Dick Foxton thrived on human connection, proving old-school charm could still trump modern tech in building bridges.
I am now at an age where I get irrationally enraged at the lack of human interaction in much that I used to rely upon real people for.
From opening bank accounts to submitting tax returns, making bookings, even checking in for flights; there’s an app for that.
It’s tedious, time consuming and strange the first time you have to do it, none of which are happy places for the 60 and over.
But if you push through, it’s amazing how easy they are.
As the millennials and the alphabet soup generations that follow will tell you, it’s all intuitive, you just have to find the time – and the urge – to play around with the new tech, like using a TV remote for the first time when your kids leave home and you’re trying to navigate from your wife’s streaming service to the Boks on SuperSport in time for the anthems, without throwing the remote out the window.
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Life’s faster, easier and cheaper with technology, but it is also depersonalised, a lesson that was driven home on Friday afternoon at Dick Foxton’s funeral in Johannesburg.
The 82 year old, who literally walked with kings but never lost the common touch – and fell in love with Thuli Madonsela – was the first of the real lobbyists, bringing business, politics and media together, using nothing more than a 25-year-old Nokia 6210.
Foxton’s magic sauce was the personal touch.
He kept in contact using the Jurassic methodology of voice calls and breaking bread around a table, getting people who might sometimes have been at loggerheads because they didn’t understand one another’s positions to find common ground.
Foxton was inordinately successful at what he did, by any metric.
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He was living proof of the adage that if you do something you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.
The fact that no-one has ever come close to matching him in the 50 years he ran his one-man company, that literally was not much more than a PA, a driver and a fax machine and, latterly, e-mail (but never from himself) – speaks volumes to his acumen, his work ethic and probably the constitution of a dray horse.
Unlike Canute and the waves, Foxton actually managed to turn back technology with humanity.
In the words of one of his granddaughters on Friday, he was probably SA’s first proper influencer.
RIP, Dick.
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