Johannesburg Business School finally gets off the ground

It was supposed to be a custom-designed building in Soweto to show commitment to SA’s growing black entrepreneur base. Instead, the University of Johannesburg’s (UJ) new business school has set up home in an old glass skyscraper overlooking the main UJ Milpark campus.

What hasn’t changed, says school senior director Lyal White, is its desire to educate and mentor future generations of black business and leadership talent — though not to the exclusion of white students.

It’s more than a decade since UJ announced plans for a R500m school on vacant land near Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital. The university was already offering courses through the faculty of management it inherited from Rand Afrikaans University, but wanted to create a formal business school to match those at other state universities. The plan was to open the new institution in 2009.

However, financial constraints, loss of key personnel and changing UJ priorities delayed the process, and it wasn’t until 2017 that the Johannesburg Business School (JBS) finally got off the ground, literally, by moving into the multistorey former headquarters of insurer Auto & General.

It’s nearly a year since White, previously associate professor at Pretoria University’s Gordon Institute of Business Science and director of its centre for dynamic markets, moved into his new job. But it’s only in the past few weeks that JBS has started to provide the executive education programmes that are the staple diet of most schools. It will be another two years before the school is ready to offer an MBA.

White knows he has to be patient. "It takes at least three or four years to establish a business school," he says, "and then several more years to develop its reputation."

One area White hopes to fast-track is international accreditation. "It’s something we need to short circuit," he says. Fast-tracking is rarely on the cards, however, at the organisations that offer the accreditations to which many SA schools aspire. They are the Association for MBAs, the European Foundation for Management Development Quality Improvement System and the US-based Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.

JBS has one advantage. Full-time faculty numbers are a common measurement, and White says he can call on more than 100, thanks to the structure of UJ’s college of business & economics, of which JBS is part. That gives it access to faculty from fellow schools in accounting, consumer intelligence, economics, public management and tourism. The 100 number would mean that JBS would have more than twice as many full-time faculty as any other SA business school.

One thing White will have to accept is that success and growth are subject to multiple outside forces. Just ask the university business schools at Cape Town, Wits, North West, KwaZulu-Natal, Unisa and Stellenbosch, where leadership changes have created the opportunity for reflection.

Mills Soko resigned in June as head of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business (GSB), two years after he replaced Belgian innovator Walter Baets. In a letter to staff, he said progress had come "at a heavy personal cost" and he would revert to his former role as a plain academic. Soko declines to elaborate on his decision but colleagues say job pressures have affected his health. Associate professor Kosheek Sewchurran, head of GSB’s executive MBA programme, has been appointed acting director while the hunt for Soko’s successor is undertaken.

Sewchurran admits he’s interested in the job. One of his priorities, as it was for Soko, is to return GSB to the top 100 full-time global MBAs, as ranked by the London Financial Times. Many schools dislike rankings, which they say measure irrelevant criteria, but GSB enjoyed considerable marketing benefits before it dropped out of the top 100 in 2017, and it is anxious to return as soon as possible.

Leadership changes are more common at Wits Business School (WBS), where Sibusiso Sibisi was installed as director in January, 10 months after the departure of his predecessor, Steve Bluen. The often revolving-door nature of the job in recent years has made it difficult for successive directors to leave their stamp on the school or plot a steady direction.

Seven months in, Sibisi, former head of the Council for Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR), says he is still finding his feet in the job he gave up retirement to fill.

In many ways, he says, the job at WBS is similar to that at the CSIR: turning research into practical applications — what he calls "the interface between academia and industry".

He adds: "We have so much knowledge among faculty at the school. How do we harness that to create a better society and a better economy?"

Caution, however, is his watchword. He’s still getting to grips with everything his job entails. "I understand better what the challenges, and therefore the opportunities, are. But I have not finished my vision document."

This slowly-slowly approach includes working out what should be the school’s attitude to executive education. "I’m not clear yet how we should approach it, so I am taking direct responsibility for the time being. I need to understand what we do and what we want."

Unisa’s Graduate School of Business Leadership (SBL) is also in transition, as it seeks a successor to CEO Renosi Mokate, who left at the end of 2017. Acting dean Raphael Mpofu, a Unisa management stalwart, is using the time to implement strategic changes within the school. One is to increase its autonomy as an institution separate from the main university.

Autonomy is a sensitive subject for most university business schools, which, for all their research and teaching activities, don’t follow the same academic model as other university departments. Most students are there for practical training rather than traditional education. And the money schools earn from executive education is often eyed greedily by others in the university hierarchy. Hence the unwillingness to grant schools full licence.

Mpofu says the SBL is preparing for what he calls "hybrid" autonomy next year. That means greater freedom to budget, manage itself and introduce programmes. "It’s a system that gives you the ability to do things quickly," he says. "It reduces red tape."

One of the school’s bugbears is that administration is run from the Unisa head office. "Our customer service is very poor because we don’t have a say in it," says Mpofu.

North-West University School of Business & Governance hopes it won’t face a similar situation after the decision by the university to take over management of executive education. While the school will continue to teach, the university will manage much of the administration.

"I hope," says school director Fulu Netswera, "this will not compromise the excellent personal relationships we have built over many years with corporate and government clients."

Netswera replaced Tommy du Plessis at the Potchefstroom-based school this year after Netswera had left the University of Limpopo’s Turfloop Graduate School of Leadership.

As a black academic, how has he settled into one of SA’s least-transformed university campuses? "I was hesitant about coming to Potchefstroom for that very reason, but everyone has been very welcoming," he says.

The University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Graduate School of Business & Leadership is also looking for a new head following the resignation of director Theuns Pelser after three years in charge. The school is a rarity in SA in that its responsibilities are limited to academic activities such as the MBA. Executive education, the fee-earning lifeblood of most schools, is left to the university’s Extended Learning company.

The university has been in two minds for years about the role of its business school, and whether it is an academic division or a standalone entity. It’s understood that another review is under way.

Meanwhile, Extended Learning CEO Simon Tankard says: "While all this is happening, we are getting on quietly with what we do."

So is Chris van der Hoven, the former WBS academic who has just replaced the estimable Frik Landman as head of Stellenbosch University Business School’s executive education division, USB-Ed. Van der Hoven says school management is "still waiting for me to give an indication of what I want to work on". A possible project is to follow the lead of Cape Town’s GSB and establish a Gauteng campus in Sandton.

Milpark Business School dean Cobus Oosthuizen is also finding his feet, though under different circumstances. His school, formerly part of America’s Apollo Education Group, was bought this year by Stadio Holdings, an SA higher-education investment company. Oosthuizen says: "We learnt a lot from the Apollo relationship, particularly in distance learning.

"It’s still too early to be clear how the new ownership will affect the way we operate."