Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - October 24, 2004
David Ball

Hofmeyr says managers and executives need to be asking: "How do we do business elsewhere?" to penetrate African and overseas markets.

This is vital, he says, because "no business is safe from international competition".

Hofmeyr says South African companies need to find innovative ways of becoming more competitive. This includes improving knowledge management and encouraging people to come forward with new ideas.

"We have to be looking for cleverer and more cost-effective ways of doing things."

Gibs director Professor Nick Binedell says economic and global forces are putting executives under pressure to ensure their businesses - and they themselves - are benchmarked against international best practice.

He says South Africa has insufficient human capacity to meet the requirements of the economy.

Decades of apartheid rule - with no investment in human capital - has taken its toll, and globalisation has accelerated the brain drain as more South Africans seek opportunities worldwide.

"Over the past decade there has been a significant increase in the demand for high-quality graduate business education in South Africa and this is expected to continue for many years to come as the demand for world-class executives outweighs supply," says Binedell.

Dr Charlene Lew, dean of the Damelin International College of Postgraduate Business Sciences, says catering for both global and local perspectives is a complex task.

Lew says business schools need to balance the need for their students to succeed in the international marketplace with their need to understand the specific South African macro-environment in which their businesses operate.

For instance, even if their firms have a foreign partner, South African business students need to understand issues such as labour law, skills development, managing HIV/Aids in the workplace and the effective implementation of black economic empowerment.

However, Frank Horwitz, director of the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business, describes debates centred on "local versus global" as a false dichotomy. "Global issues are local issues and local issues are global issues," he says.

He says the thousands of retrenched clothing workers in Cape Town and Durban, who have been directly affected by the strength of Asian clothing manufacturers, illustrate how local and global issues are intertwined. "We are profoundly affected by globalisation here in South Africa."

Horwitz says it is crucial that business schools train company managers and executives to deal with complexity, ambiguity and diversity.

Another aspect to consider is flexibility in the type of training offered to today's executives, given their high-flying lifestyles. "An executive might have just spent an afternoon settling a tricky labour dispute before boarding the overnight flight to London or New York to discuss a merger or acquisition," says Fran Connaway, general manager of Henley Management College in Southern Africa.

An executive like this, she says, would need to do an MBA via distance learning.

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