M.E.R.C. Blog

An interesting discussion has sprouted from the rich output of the Third Annual GBSN Conference in Nairobi about what distinguishes African business school needs from those in the "North".  In order to further capture and encourage this discussion, we have posted the threads on our blog.  We invite you to join this virtual conversation by posting on this blog.

Thank you,

Guy Pfeffermann, CEO

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Guy,

Thanks for sending along the review of the Nairobi session*. Having spent (maybe misspent) 25-odd years in university business schools, I recall sitting in maybe 100 meetings of this kind and, believe it or not, many were interesting.

There’s always been a tension in business schools embedded within universities between orienting toward the outside community, typically represented by the business community, or toward the academic community represented by the rest of the university. Business often (by no means always) wants more pragmatic stuff to be taught, in your meeting signified perhaps by the statement that African B-schools should produce graduates with "fire in their bellies." In the U.S., it’s more likely to be a bit more sophisticated than that, but not much: "Your graduates can’t hit the ground running, so we have to spend a lot of time further training them." etc.

The university, on the other hand, wants B-schools, if they are to exist at all, to be properly academic, subject to rigorous standards both in the classroom and in research output. Thus, B-schools are not to "train" people for jobs, but to explain how business fits into the broader society, what societal problems are created by business operations, how excesses can be remedied, etc. Sure, it’s alright to teach some basic accounting or finance, because it’s fundamental to understanding the functioning of any business enterprise and, indeed, any public enterprise. But, such courses as "Sales Management," "Small Business Management," and, today, perhaps "Entrepreneurialism" have no place in a university curriculum.

Thus, university B-schools range across a spectrum from quite academic: Chicago, Northwestern, Wharton (graduate), etc. to much more applied: Thunderbird, possibly HBS, Darden and many, many state schools. Thunderbird gets away with it because it’s not embedded in a university and HBS is, even now, really not accepted by much of the university (for example, it is not allowed to offer a Ph.D., the university’s doctoral degree, but rather must be happy with a DBA, an HBS degree).

In the US, academics and some businesspeople respect the Chicago’s of the world, while business people mostly go for the HBS-like schools. However, my suspicion all along has been that African schools would be better off at this stage with a much more practical approach. And, this approach is not really the specialty of, say, Wharton. Thus, the schools that might be more appropriate for helping with African programs might well be some of the lesser known ones, and ones less likely to be posturing to become "research institutions."

Anyway, thanks for sending me the review.

Robert Miller

*You can find the review of the 3rd Annual GBSN Conference here. 

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Yes, I agree with Bob. Have found the HBS model most useful, but have been astonished at how far some of the European schools that one might expect to be more applied have bought in entirely to the research excellence model. And have detected quite a strong trend in that direction at HBS too.

It is unfortunate, however, when this is set up as a competition between the research model and the applied model (as I think has happened). As someone said, there is nothing quite as practical as a good theory; and similarly good practice absolutely needs excellent research bases. And good management / business research should at least be inspired by questions of practice.

African schools need a focus on practice (hence TPM), but we also very deeply need better research, and in particularly need to find out how to (and gain the confidence for) research that charts the way forward towards business success in Africa by Africans.

It would be very helpful if a group of wise senior faculty could help us formulate an approach to our brave but tentative idea of creating a TPM-like course called "Researching the Practice of Management" that transcended that dichotomy and helped us develop research excellence for application in management excellence.

I have some ideas about this, but would really welcome help with it. It needs going beyond current conventional global wisdom and practices about research in business schools if we are not going to waste our energy arguing between two non-viable alternatives - academic research divorced from management practice because the researchers are pursuing discipline-specific recognition in A-grade specialist journals, and weak anecdotal stuff that masquerades as research because the protagonists are ill-equipped or too lazy to do the proper stuff.

Neither sounds appropriate.

I think there is a better alternative that would not be too difficult to define if we trusted each other enough not to defend the extremes!

Jonathan Cook
Senior Lecturer, Gordon Institute of Business Science

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Wonderful conversation!

Wow, Jonathan I need to know these good schools in Europe that are doing a fine job of traversing the rigorous academic path and the practical ‘applied’ path.

Were you thinking of LBS [London Business School] or Oxford "Said Business School"? If so I think there is some truth in it. Said actually followed a similar path to that of GIBS.

Regardless, I think there is a solution to business schools in Africa being more practical while retaining a research academic path and I hope we can research this according to your proposal.

I think this lies somewhere between a good MBA and good executive short  programmes tailor made for industry. The MBA has to impart a global perspective of issues while executive programmes have to be multi-disciplinary and application focused.

George Njenga
Dean, Strathmore Business School

 

african business, african business schools, business school, GBSN, GBSN Annual Meeting, nairobi

My wife and I returned from three weeks in Kenya. That country is really moving forward. Unlike only two years ago, when the city was littered with trash, especially lots of plastic bags, Nairobi’s streets are now remarkably clean. Thanks in large part to Wangari Maathai, Kenya’s “Tree Woman”, who won a Nobel Prize in 2004 for her environmental efforts, trees are being planted throughout the city.

One thing that is striking in Kenya, as in most other low-income countries, is the proliferation of non-profit organizations (known as nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs). Besides local branches of well-known international NGOs such as CARE and OXFAM, a great many local NGOs are active in a multitude of sectors. The “Directory & Profiles NGOs Eastern Africa 2006/07” lists about 4,000 such organizations officially registered in Kenya alone. For example page 21 lists, among others, the Baptist Aids Response Agency – BARA, the Bar Hostesses Empowerment Support Programme, Bright Poor Students & Old Age Programmes.

Most local NGOs are operating on shoestrings. Their staff are very small. Often they depend on a single funding source and are therefore dependent as well as vulnerable. I met with a dozen NGO leaders and asked them whether they were happy with their staff’s management skills. Unanimously, they flagged lack of business and management skills as a serious imediment to their achieving their goals. They mentioned specific skills in need of improvement: how to handle money better; how to gather information needed to monitor activities and evaluate results; how to dissemminate information internally; how to improve fund-raising and diversify funding sources; how better to manage personnel, and so forth.

Many funders include small staff training components in their grants, but the NGO leaders’ experience with courses being offered locally has not been good. According to one, “professors are too theoretical – they just lecture, and the training is useless”.

We discussed how this situation might be improved. Huge amounts of money flow to and through local NGOs . Therefore, more effective management would almost certainly have a big positive impact on development and poverty reduction. The good news is that local Kenyan business schools have improved and diversified their courses a lot in the last few years, thanks in part to partnerships with the Global Business School Network (http://mercnetwork.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13&Itemid=36) , the Association of African Business Schools (www.aabschools.com) and MERC, the Management Education & Research Consortium (www.mercnetwork.org). One or the other of these local management schools could create a management training center for NGOs.

In order to get a Center off the ground it would be best if some local NGOs formed a Partnership for Management Education.

Guy Pfeffermann
CEO, MERC

african ngos, local ngos, ngos, nongovernmental organizations, non profit organizations, wangari maathai

I believe that MERC has been successful in strengthening business schools of under-served markets because the Global Business School Network avoids pitfalls which have undermined some other such efforts. In particular, the “multi-school” approach to forming mentoring teams and the combination of formal commitments with benevolent individual faculty motivations set the approach apart from others.

Why have some Institutional Partnerships Stalled or not Developed in Full?

1. When money is a goal on either one or both sides. Institutional partnership is built on effort and generosity
2. When the focus is not on program participants
3. When one of the sides falls short of expectations: meeting preparations, following recommendations.
4. Changing partners frequently, or having too many. There is a certain jealousy effect
5. When lacking full support from leadership of the school. This is not a one man task.
6. Lack of ambition on either side
7. Not putting enough time into the relationship. Relationships have to be taken care of. Not keeping the partner well informed on developments. Let the partner rejoice on your successes and feel pain on your failures. Be available. Partnerships have a formal dimension and a hot-line. It is important that this line works. Faculty are busy, make sure to close agendas well in advance
8. Lack of formalization in the relationship
9. No internal selling/ communicating partnership activities
10. Not creating value for both parties, especially at the mentored institution (see tools to develop)
11. Not keeping care of personal relationships. Personal relationships involve time and effort, individuals should be taken care of. For example stranding faculty mentors at a hotel when visiting a partner institution is a sure recipe for delaying the next visit
12. When the ultimate goal of the relationship is not that the mentored institution surpasses the mentoring institutions in quality
13. Not traveling or keeping frequent contacts with the mentored institution
14. Not choosing the right people….

Javier Santomá
IESE Business School

How can three or four people do for Africa what most government aid agencies and NGOs have not succeeded in doing ? Five years ago two or three anarchistic World Bank employees (not an oxymoron, I assure you) brainstormed what could be done about one of the most neglected keys to social and economic progress in Africa and poor countries elsewhere. The answer: create a win-win network.
 
The problem: nearly everyone who is trying to do good things in Africa will tell you that one of their main problems is finding local managers who know how to get things done. More often than not, school and even university graduates have to be trained again, on-the-job, because what they learn is mostly academic and unconnected to local needs. The old quip about Senegalese schools teaching kids about “our ancestors, the Gauls” during the colonial period is still very relevant. For example, all modern management schools nowadays teach interactive participatory courses based on “play acting”. Students put themselves into the shoes of decision-makers faced with real-life actual problems. This is known as the “case method”. It is very powerful, because it forces participants to become probklem-solvers, not people memorizing in order to pass exams.
 
The trouble was, until we arrived on the scene, that there were hardly any local African case materials. Where management schools used cases, these had to do with rich country problems encountered by the likes of Enron, Nestle and so forth, hardly useful to a small furniture manufacturer in Accra.
 
So, we met with some of the world’s leading-edge management schools, and they agreed to form a global network of professors who would team up with their African colleagues. Together, they would help African management schools to produce state-of-the-arts local teaching materials, so that students would be trained to be problem-solvers, not memorize books and lectures to pass exams. Going from total authority over students to interactive discussions was a mental revolution for many African professors. Some refused, but more got fired-up.
 
Three years into pilot programs in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and other african countries, a large number of good, locally-relevant teaching cases now exist. In Kernya alone there are over seventy, which are available to any school wishing to use them.
 
I think that the main reason why the network approach is generating so much enthusiasm, and why so many well-known professors from top schools volunteered to team up with African colleagues is because these professors learn at least as much from doing research in Africa than their African colleagues benefit from becoming connected to a world-class pool of knowledge.