World-famous Forbes magazine woke up to its second century in an overcast New York after a night of whiskey, bagpipes, banter, billionaires and Stevie Wonder.
Forbes celebrated 100 years of publication with a huge party for the rich and famous on the swanky Chelsea Piers overlooking New York Harbour. It was a who&#8217;s who of business from South Africa&#8217;s mining magnate Patrice Motsepe to Warren Buffett and Sean &#8216;Diddy&#8217; Coombs.
The business magazine &#8211; celebrated in songs with a cover that is the envy of  billionaires &#8211; has survived two world wars, depressions, recessions and the decline in the print business. It began reporting in a business world where oil and steel were king; it completed its century when Artificial Intelligence and technology were making people rich.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2017/09/20/forbes-magazine-100-years-hits-flops/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Forbes Magazine: 100 Years Of Hits And Flops</a>
The magazine was the brainchild of parsimonious Scotsman BC Forbes, a man who spent a few years working in South Africa, in the early 20th century; first, on the Natal Mercury, in Durban, then on the Rand Daily Mail, in Johannesburg.
Forbes sailed to New York in 1904, with $50 in his pocket, to make his fortune. He struggled to find a job and worked for free for a New York publication to prove his worth.
&#8220;For my grandfather this was a leap of faith. He didn&#8217;t know whether the owner was going to pay him or not. Money was very important to my grandfather. He used to say the best way to make copper wire was to get two Scotsmen to fight over a penny!&#8221; joked his grandson Steve Forbes, the Editor-in-Chief of the magazine who hasn&#8217;t missed a column for nearly half a century.
Forbes also recalled how his grandfather had booked into New York&#8217;s the Waldorf Astoria, one of the most luxurious and expensive hotels in the world. He had to scrimp and save, by walking to stories and saving his taxi money, to make the bill every month.
&#8220;A lot of his friends asked if he was mad. He couldn&#8217;t afford it, but every night he was in the bar mixing with the biggest and most powerful business names of the day,&#8221; he says.
Mixing with the right people, coupled with sharp and honest reporting, helped make Forbes magazine a success from its launch in 1917.
At the function was a sartorial reminder of BC Forbes. Grandson Kip Forbes wore his grandfather&#8217;s tailored tweed suit, that looked like it was made yesterday.
&#8220;I think it was made for in the him in the 1940s and it has survived the mothballs, so I thought it was right to wear it tonight in his honor,&#8221; he says.
Kip Forbes agreed that his grandfather was parsimonious as well as a shrewd business journalist.
&#8220;He used to say, I don&#8217;t give advice, I sell it,&#8221; he chuckled.
The event was supposed to see a jet plane, mounted on a boat, float up to the quayside at Chelsea Piers, but the rough weather on the night caused the Coastguard to put the block on this.
Instead the high-flyer of the night was Stevie Wonder who played a set opened by My Cherie Amour.
But the music closest to the Forbes family greeted guests. The skirl of the  bagpipes was in honor of the founder who had traveled a long journey from poverty in the village of New Deer, in Aberdeenshire, to creating the magazine of billionaires amid the riches of New York.
Steve Forbes toasted his late grandfather with a sip of 12-year-old Scotch given by one of the sponsors of the party. With the sip came the Forbes wry wit.
&#8220;My grandfather would have appreciated this&#8230; especially as it is free!&#8221; says his grandson to laughter from the large crowd.

A Mad Decision Paying Off 100 Years Later

April 1927: B.C. Forbes takes on automobile pioneer Henry Ford, praising his manufacturing successes, but railing against his virulent anti-Semitism. Ford issues an apology.
May 1929: A B.C. Forbes column warns &#8220;Stocks too high&#8221; five months before the market begins a slide that will take it down 85%.
December 1929: Though Forbes declares the worst is over for stocks, the market remains down for the next three years.
June 1932: A little-known Columbia University lecturer named Benjamin Graham writes an article saying crash had been way overdone, saying stocks are cheap. With the Dow at 45, it was nearly the bottom.
July 1956: Forbes is the first magazine to launch an Annual Report on Mutual Funds, including performance grades in Up and Down markets. The survey is widely followed and copied.
July 1963: A Forbes cover story examines the evidence that tobacco causes cancer and concludes, &#8220;The U.S. tobacco industry is headed for trouble of a kind no other industry has ever seen.&#8221;
September 1972: &#8220;The New Super Money Men&#8221; cover is the first to identify the rise of professional athletes and their managers as business-focused enterprises.
December 1972: A cover story predicts Mazda&#8217;s rotary engine will take over Detroit. Its popularity stalls soon after.
November 1974: In the depths of a bear market, Warren Buffett tells Forbes that stocks are cheap. &#8220;I feel like an oversexed man in a harem. This is the time to start investing.&#8221; Stocks soon rise.
August 1980: Chrysler is near bankruptcy and written off by the media. Forbes accurately predicts a comeback under the leadership of auto veteran Lee Iacocca.
November 1984: A Forbes investigative team is the first to shine a light on Drexel Burnham&#8217;s Michael Milken and his junk bond money machine.
November 1987: Despite dire predictions, a Forbes cover story assures readers that there would be no serious economic downturn as a result of the October 1987 crash. The market ends the year with a gain.
May 1990: &#8220;How Rich Is Donald?&#8221; A cover story digs deep into Trump&#8217;s finances, exposing a liquidity crunch and revealing a net worth of only $500 million versus the $4 billion he claimed.
April 1992: The magazine puts a tulip bulb on the cover and advises our readers not to put any new money into the stock market. The bull market rages on, almost without interruption, for eight more years.
March 1993: George Gilder&#8217;s cover story &#8220;Telecosm &#8221; in Forbes ASAP, predicts the coming wireless Web and computers the size of a wallet that would store your life&#8211;smartphones.
April 1994: Midway through Bill Clinton&#8217;s first term as president, a cover exclaimed: &#8220;Why Bill Clinton Looks Like a One-Termer.&#8221;
December 1996: In &#8220;Gilbert Amelio&#8217;s Grand Scheme to Save Apple&#8221; Forbes predicts that a new OS will save Apple, which would squash Microsoft. Amelio is ousted within seven months&#8211;by Steve Jobs.
December 1996: In &#8220;Is He the Godfather of the Kremlin?&#8221; Forbes reveals how Russia&#8217;s Boris Berezovsky, is the real muscle behind President Yeltsin. The oligarch will factor heavily in the selection of Vladimir Putin.
December 1998: A cover story on &#8220;Tax Shelter Hustlers&#8221; reveals a myriad of income tax avoidance maneuvers by leading accounting firms and their corporate clients and prompts alarm at Treasury and in Congress.
January 1999: &#8220;Amateur Hour on Wall Street&#8221; warns that a growing mob of novices, armed with cheap, fast PCs and e-brokerage accounts, is fueling a dangerous speculative tech stock bubble. Fourteen months later&#8211;pop!
April 2008: A cover story, &#8220;No Thain, No Gain,&#8221; gushes over Merrill Lynch and its ill-fated CEO, John Thain. Within a year, Merrill Lynch is bailed out by Bank of America and Thain is ousted amid scandal.
November 2008: With the financial crisis in full bloom, Steve Forbes&#8217; cover story, &#8220;How Capitalism Will Save Us&#8221; extols the underlying strengths of the U.S. economy and accurately predicts a resumption of the global boom.
October 2011: The magazine calls Chesapeake Energy&#8217;s CEO Aubrey McClendon, &#8220;America&#8217;s Most Reckless Billionaire.&#8221; Two years later, he&#8217;s out as CEO. Within five years, he dies in a car accident one day after being indicted for bid-rigging.
February 2013: A cover story on Airbnb identifies the share-economy as a new disruptive threat in a myriad of industries from hotels to car rentals to camping.
September 2015: In &#8220;Money&#8217;s New Operating System&#8221; Forbes predicts that the blockchain will become the &#8220;dial tone for the 21st-century global economy.&#8221;
June 2016: Forbes exposes billionaire Peter Thiel as the hidden money behind Hulk Hogan&#8217;s $140 million libel case against Gawker.
December 2016: The magazine chronicles how billionaire Kenneth Feld keeps Ringling Brothers circus alive. Within six months, the 146-year old entertainment business is shuttered.
March 2017: A cover package called &#8220;In Trump They Trust&#8221; exposes the vast web of global business partners&#8211;from Indonesia to Panama&#8211;cashing in on the 45th president.
Paul Klebnikov (1963-2004)
Bold journalism takes brave journalists, and Forbes has produced none braver than Paul Klebnikov, who climbed the ranks to become founding editor of Forbes Russia. Klebnikov launched the magazine at a time, like now, when the powers-that-be didn&#8217;t appreciate tough questions. And he asked them, chronicling the looting of the country by crony capitalists, the rise of organized crime and the war in Chechnya.
On July 9, 2004, Klebnikov was shot nine times with a semiautomatic pistol as he left his Moscow office. Just 41, he left behind a wife and three children. While Russian officials have never brought his killer to justice, some investigators have tried to pin the killing on now-deceased oligarch Boris Berezovsky, whom Klebnikov had dubbed the &#8220;Godfather of the Kremlin.&#8221; Others point to Chechen criminals. A team of investigative reporters, Project Klebnikov, continues to seek answers. And a generation of Forbes journalists, inspired by his fearless reporting, continue to ask tough questions.
&#8211; Written by <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/schifrin/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-ga-track="contrib block byline">Matt Schifrin</a>, FORBES STAFF

Forbes Magazine: 100 Years Of Hits And Flops

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FORBES AFRICA has told many spellbinding business stories in its five years. The story of its own difficult birth is one of the most riveting.
The idea of the pan-African business magazine was born in the heart of a financial crisis which wiped out many investors and left businesses lucky to survive. The media suffered the most.
In the depths of the downturn in 2007, soon after launching CNBC Africa, a business and finance TV channel, the two founders, Rakesh Wahi and Zafar Siddiqi, wanted a magazine. It was the worst time to launch.
“The whole publishing market was collapsing around us. To launch a new title at that time; people externally would have said you are foolish. Some of our other shareholders did not want to invest in the publishing business owing to the economic downturn,” says Wahi.
The pair refused to throw in the towel.
“I had a strong feeling this was going to work. When I told Zafar about it, he only asked if how I felt about it and I told him that the brand would be an instant success and after his thumbs up, we ran with it.”
Towards the end of 2009, a meeting in New York sparked the interest in joining the worldwide FORBES family. The magazine has a string of franchises around the world, from FORBES MEXICO to FORBES INDONESIA.
Wahi followed his gut, in the face of scepticism.
“Every time we spoke about FORBES, people’s eyes would light up,” he says.
It was the right time, he believed. The pair waited for the market to turn around slightly and made their move.
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“We didn’t like that very few African business leaders had made it into the international version of FORBES… people didn’t understand that there is so much entrepreneurship going on in the continent,” says Wahi.
It wasn’t easy. Building a pan-African magazine was expensive and complicated; but the gap in business and finance reporting in the continent was there to be filled.
It took about two years to complete the legal agreements of the franchise. The most difficult challenge was hiring the right people to steer the magazine to the top. Wahi’s 13 years in the Indian army, where he had become one of the youngest to receive the Vishisht Seva Medal (a military decoration in India) in 1986, helped.
“The army teaches you about looking after people. The core of it is that you have to do things together and you have to inspire people.”
He brought these principles with him to the world of entrepreneurship.
“When we were looking at finding an editor for the magazine, I searched around trying to see who would be the right fit… I was impressed by the experience people brought to the table but something was always missing… Chris Bishop’s name came up because he had done a great piece of work for me a couple of years before that, and impressed, so we took him on… He said he would even do this job for free,” recalls Wahi.
Magazines were in trouble everywhere. In the United States, according to MediaFinder, 152 closed in 2011 and 82 in 2012. In South Africa, Heat, Seventeen, FHM, Sports Illustrated and Shape are a few magazines that shut down because of declining advertising, circulation and competition from online.
Despite this, on September 28, 2011, on a night of glitz and glamour in Johannesburg, billionaire Patrice Motsepe unveiled the historic first cover of FORBES AFRICA.
It turned out that Wahi’s decision to hire Bishop was the right one. In just five years, the team has turned FORBES AFRICA into the leading business magazine in Africa against the odds.
The magazine came out ahead of its competitors in the IPSOS Affluent Survey Africa in 2014 and 2016. The independent research study, released on August 4, shows FORBES AFRICA reached 163,000, or 4.7%, of the 3.4 million qualifying adults, aged between 25 and 64, across seven markets.
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“What we have managed to achieve in just five short years is truly remarkable. Our success is attributed to the hard work and dedication of our teams from across the continent,” says Sid Wahi, Executive Director at ABN Publishing (FORBES AFRICA).
The IPSOS 2016 figures show a 7% increase from the 2014 survey.
“As the founding editor of this magazine it gives me immense pride to see our circulation figures increasing; all this at a time when magazine circulation around the world is falling. I think this is a tribute to the hard work and determination of our young band of highly talented journalists,” says Bishop.
FORBES AFRICA’s work has been recognized by various accolades awarded to the journalists and the editor. The hard work is also appreciated by readers. In Zimbabwe, entrepreneur, Blessed Mushamiri, says he drives around the city looking for a copy each month.
“Sometimes I have to drive to five different uptown shops to bump into one but I don’t stop looking. If I can’t find one, I ask people in South Africa to send me some copies. When I read FORBES AFRICA it engages me in an affair of pure pleasure, an exciting brush with business in Africa that shows me, as a young entrepreneur, that I can participate in something rare and thrilling. It is a must-read for every businessperson,” says Mushamiri.
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In West Africa, Emeka Akano, CEO and Co-Founder of Jara Mobile Ltd, says reading about entrepreneurs from different backgrounds who make it to the FORBES lists has inspired and motivated him.
“Features in the prestigious FORBES AFRICA magazine have gone a long way in giving me much more exposure to a credible audience, increased my personal profile beyond measure, opened doors for new business opportunities and business connections,” says Akano.
No matter the praises, Wahi says there is still more work to be done. He wants to grow the magazine to an even bigger success story, as with many of his other businesses.
Wahi is a smart entrepreneur and risk taker. An audacious one, five years ago, put this magazine in your hands.

Behold The Business Bible Of Africa

I am not one of those women who make assumptions about others based on what they’re wearing, but at a recent event, I caught myself staring at a young woman, probably well-bred, who decided it was appropriate to step out in a sheer skirt that revealed her knickers in their entirety.
Slightly dumbstruck, I looked to my male colleagues for a reaction. Nothing. Their gaze fell on her with the same analytical inspection that one applies to an inanimate object like a car, interesting enough to turn heads, but not worth any actual emotion.
That’s when it hit me – I had seen this before. This young lady was not the first of her kind, and she would certainly not be the last.
She was merely a ‘Fashion Lemming’ following an imaginary leader who graced TV shows, magazine covers and music videos.
If Miley Cyrus and Rihanna can prance about in next to nothing, we can too, right? Women’s Lib, Feminism, Sexual Equality&#8230;we’ve earned the right to flaunt our bodies so men can ogle at us like objects, right? Right?
Somewhere in my subconscious, I can hear my grandmother making judgment calls on women based on a tiny hole in their stockings. Imagine the fall-out if we were to time warp a selection of our fashion icons back to the 1950s, 1960s or even the 1990s. ‘Girl Power’ certainly seemed more assertive in platform sneakers than it does in a miniscule piece of nothing that covers up far less than it reveals.
But before we get on the bandwagon of blame, let us talk about where this all starts – the catwalk.
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I think it’s safe to say that the general public has never really understood this realm of the fashion world where storytelling and trend collide. As in theatre, where actors wear more makeup and project their voices to be heard, fashion’s stage is the runway and all that ascends it a show. It is however how the mass industry adapts this ‘performance’ that really has the most significance, and sadly we do not have enough modest stylists on hand to curb the epidemic.
Let us look back to Spring 2013 when we were first introduced to the crop top. Paired with a trouser or skirt fitted high in the waist, it flirted on the fringes of sexy without giving it all away. Likewise, racy bra tops played peek-a-boo under a jacket, whispering just enough without having to shout for attention. While ‘Sports Luxe’ revealed that athletic was the new sexy, minimal was the new feminine.
Cue a set of ambitious stars who thought they knew better and voila! You have street style that borders on ‘street walker’ – no imagination needed. Eventually their quest to ‘out-flash’ each other either resulted in complete nudity or epic fails on the red carpet. But on the way there, it left millions of women ‘enlightened’ in a very dark place.
How is this for a shocker? Fashion never wanted you to wear a crop top and micro-shorts (outside of the gym), they never intended you to reveal your ‘Wednesday’ panties under a mesh dress, and no, that bra top is not appropriate for anyone over a size 32A.
You see, some looks seen on the runway should never be reality; and just because that Attention Addict on Instagram is selling her body for followers, you don’t need to leap aboard for the downhill ride.
How people react to one another in real life is greatly different to La-La Land. The six-foot model wearing lace with nothing underneath is not going to be bothered backstage. Kim Kardashian is okay wearing latex with 10 bodyguards surrounding her; but you, my dear, are not safe in your sheer dress at the petrol station. There will never be a good enough reason to attack a woman, so please do not think I’m even suggesting that we cover-up for change. But I do think a few values need to be upheld in order to keep womankind’s image on the up and up.
Why not stand out from the crowd? Rita Ora may wear a side slit up to her hip on the red carpet, but you can make your own choices. I always say: if you have to coordinate your underwear with your outfit – it’s showing way too much. Clothing should never make you feel uncomfortable; so if you’re pulling and tugging, struggling to sit, stand or walk, chances are it wasn’t made to ever really be worn. That’s the deluded designers’ fault, not yours. A woman doesn’t need to show skin to be beautiful – she just needs to be comfortable in her own skin.
Alarmingly in a society that is always connected, we have so few meaningful connections. Our race to gain more friends and followers online has disconnected us from our reality, our heritage and our culture. The selfies we post are more important than how we really look – it’s all an illusion. So we’ve cast ourselves in a fantasy production of day-to-day life; and let me tell you, the critics aren’t impressed.
Once upon a time women were feminine: we succeeded with grace, we failed with dignity. Men will never be less attracted to skin, but with so much of it on display, they will grow tired of the irreverent show. Little by little, we dull our own sparkle. In a world where less may get you more glances and advances – ask yourself what exactly you wanted in the first place.

Tag: Magazine

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Forbes Magazine: 100 Years Of Hits And Flops

Behold The Business Bible Of Africa

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