Executive MBA participants visit USB and business representatives in South Africa
12/09/2015
In November, participants in our new Executive MBA program, which opened in September 2015, visited the University of Stellenbosch Business School (USB) in the framework of a week-long international learning expedition to South Africa.
The trip combined courses given by USB faculty and visits to a number of businesses in the vicinity of Stellenbosch and Cape Town. Courses covered a variety of topics linked to the local business environment including economics for emerging countries and dealing with uncertainty, managing change and sport as a vehicle for change.
Each day, the 14 EMBA participants had the opportunity to visit and meet a range of different South African business representatives. These included entrepreneurs/social entrepreneurs at the Khayelitsha Township (including the Department of Coffee, Espinaca Innovations and Heavenly Quartez); representatives from Backsberg, South Africa’s first carbon-neutral wine estate; and Cipla pharmaceuticals.
Co-Director of the Excutive MBA program, Catherine Demangeot, explains: “This trip was designed to provide participants with a human insight in to different management cultures and leadership styles. As part of the program, EMBA candidates were also asked for example, to provide feedback and advice to the entrepreneurs they met during the trip.”
USB, which is one of IÉSEG’s 235 partners around the world, has also published an interview with Fidèle Nizeyimana, one of the participants on the IÉSEG EMBA program. Meanwhile, two professors from IÉSEG, Birgit Kleymann and Koen De Bock, were also invited to USB this autumn to teach intensive courses on Organisational Dynamics and Complexity and Internet Marketing to students at USB.
The IÉSEG EMBA program, delivered part-time over 24 months, is designed to offer participants a strategic opportunity for personal and professional growth. Focused on developing leadership skills, and enabling participants to manage teams that transform the organization’s vision into reality, it is targeted at professionals with a minimum of 5 years’ experience at an executive level. Find out more about the EMBA programme here.