FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA (July 10, 2009) – “The global crisis is not just a problem with mortgage systems and the regulation of banks in one country with a domino effect into many others. It also forces universities and business schools to ask questions about the nature of business and management education, and the issues of ethics we incorporate.”

This is according to University of Cape Town (UCT) Vice-Chancellor Max Price, who opened the fourth annual Global Business School Network (GBSN) Conference held this June at the UCT Graduate School of Business. He set the tone for the major event which drew more than 90 representatives from business schools, foundations, civil society, government and companies representing 23 different countries across five continents. The theme of the conference was “Partnerships in Practice – Local Managers for a Globalized World”.

GBSN is an international non-profit organisation, based in Washington DC, dedicated to creating the next generation of leaders in developing countries by raising the quality and accessibility of business management education. The Global Business School Network includes top business schools engaged in capacity-building programs with their counterparts in the developing world. GBSN partners with the Association of African Business Schools, which participated in the Cape Town conference.  Now in its fourth year, the GBSN annual conference has established itself as the key event on management education and training for development across the globe.  Its mission is to bring people together who are actively engaged in management education and in the implementation of best practice in schools, universities, corporate training programmes, as well as in education in the public sector.

With UCT’s Price setting the tone, ethics and entrepreneurship emerged as two key themes from the conference. Price added that institutions of higher learning, in the current economic context, have an opportunity to spread their expertise and knowledge in new ways to boost economies.

“It’s an opportunity for us to ask whether there are other markets for us and other kinds of entrepreneurs, some who might not have received a university education, with whom we can share the skills that in the past have been targeted very much at the corporate sector. We also need to do more to offer those skills to the public sector as well as small entrepreneurs, micro-enterprises and informal sector businesspeople,” said Price.

These sentiments were echoed by Guy Pfeffermann, CEO and Chairman of the Board of GBSN. Pfeffermann, a former Chief Economist for the International Finance Corporation (the private sector arm of the World Bank), said that business schools globally were at an important juncture.

“The current environment requires something more than business as usual. In one sense, the crisis can be seen as a huge opportunity to shake things up in business schools,” he said.

“What we are doing as a business school network is providing a platform for the way forward to be discussed, and helping forge sustainable partnerships among those who share a stake in educating and developing managers, and how best to craft such partnerships as an effective approach towards accelerating development.”

Pfeffermann explained that GBSN was created within the International Finance Corporation in 2002, then spun off as a nonprofit organization.

“Even though the scarcity of skilled local leaders and managers is widely recognized as an obstacle to progress in all sectors of most developing countries, public and private funders are devoting little funding to building local capacity for training the leaders and managers of tomorrow.  For many years, the  focus in Africa has been mainly on meeting primary education goals, while universities received relatively little attention.  Business schools in particular did not make it onto the radar screen of many donors.”

It was the urgent need to address this management gap that gave birth to the GBSN, and it has since attracted a multitude of business schools and academics eager to use business schools as a tool for national development.

Nora Brown, Chief Operating Officer of the GBSN, said that the quality of the people and institutions involved is one of the Network’s greatest assets.

“GBSN facilitates collaborative programs between business school faculty around the globe with the goal of improving the access and quality of management education in emerging markets. For example, we coordinate the development of new, locally-relevant courses and teaching materials, in order to train local business leaders, public sector managers, and entrepreneurs .We help business school faculty adopt modern pedagogies, such as participant-centered, interactive teaching which prepare students for the realities of doing business in the local environment.”

“It also entails running workshops where faculty from Africa and from other continents exchange valuable information on global best practice and innovations in business education and create new partnerships around new research, faculty exchanges, and collaborative student projects.”

As a result of past GBSN activities, the Association of African Business Schools (AABS) was created.  AABS has grown substantially in the past few years and has taken over the management and delivery of a former GBSN pilot project known as Teaching the Practice of Management (TPM).  TPM is a unique pan-African faculty mentoring program focused on interactive case-based teaching. More than 300 African professors have participated in TPM to date.  The one-week programme has been run in Johannesburg (South Africa), Lagos (Nigeria) as well as Nairobi (Kenya), and this year took place in Accra, Ghana.

John Mullins, Associate Professor of Management Practice in Marketing and Entrepreneurship at London Business School, argued that business schools need to get students thinking beyond current shareholder value and shift attention to sustainable returns.

Professor Mthuli Ncube, President of the South African Association of Business Schools, added that ethics and sustaining the environmental are also critical areas many schools need to work on.

“Before the financial crisis, a lot of business schools talked the talk on ethics and their contribution to society, but did not make it a core part of their programme. Now they are seeing it as a key part of their curriculums. It is important that the values of excellence, leadership, integrity and social awareness are imprinted on students by business schools – this needs to be just as important as the imparting of business skills,” he argued.

Dennis Hanno of Babson College in the US added that the benefits of entrepreneurship skills are not just relevant for those who want to become entrepreneurs.

“Only 10% of our students go on to start their own businesses, but the entrepreneurship learnings come through in their management positions in the way they manage,” he said.

“One area for business schools to look at is removing the artificial boundaries between subject areas. To mix traditional business subjects with new subjects will stimulate high levels of creativity. The financial crisis is also the best time to spur on entrepreneurship – research shows that many firms begin and gain a foothold in tough economic times, including many of today’s industry leaders such as Microsoft.”

On the issue of faculty development and the challenges, Robert Kennedy, head of the William Davidson Institute of the Stephen M Ross School of Business (University of Michigan), argued that many business schools are trying to strike a balance between hiring PhDs which are good for international accreditation and people who are good teachers but who might not be good researchers yet.

“Looking at the African continent, a viable path may be to bring people in because they have really good practical knowledge, train them to be teachers and, if they’re successful over time, develop their academic research capabilities.”

Will Mitchell, Professor of International Management and Strategy at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business said that, in many ways, Africa is a critical place to develop academic talent and research capabilities.

“Africa is where business is being redefined. What is happening here will actually teach us a fair bit about what the nature of business will be over the next century.”

Brown, the GBSN COO, said that the conference had achieved its aims of facilitating partnerships, and sharing knowledge on management education in developing countries and the critical role business schools can play in national development.

“Global partnerships between business schools, development agencies, and the private sector allow for innovative approaches to development initiatives.  Such partnerships leverage the expertise of business schools and translate global best practice into local context,” she said.

Several participants in the GBSN Conference announced fellowship opportunities for African students and faculty.

For further information on these and the GBSN, please contact:

Nora Brown
Chief Operating Officer
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