Growing Leaders in Emergent Markets

Abstract

South Africa has unique challenges. Thirteen years since becoming democratic, it is still going through its own unprecedented change in joining the global economic network and moving from Apartheid to democracy and from a closed to an open community. These political and sociological changes have also infiltrated business and therefore management education in South Africa, bringing demand for new approaches. At the Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town, the authors adapted their traditional MBA teaching approaches to become more creative. This article summarizes the main themes within a core MBA course that have been guided by their new learning design, growth-stages methodology, a multipronged plan for moving management and leadership students through the growth stages by using ideas from systems thinking, scenario planning, coaching and mentoring, and organizational learning. These Western constructs are being complemented by African knowledge, which the authors are slowly developing and integrating into the traditional business school curricula.