After 20 years of living above a theatre, Rhodes Business School is finally to have its own building. No date has been set for the move, but director Owen Skae says it is part of a planned realignment on campus that will bring together all divisions of the commerce faculty.
Founded in 2000, the school has always lodged on the top floor of the university’s theatre school on the main street of Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown).
Skae, who became director in 2010, admits lack of administrative and teaching space has been a constant problem. But now that the university has funds for development, he says, the school can look forward to its own, custom-made base.
The premises will put practicality before grandeur, as befits one of SA’s smallest business schools. As reported in the lead story, the Covid-accelerated shift to online higher education will have implications for campuses designed for high-volume student attendance — in either classrooms or overnight accommodation.
Some schools say they may need to find alternative uses for parts of their campuses. University of Stellenbosch Business School, which is designing a new campus in preparation for a move to Stellenbosch from its current Bellville HQ, says it may need to trim original plans.
The word "may" crops up a lot in business school conversations about the future. No-one really understands the long-term implications of Covid-19 and its economic and social impact. But what all schools agree on is that, whatever the short-term effect, long-term demand for executive education isn’t going to disappear. Indeed, they argue that the greater the disruption to normal business, the more it will be needed.
Whether all existing schools will be around to enjoy the eventual rebound is open to question. Nicola Kleyn, until recently dean of the University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science (Gibs), says there is a global oversupply of business schools.
"A lot are marginal and barely profitable," she says. "The fallout from Covid-19 will cause some to close or merge and others to specialise. We will see consolidation in the industry."
Kleyn, who will become dean of executive education at Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands on August 1, says such a fallout is unlikely among established schools in SA. "The sector here is highly regulated," she says. "This has created a formal sector with high entry levels and standards. That is not the case in many other markets, and those are where I think we will see casualties."
But could some of these consider SA and the rest of Africa as their salvation?
Johannesburg Business School director Lyal White says the continent, with its huge, relatively young population, is crying out for education at every level of business, from the shop floor to the boardroom.
"There are hundreds, even thousands, of rats-and-mice business schools around the world desperate for new income," he says.
"When they see the burgeoning African population and realise they can provide education at a quarter of the cost they do elsewhere, they are bound to be interested."
That doesn’t mean Africa needs a free-for-all. Basic business principles may be similar the world over, but context isn’t, says Zaheer Hamid, director of the Durban-based Management College of Southern Africa, or Mancosa. The college, along with near neighbour Regent Business School, is part of the pan-African Honoris United Universities network, created to improve higher education on the continent.
In March Yusuf Karodia, who founded both, was named Honoris’s African education person of the year.
Africa has unique business education challenges, says Hamid. What’s taught in Asia, Europe or North America can’t simply be transplanted here. In SA, the emphasis should be on readying people to work.
"Business theory is all very well, but we have to equip people with the critical 21st-century skills required for the future," he says.
"It’s about employability and adaptability."
White similarly notes: "People want meaningful employment. The purpose of education is not to find a job or career but to improve your life."
Not just your life, but the lives of everyone around you. In times of crisis like this, when many companies face unprecedented challenges, it’s easy for them to become so inward-looking that they neglect the bigger picture.
"Poverty, hunger, sustainability … none of these goes away just because our attention is elsewhere," says Milpark Business School dean Cobus Oosthuizen. "Whatever its internal challenges, business still has a responsibility to broader society.
"As schools, we must continue to maintain that awareness in our executive education."
Maintenance alone may not be enough. Chris van der Hoven, head of executive education at University of Stellenbosch Business School, says: "There will have to be a massive reset in the social, business and political spheres to avoid further losses in both fiscal and human terms."
The University of Cape Town (UCT) Graduate School of Business (GSB) has been a pioneer in social innovation, with the support of corporate partners.
Business development director Rayner Canning says: "There can be no let-up. We need innovation now more than ever."
Henley Business School Africa dean Jon Foster-Pedley, however, isn’t convinced it’s freely available. He says schools, and the universities to which many belong, have to break free from traditional academic thinking to meet the needs of a rapidly changing world.
"Academia concentrates on theory, but real life has little to do with theory," he says. "Universities used to be organs of change. We need them to be that again."
One which is changing, in its own way, is the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT). Its business school, which used to bear the TUT name, has changed its identity to the Tshwane School for Business & Society and is finally dipping its toes into the executive education pool. The school is anxious to take advantage of its status as the capital city’s only homegrown business school. (Gibs is based in Joburg.)
TUT used to limit the business school to MBA education, but at the urging of director Kobus Jonker, who moved in last year, it has loosened the straitjacket.
Tshwane is a major hub for the SA motor industry and the school has begun offering programmes to vehicle and components manufacturers and to the Gauteng provincial government’s automotive investment and development arm.
Jonker, who forged similar motor industry relationships in the Eastern Cape when he helped launch the Nelson Mandela University Business School some years ago, says the Tshwane school is also finalising programmes in agricultural management and township entrepreneurship.
"We are finding opportunities in several sectors but, having started executive education from zero, we’re not going to get ahead of ourselves," he says.
"We will find out what we’re good at and where we can add real value, and concentrate on that. Our ambition is not to become a big, generalist school."
Older schools fitting that description continue to expand their offerings. UCT’s GSB is launching a master of management degree specialising in international management. The degree is affiliated to the Global Alliance in Management Education.
Programme director Beverly Shrand says the first GSB cohort will start in September 2021, but applications are already open.
The University of KwaZulu-Natal’s executive education arm, Extended Learning, is developing its investment and economic development programmes in partnership with investment promotion agencies, says CEO Simon Tankard.
He adds that clients and employees expect business schools to respond to market needs far faster than they have in the past. "Long lag times relating to learning are no longer acceptable, and employees expect to be able to access content and acquire new knowledge at any point as it is required," he says.
Market research for this cover story was conducted before and during the lockdown. Results track executive education activities on two scales: management level and subject preference.
Compared with previous years, employer reasons for undertaking executive education haven’t changed much. However, schools may be concerned by the "Money’s Worth" table, showing that barely half of private sector employers believe they are getting value for money.
Allowing for the fact that attitudes may be influenced by the lockdown and the need to manage every cent, that’s a sobering result. It reinforces the view that the future may lie less with classroom education and more with online and digital.
"Show Me the Money" and "Open Season" show the average cost of traditional executive education programmes, including face-to-face classroom sessions. Direct online comparisons can be misleading but, at some schools, the average weekly cost of an online programme is considerably less than the daily cost of a traditional one.
Several schools have reduced costs of their standard programmes to ease the pressure on crisis-hit companies. Regenesys, for example, has cut fees of many programmes by 60% until the end of August.
Besides saving money, some employers like online courses because staff don’t have to leave the workplace. That feeling is not always reciprocated: many employees value classroom interaction and deeply resent it when the company intrudes on official study time at the office to load them with more work.
Besides the opportunity to leave the office behind, many individuals miss the "warmth and engagement" of the classroom, says Timothy Hutton, acting executive director of Wits Business School. "They also feel they are missing out on networking opportunities."
It’s not just remote learning. Convenient as it might be, remote working also has its social drawbacks. Regenesys CEO Leoni Grobler says: "In our conversations with clients it is clear that people yearn for more social interaction."
Something else emerged from our research. Whether it is customised executive education tailored for individual corporate clients, or open programmes for individuals, there is almost no limit to what schools will teach. Traditional subjects such as leadership, management, finance, strategy and marketing have always held sway. More recently, ethics, governance, entrepreneurship, emotional intelligence, interpersonal skills, digital marketing and women in leadership have all come into their own.
But what about storytelling, behavioural economics, forensic investigation, wine, fraud and negotiation? They’re all in SA. In the US, there’s even a programme called Body Language for Entrepreneurs.
Fifteen schools took part in market research on executive education for this special report. They were the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business; the University of the Free State Business School; the University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science; Henley Africa Business School; Johannesburg Business School, at the University of Johannesburg; the Management College of Southern Africa; Regent Business School; Milpark Business School; Nelson Mandela University Business School; Regenesys Business School; Rhodes Business School, at Rhodes University; the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Extended Learning school; the Unisa Graduate School of Business Leadership; the University of Stellenbosch Business School; and Wits Business School, part of Wits University.
The research period overlapped with the Covid-19 lockdown, causing two other schools to withdraw during the process because of administrative pressures.
The same applied to some employers. Of the 74 that took part, 74% were from the private sector and the remainder from the public sector and NGOs.
Research was carried out by the FM’s long-term partner on business school projects, Lodestar Marketing Research.
— The research sample
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