It has been a bit calm on my blog lately, but this has everything to do with the fact that I am moving places. Despite the enormous pleasure I have had at Euromed Management, I move totally South, in order to become the director of the Graduate School of Business of the University of Cape Town.
I have found a school that has the vision to become a new type of business school, a business school based on the paradigm of the emergent economy. Emergent economy means economies with high degrees of uncertainty, high degrees of complexity and unfortunately often high degrees of inequality. As much as this is true for what we classically call the emergent economies (BRICSA), uncertainty, complexity and inequality is equally a true issue of the company in turbulent economies. I trust that the exploration of the paradigm of the emergent economy will give interesting insights in the financial crisis and how we could do differently.
GSB is developping a few areas of excellence. The mission of GSB is to develop a pedagogical excellence, around sytemic thinking and action learning. An academic excellence is constructed around the paradigm of the emergent economy as described before. But it is equally the role of a business school to contribute to the alleviation of inequality, and therefor GSB is developing and continues to grow in the area of social entrepreneurship, both academically as in the field. Finally, GSB aims to develop a thought leadership in all this areas, with a particular focus on executive education in the world (Europe) and its contribution to the development of Africa and in particular Africa's academic potential (via an innovative PhD program).
More will come, but I felt I had to share this with you on the evening of my departure.