What do MBA students spend their time doing? Those thinking of enrolling often ask this of MBA students – who more often than not tell of the huge workload they face. MBA students write individual and syndicate assignments, as well as exams for each module that they study. But there is more to it than that.

This is another in the Window on the MBA series, providing an insight into the nature of the WBS MBA. MBA student Kirenga Rwigema gives his perspectives.

On my MBA journey, my experience of the classroom was that even though the lecturers are recognised thought leaders in their fields, in the classroom they function merely as coordinators of thought factories.

I say this because no single individual can possibly cover the full breadth of perspectives that reside in the minds of a group of people from such diverse backgrounds and levels of experience. The learning is therefore a function of the interactions of the members, facilitated by professors and professionals and can, as a result, be applied in any working environment in which one finds oneself. The mix of individuals is, therefore, the result of well thought-out engineering of group dynamics, and the outcome is one where every participant is simultaneously a teacher and student.

Ultimately, it is not so much the intricacies of each discipline that one attempts to master, but rather the invisible thread that strings it all together. That invisible thread is a combination of leadership and critical thinking. Forget the old adage of learning to think outside the box and embrace the fact that there is no box… In the not-so-old days, it was possible for companies to have access to technology or information that none of their competitors had. In today’s world, however, technology and information accessibility have advanced to the point of relative equality. Therefore, what separates the good from the great is a combination of the people and critical thinking that is applied to common information, to yield superior and unique results.

We learnt that, after the global recession, the shift away from what worked in the process-oriented phase of the business life cycle will be a critical factor in corporate South Africa’s ability to maintain rapid growth. University of Southern California professor of management and organisation, Larry Greiner, said: “The sources of your successes will become the sources of your failure.” He was referring to the notion that for organisations to evolve, they need to unfreeze their strategies during times of revolution, before they can freeze the new strategy and achieve evolution. I have realised that the focus in business is, therefore, shifting more and more away from outright operational skills, toward the softer, more human, skills that are often joked about by the more technically inclined. This is exacerbated by the realisation that learning complex algorithms of code or life insurance risk calculations is nothing compared to understanding the complexity of a single employee, let alone an organisation full of them. It appears then that the soft stuff has become the hard stuff, and he who masters that lesson becomes the one-eyed man in the land of the blind.

It is with these thoughts that I tackled the entrepreneurship elective at WBS. I have always considered myself a corporate man; however, this was only to the extent that I believed in not making the same mistakes as others and saw my stint as an employee as a necessary step towards being my own man. It thus came as a surprise that an entrepreneurship elective was on offer, given the significant corporate influence so prevalent in the case studies we do. I believed there would be a philosophical angle to how one makes oneself an entrepreneur within the corporate walls, but was pleasantly corrected. This elective, more than any other, opened my eyes to the truth that an MBA is more than just a stepping stone and networking platform, but is also a serious ground for giving birth to one’s own ideas and plans for the present and future, and receiving genuine (as opposed to purely academic) feedback and support to make those dreams a reality.

The outcome of this course was a business plan that was judged by real-life venture capitalists and angel financers, who provided assistance in the form of advice, strategic partnerships and financing. Unlike many courses, their assistance has expanded beyond the borders of the classroom into a partnership that is a worthy justification for the MBA in itself. The course taught me that personal success and social value are inextricably linked and need not be seen as mutually exclusive. It has subsequently given rise to a business of my own that I hope will transform the South African tertiary education system, while satisfying the financial goals of a business. I believe the divergent thinking that I have gained on this course stands me in good stead to translate my thoughts and dreams into meaningful, profitable and sustainable realities.

The MBA as a whole has ameliorated my view of an organisation as a living and breathing organism. I maintain my focus on and interest in technology, but to the extent that it should be the enabler of human thought and not the result. Some may question the merits of a local MBA compared to the more recognised schools of this world, but the reality is that we are experiencing a paradigm shift in the way the world conducts business, and the existing benchmarks are fast becoming less and less applicable in the developing context. In response to the question of why so many so global businesses have failed to penetrate the Chinese market successfully, it has been said that China is becoming modern but not Western. The same, I believe, can be said of the African continent, in that the interests, values and capabilities of the African people remain a relatively unknown quantity to the rest of the world. The great entrepreneurial spirit of this continent creates an opportunity for us to define a new way of conducting business, based on a clean slate infrastructurally, as opposed to those heavily entrenched in the investments made in the process era. I suggest that an MBA for people in Africa should be done in an African context, based on a mixture of African and international case studies. That is what I received during my MBA.