Publications
Partners
Cape Town – South African Masters of Business Administration (MBA) courses need to incorporate social innovation, entrepreneurship and a critical understanding of emerging markets to create unique leaders for this country.
That is according to University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business (GSB) director Professor Walter Baets, who said MBA degrees should train managers to “deal with difficult situations in South Africa”.
WATCH: Creating an MBA uniquely for emerging market business leaders
The GSB, which is the only African MBA degree listed on the Financial Times Top 100 MBA, announced last week that the GSB had been awarded a place on the Top 40 2015 Corporate Knights Better World MBA Ranking, another first for an African MBA.
While other rankings focus on traditional criteria to produce world-class business administrators, this ranking identified the GSB for its socially and environmentally aware MBA programme.
“The GSB is trying to establish a bigger African focus, not only in its curriculum and faculty, but in its models of education as well,” said Baets.
WATCH: Why the Better World ranking is important for the GSB
Speaking to Fin24, he said most of the management models the GSB had taught in the past were European or North American, which didn’t necessarily apply to emerging markets.
Explaining that emerging markets have high degrees of complexity, uncertainty and inequality, Baets said many of the classical models “are conceived with the idea of a continuously slow-growing economy”.
“That’s not the reality here,” he said. “Here, you have much more uncertainty. You will need more innovation (and) you will need more entrepreneurship.
“Entrepreneurship is a genetic thing that you have to implant in every one of your MBA graduates here and in other emerging markets,” he said.
Baets, who is the chairperson of the Association of South African Business Schools, said universities need to develop MBAs that work in Africa. “For too long, emerging markets … have not been interested in that,” he said.
“What I saw in this school when I arrived was that we trained people to go and work for Goldman Sachs and that was the tricks we trained them in,” said Baets. “Now, if I train you in the tricks I used in Goldman Sachs, how are you going to be useful here in South Africa?
“It’s a waste of effort.”
WATCH: Is an MBA for everyone?
