Henley Business School Africa believes in real-life, real-time and relevant action learning

Independent Newspapers, MBA Feature – The Star, Pretoria News, The Mercury, The Cape Times 23^rd April 2021

THERE are always two questions when it comes to a discussion about a Master of Business Administration (MBA). The first one is existential – What’s the point?. 

The answer is simple. An MBA degree is vital because it teaches the student how to think. System thinking helps us find connections, causalities and consequences. Critical thinking teaches us to separate the fake news from the real and the imagined threats from a looming catastrophe.

An MBA gives us the skills to come up with an action plan to ensure that we survive.

The second question. If you accept that the MBA is critical in a world that is increasingly volatile, uncertain, chaotic and ambiguous, to say nothing of disruptive and diverse – Which one should I enrol for?.

It’s a big question. 

A good MBA will ask a lot of you. It’s an investment in time, money, sometimes blood (metaphorically), sweat and tears (literally). 

Henley Business School Africa has made sure that its MBA is family-friendly, and not a marriage break-up academy. The school also ensures that you can learn while you earn and that you can immediately apply everything it teaches you from day one.

“We believe in real-life, real-time and relevant action learning. We teach the same tools that we use ourselves. We went from what was effectively a start-up to a fully-fledged business school, and a decade later, with compound growth in turnover of more than 1 000%. We have a student body that contributes almost two-thirds of the entire Henley global executive MBA class every year.

“There’s the other thing about us, we are British-born and South African-bred. The MBA qualification that you will graduate with is a British qualification that enjoys triple international accreditation, which you get to pay for in Rands.”

For Henley Business School Africa, the science of management is not about making profits for profit’s sake, but actually creating prosperity for the communities in which it operates in, because that’s true radical economic transformation. 

The school builds leaders, who build the businesses that build Africa. It’s a process that starts in the classroom, but overtime extends all the way to corporate activism; blowing the whistle on state capture; and holding leaders of the corporate and political worlds to account. 

“When the lockdown was imposed, we had already pivoted, seamlessly, to virtual learning. It was not lecturers peering into laptops using Zoom, but rather a fully-fledged learning platform that we had developed to bring our entire global arsenal of lecturers and learning to our students in their hour of need. And then, we gave it away so that other business schools could pivot too, without making the same mistakes we had, and get on with the national imperative of educating the country”.