as if they were leaves out half of what actually happens in a boardroom or a deal room.

A rite of passage marks a transition everyone eventually has to go through to reach whatever comes next. Rules of Passage is about the version of that which businesses, governments, and the people inside both of them go through constantly, usually without ceremony and often without much help. This site is an attempt to provide some.