Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - June 19, 2005
Ciaran Ryan

ONE of the criticisms levelled at SA business schools is the lack of local research. MBA programmes require students to carry out projects at their places of work, and while this adds to the knowledge base of the classroom or the company, it seldom spreads beyond this.

Big-name MBA schools such as Harvard and Stanford are prodigious research factories, but in South Africa this function is left largely to consulting and accounting firms. Research requires funding, something local business schools say is in short supply.

Harvard and Stanford researchers churn out bestselling business books that help rudderless businesses find their bearings and make sense of the commercial cock-fight in which they find themselves.

The granddaddy of them all is business guru Tom Peters, who has an MBA and PhD from Stanford, and went on to work at consulting firm McKinsey & Co before leaving to pen the trailblazing In Search of Excellence.

But some business authors have been criticised for dressing up common sense as science or, worse, faddism. This was brutally exposed in the book The Witchdoctors by J Micklethwaite and A Wooldridge. The authors took aim at management gurus and detailed the destruction they caused at some of the world's leading corporations.

Professor Susan Adendorff, MBA programme director at the University of Pretoria, says there is a tendency to pursue the latest fads in business schools.

"This is something we have avoided. In the 56 years of our existence, we've avoided following the flavour of the month," she says.

"Our courses are designed to be cohesive, coherent and cross-functional. For example, we don't treat black economic empowerment (BEE) as a separate subject, but as part of our course on leadership.

"HIV/Aids is really a human resources issue, so we place it in its proper context. Similarly, business ethics and good corporate citizenship is covered in a course we call Business in Context," Adendorff adds.

Yet Professor Gavin Staude of Rhodes's Business School, which launched an MBA programme in 2001, says labelling new business theories as faddism could be a costly mistake.

"If there are new and better ways of doing business, then students need to know about them.

"For example, there's been plenty written on the subject of quality in recent years and companies are always looking for ways to improve quality," Staude says.

"Relationship management was virtually unknown as a business concept 10 years ago and very few schools taught it.

"Today, it is recognised as one of the principle drivers of business success, and virtually all business schools cover it in their curricula."

At a recent seminar in South Africa, Tom Peters berated US business schools for neglecting innovation and creativity as an academic subject. Only four US schools cover it, and then only as an elective rather than a core subject.

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