SOUTH AFRICA SPECIAL REPORT
From their inception they developed deep insights into complex stakeholder relationships and led searching conversations about ethical leadership. During the apartheid period, companies often led the way toward social change and this trend was reflected at many of the country’s business schools, several of which integrated their classrooms long before apartheid ended and began searching considerations of the role business can play in a changing society. In these early years, South African MBA alumni often found that the complexity of their home environment served them well elsewhere: while a large number left the country during the apartheid period, many found that their experiences in South Africa gave them insights that allowed them to move quickly into senior roles and found major companies in the US, Europe and Australia. Ironically, the period of brain drain under apartheid has meant that South African schools now have some of the most established global alumni networks of any business schools in emerging markets. In the decades since the fall of apartheid, South African business leaders have become even more adept at managing complexity and change. Supporting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace has been, in one way or another, a key performance indicator for many managers for 30 years; the most successful firms in South Africa in terms of this metric have far outpaced approaches taken by companies in the ‘Global North’. Now, even as the country manages the challenges created by its historical legacies, it has found itself at the front line of the problems wrought by climate change. Just a few years ago, Cape Town – the country’s second-largest city and a major hub for technology and tourism – nearly ran out of water in the midst of a historic drought. The country’s own path to net zero is complicated by its reliance on domestically produced coal and the jobs that coal mining provides in a country where approximately a third of the population is unemployed. In typical South African style, these challenges have become opportunities for change. While Cape Town’s dams are full again, the area’s response spurred new approaches to water management across the Southern African region. The rolling blackouts caused by an ageing, mismanaged infrastructure are forcing a rapid shift towards solar and other renewables, as well as innovations such as restaurant menus optimised for low or no-electricity environments. As the world becomes more complicated and issues such as inequality, DEI, sustainability, shared value and stakeholder management come to the global fore, South African business schools once again find themselves with unique insights into developing resilience and navigating shifting environments. The growth and development of the African continent has also brought renewed attention to South Africa. Long a key hub for multinational companies looking to do business throughout the continent, managers and MBA students in South Africa gain unique experience of working across this fast-growing region. As the world’s demographics shift increasingly toward Africa – which currently represents 17 per cent of the global population and is expected to have the majority of the world’s working-age population by 2050 – South Africa o ers a unique window into the challenges and opportunities created by these shifts.
South Africa is a land of extremes: from its wealth and inequality juxtaposed throughout society to its natural beauty, from oceans to desert, forests to mountains and lions to penguins. The country is home to most of the largest companies on the African continent, (including 58 of the top 100 measured by market capitalisation) even as it struggles through infrastructural deficits including rolling blackouts that can leave South Africans without power for up to ten hours a day. Yet at the same time, the country o ers world-class technologies and financial services, a thriving start-up scene, top-class tourist destinations, untapped talent and a unique and important approach to management education. With these challenges comes a long legacy of forging new understandings of doing business in complex environments – as well as glimpses of ways the private sector might help to drive sustainability and positive societal change. As business schools around the world are being forced to grapple with the relevance of the MBA, students are showing an increasingly strong appetite to think about integrated real world challenges and pundits are speculating that our entire educational model might be upended by artificial intelligence. A unique context South Africa is never far from its di cult history. The apartheid system, which only came to an end with the country’s shift to full democracy in 1994, created explicit race-based restrictions and privileges reflected in every part of its social fabric and made it a global pariah subject to restrictive international sanctions. In the mid-1960s, when most of the country’s oldest business schools were established, their MBA graduates faced a domestic context riven by social conflict in a substantially closed, extremely competitive and inwardly-focused economy. Business schools in South Africa have always been forced to adapt global insights to the complex realities of the local environment.
Ambition OCTOBER 2023 | 27
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