It’s a recurring irony that business schools, which often lecture corporate boards and CEOs on the need for leadership succession planning, don’t always heed their own words. Or, if they do, the message never seems to reach the universities within which most of them sit.
A few weeks ago, after nearly two years as interim dean of the University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science (Gibs), Morris Mthombeni was finally permitted to drop the “interim” from his title. He has been running the school since July 2020, following the departure of former dean Nicola Kleyn.
Mthombeni, who has been at the school since 2014 after a career in financial services, had been widely expected to get the job. Despite the “interim” tag, he says he was given free rein to run the faculty as he saw fit, even if long-term plans were tempered by the knowledge that another appointee might want to do something different.
His five-year contract doesn’t really change the way he does the job, he tells the FM. But it does give him “a longer-term horizon to achieve what I want; that means responding to customer and student needs and helping them shape what the world will look like”.
Gibs isn’t the only school with a new head. Udesh Pillay has replaced the founding director of the University of the Free State Business School, Helena van Zyl, who retired last year. While he says he wants the school to remain a small, “boutique” institution, he’s planning a change of focus.
Executive education, says Pillay, should concentrate more on development of SMEs, which are crucial to the development of peri-urban environments such as the Free State. His plans include creation of a small-business academy to add depth to existing university activities. There’s also talk of a small-business incubator.
Pillay says he wants to offer similar services in Limpopo, the Northern Cape and Mpumalanga, where the business mix is similar to that of the Free State. Lesotho is also on the radar.
Small business development is already an integral activity at North-West University Business School in Potchefstroom, which is about to start its own hunt for a new director.
Incumbent Jan van Romburgh has resigned but will continue to teach at the school. For now, long-serving academic Anet Smit has been named acting director.
Economist Raymond Parsons, chair of the school’s advisory board, says the search for a full-time successor will start soon. He hopes an appointment can be made in time for the start of the 2023 academic year.
Small-business development — specifically, increasing the influence of its small business advisory bureau — is among the objectives of Project Proton, the school’s 2026 vision. Others include winning international accreditation from European and US business education bodies, to add to the UK-based Association of MBAs accreditation it already holds; expanding its influence in the rest of Africa; and becoming a leading voice against corruption through the establishment of a unit for corruption and integrity studies.
Academic Albert van Zyl, who was seconded to the Zondo commission on state capture, says: “There is a provable link between corruption and violence and even murder. That all works against the future of the country.”
Nelson Mandela University Business School, in Gqeberha, is also looking for a new director, after Randall Jonas left early this year.
Acting director Hendrik Lloyd says the school has been part of a university-wide reorganisation. Within the school, there’s a new emphasis on executive education, and it has added ocean sciences and maritime subjects to its academic offerings.
Like North-West, it wants to make its mark across Africa. Michelle Mey, deputy dean of the faculty of business and economic sciences, under which it falls, says the school is anxious to reignite its academic and reputational progress of a few years ago.
“Covid didn’t help, but we seem to have stalled,” she says.
The same can’t be said of Henley Africa, which goes from strength to strength. Dean Jon Foster-Pedley, recently appointed chair of the Association of African Business Schools, says the school is the first in the southern hemisphere to win two talent development awards from the European Foundation for Management Development.
It was also the biggest contributor, he says, to the UK-based Henley business school group excelling in the latest Financial Times global ranking for executive education. And, he says, the school is setting new standards in virtual reality as an educational tool.
It’s all very well the West talking about ‘net zero’ environmentalism, but what happens to oil-dependent economies like those of Nigeria and Angola? Someone has to make outsiders understand what is required to bolster their peaceful transition
— Catherine Duggan
Duke Corporate Education, including its Joburg campus, also cracked the rankings, but the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business (GSB) was the only SA-based school to make it.
Having finally made it to SA after a prolonged period of long-distance management from New York during Covid, GSB director Catherine Duggan says her priority is to reinforce the school’s position as “a bridge between the African continent and the rest of the world”.
GSB’s international status gives it an influence that other SA schools, for all their activities in Africa, don’t share, she says.
The school has hired several new academics with African expertise. “It’s all very well the West talking about ‘net zero’ environmentalism, but what happens to oil-dependent economies like those of Nigeria and Angola?” she asks. “Someone has to make outsiders understand what is required to bolster their peaceful transition.”
US citizen Duggan says that when she finally arrived in Cape Town to take up her post in person, she felt as if she “already knew everyone” from their online interactions.
Stellenbosch Business School director Mark Smith, a British academic delayed several months in France before being granted his work visa, had a different reaction.
“Though we had a lot of virtual interaction while I was waiting, only when I arrived did I realise that I didn’t really know my colleagues. There had been none of the nuances of personal contact. Relationships are impaired by lack of contact.”
The school recently changed its name, having previously been the University of Stellenbosch Business School — despite the mother institution having already become Stellenbosch University.
“We spent a long time thinking what to call ourselves,” says Smith. “We are proud to be attached to the university and the Western Cape but many other leading schools around the world don’t bear their university’s name.”
Physically, the association is about to become closer as long-discussed plans to move the school to Stellenbosch from its campus in Bellville, Cape Town, finally take shape. The proposed site is currently zoned for agricultural use, so Smith says the new campus is unlikely to be ready before 2026.
The Bellville campus may be retained as a satellite site.
Other schools are also looking for new premises. Kobus Jonker, director of the Tshwane School for Business & Society, admits the current multistorey building is no longer fit for purpose. Besides being in a rundown part of the city centre, there’s also the issue of structural decay in the building itself.
Alternatives include a Hatfield building with a nearby hotel and food outlets — much more suitable for an ambitious school.
Jonker, who is due to retire at the end of next year, says Tshwane University of Technology, of which the school is part, is open to the school eventually becoming a stand-alone faculty. Before that happens, however, it will need to increase the number of academic staff, students and executive education clients.
SA’s newest business school, the Durban University of Technology Business School, will officially open its doors next month, despite having accepted its first cohort of MBA students nearly a year ago. The school resides on a university campus opposite Durban’s Scottsville racecourse.
Fulu Netswera, dean of the faculty of management sciences, says the school is eyeing separate premises in Umhlanga, closer to its potential market — though he admits property and land prices in the area are a deterrent.
The school has assumed responsibility for executive education, which used to be managed elsewhere in the university. It is already talking to the eThekwini municipality about programmes and has ambitions to do the same in Pietermaritzburg.
Regenesys Business School, in Sandton, probably has the grandest ambitions of all. Not content with having created a school with campuses in SA, Nigeria and India, founder Marko Saravanja says he wants to expand into the US as part of his plan to turn Regenesys into a full-scale university.
He wants to create a business in California’s Silicon Valley to develop Regenesys’s technology capabilities. There’s talk of acquiring a US college, too. “We realised a long time ago the need to go international,” says Saravanja.
SA presently accounts for about 90% of Regenesys’s revenue. “In two to three years, it will be less than 50%, and longer-term 20%,” he adds. “We are very concerned about the future of this country.”
Randall Carolissen is accelerating the changes he instigated after taking over at Johannesburg Business School last year. The school has been upgraded to a faculty in its own right, allowing it to “react quickly to market and client needs”, he says.
The school has begun the application process for multiple accreditations but already its reputation is growing, says Carolissen. The school expected to enrol eight students for its first doctoral programme. Instead, it received more than 100 applications and enrolled 33. “All are master’s graduates,” he says.
Tumi Nkosi, the school’s executive education director, says demand is also growing beyond expectations. The school offers no open programmes, only customised ones, tailor-made for corporate clients. “We don’t spray and play,” she says. “We tell clients we need to talk and see what works, that we need to be nimble and agile. That’s our ‘secret sauce’.”
I think that concept of leadership is under threat more than it has ever been
— Owen Skae
Rhodes Business School director Owen Skae says that after years of greed and corruption among corporate and political leaders, business schools have a special role to play in creating a new kind of leadership.
“People are becoming less tolerant of this behaviour,” he says. “They have had enough. If you, as a leader, are not willing to serve the organisation — which is what you are there to do — no-one will buy into anything you do or say. I think that concept of leadership is under threat more than it has ever been.”
Milpark Business School is in the throes of its latest strategic review — part of what dean Cobus Oosthuizen calls a “full-scale re-evaluation” following the January appointment of Andrew Horsfall as group CEO of Stadio Holdings, which owns Milpark.
Oosthuizen says Stadio has a “very strong appreciation of our context and the role we should play”.
One question is where Milpark sits in the market. It has experienced good growth in recent years and its MBA is internationally accredited, but Oosthuizen says that with more than 20 business schools in a relatively small market, “you have to find your lane”.
Should Milpark be in direct competition with major university business schools with bigger infrastructures and budgets, or should it be targeting the mid-market sector? “Price sensitivity is becoming an issue,” says Oosthuizen. “It’s not something we can ignore.”
The Da Vinci School of Business Leadership is also keen to define its place in the market. CEO HB Klopper says: “We don’t want to remain below the radar.”
Unfortunately, that’s often the fate of relative newcomers in a competitive sector. The school has made considerable progress but, as Klopper observes, no school wants to be a “well-kept secret” longer than necessary.
He says demand for the school’s executive education products is expanding rapidly, mostly in its chosen sectors, such as mining, engineering, financial services and technology. “We don’t want to be all things to everyone. We want to be the best in specific areas.”
Unisa’s Graduate School of Business Leadership used to enjoy that reputation in online education. In the past two years, however, every business school has moved into that space.
“That has not been good news for us,” says executive education head Peet Venter. “It’s forced us to look at what we do and how we want to position ourselves in the future.”
The school has lost traction in the executive education market in recent years. Venter, who took charge in 2021, says: “We have a good idea of where we want to go and the programmes we want to offer, but we need to go back to the basics, get the right foundations in place.”
He says there have been positive discussions with industries and companies, with emphasis on SMEs and technology entrepreneurship. But it will take time to come close to dean Pumela Msweli’s ambition of earning R100m a year from executive education.
Wits Business School is further along the comeback trail. Executive education head Leoni Grobler even suggested that the FM headline this article “Look Who’s Back!”
School director Maurice Radebe says a strategy to rebrand and reposition the school after a difficult few years is bearing fruit. “Big corporates that stopped working with us are coming back and tell us we have turned the corner. Student numbers were dropping but aren’t any longer. We’ve had a massive turnaround in all our programmes.”
He’s particularly keen to increase penetration of what is known as the “C-Suite” — companies’ most senior executives such as the CEO, MD, CFO, chief marketing officer, COO and chief information officer.
“That’s where reputations are made,” he says. “We want to be known again as SA’s premium business school brand.”
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