Education has always been my passion, from writing to facilitating a learning experience, especially
for people who have not had the opportunity to pursue management education. Before obtaining
My MBA: I spent over a decade in the UK, where I worked in several industries, from banking to
pharmaceuticals. After returning to South Africa, I helped launch the Small Business Academy and
realized that the field of entrepreneurship is dismally underserved in low-income areas.
It was then that I became an entrepreneurship consultant, focusing on educating small business
owners on how to make their businesses sustainable through various training initiatives. I was
lucky enough to be asked to write the curriculum for two modules on TSIBA’s Post-Graduate in
Business Administration programme. But the highlight has been to lecture these two modules for
students who are entrepreneurially inclined and watch them grasp the difference in concepts so
that they can apply them in their own business venture or even where they are currently
employed.
The most memorable experience has been hearing how the module of Entrepreneurial Leadership
has changed some students’ lives. There were several students in the last cohort who decided to
start their own business to help small enterprises succeed because of what they had learned from
the exercise and realised how valuable it is to impact another person’s livelihood by changing their
leadership challenges into positive actions.
I co-authored an article for the Academy of Management’s Evidence-based Leadership
Development Programs award in Boston, USA. But my favourite sources of information come
from research done by international management consultants like McKinsey Quarterly and EY
Reporting or academic articles in Wharton Knowledge and the Harvard Business Review. But also
from South African sources like BusinessTech and Engineering News. I follow them on their
websites or social media such as Twitter and LinkedIn and have set up alerts for anything related to
these fields.
I think that faculty members have to become more technically savvy and learn to engage students
online in role-play, group work, guest speakers and practical exercises to apply the theory to real-life situations. The world is changing at an immensely rapid pace and we need to future-proof our
students to be able to deal with how to adapt agile to situations on the ground. As for continuous
Learning is an objective that needs to be developed because people have enjoyed it.
If students see how their current course has impacted their careers and changed their perspective
In developing themselves, it will be ingrained to look for the next opportunity to grow. Once that
bug has bitten, it will be hard not to search out ways to strive towards the next level in their
academic journey.
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