When Sean Summers reassumed the leadership role at Pick n Pay the group was rushing headlong into the abyss. Everything that could go wrong for a retailer was happening — loss of market share, being crippled by debt, technical insolvency and being deserted by its formerly loyal base of customers.

Most managers, when staring into the abyss that was Pick n Pay last year, would have taken fright and opted for a safer job elsewhere. But not Summers — he loves a scrap. In Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil there is a famous quote that goes “if you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks into you”...

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