QUESTIONS & ANSWERS A final reflection

Walter Baets left the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business (GSB) last month after seven tumultuous years as director. In his final interview, the Belgian academic spoke to David Furlonger

What were the main challenges you encountered on arriving at the GSB in 2009? The thing that surprised me most was finding SA business schools were like good British schools of the 1980s and 1990s, training manager students to be managers in the Goldman Sachses of the world. In a way you were training people to be irrelevant in their own country and continent and almost forcing them to go to England, Europe, Australia and North America. I couldn’t believe that in a continent that needs entrepreneurship, innovation and management organisation, schools didn’t pay attention to being locally relevant.

Then you have people who say schools should concentrate on the needs of the country and be responsible for realisation of the national plan.

I say you will contribute to the national plan by being internationally excellent and focusing on local relevance.

The real discussion in SA should be about the affordability of education, so every smart kid can go to university at a reasonable cost. We have to talk about how to make education more accessible. Universities are based on conservative, traditional models. If you were to run them efficiently, you could probably save R100m-R150m, which you could spend on bursaries. Here, a first-year student on financial aid has to succeed in only half his courses. In Belgium, if you are on financial aid and you fail a course, you’re out. The state pays for your education and the only thing asked of you is to study hard. If you were to change that here, you could assist twice as many people. You have been very critical about the quality of some SA MBAs, even though they have all been accredited by the Council on Higher Education. What is the solution? You have this idea in SA that if you don’t deliver an MBA, you are a useless school. I disagree. What this country needs more than anything is middle-management education. So maybe research-led universities should concentrate on top degrees, and let other institutions, public or private, deliver higher certificates, postgraduate diplomas and other stuff that would be a blessing for SA. Their qualifications would be steppingstones. We would still have MBAs but fewer and of a higher standard. Some private schools cater to mainly black students who can’t afford the fees of certain university schools. Are you not cutting off people with talent but not money? A good education should be available to anyone. I’d like to be able to say to any smart black kid: “You can do your MBA here; I have a loan system and since your salary is going to increase by so much in three or four years, you can pay me back.”

So I improve my affordability but remain an intellectual elitist. The purpose of a good business school is to deliver intellectually challenging, good education. There is nothing that replaces that.

We have created a GSB foundation which hopes to raise about R100m this year and more in coming years. Imagine if we could raise R300m and use much of that for bursaries. Not for black people specifically, but for people who need it. If they are bright enough and committed enough, they can get their degree. What have you achieved at GSB? Despite great odds, I have been able to transform the place, to the point that only 28% of faculty and staff are white. I have created a business school that tries to be relevant and focuses on innovation, inclusiveness and entrepreneurship, to try to make a difference in the world.

We have achieved the international triple accreditation of Amba, Equis and AACSB and You are leaving two years into your second five-year contract. What is unfinished? Most of the things we launched have been running two or three years. Had I stayed on, I would have seen them settle. But I don’t think my strengths are in stabilising. They are in disrupting. That’s who I am. GSB now is in a phase of consolidation, of further maturation. You were a very polarising person at GSB. Quite a few people left in the early days of your tenure. Could you have done things differently? I don’t know about polarising but I admit that in trying to reach something, I don’t always pay enough attention to getting people to go along with me. I think it would be good for the school if my successor had more capacity to engage. I would like to have more patience with people, to engage more with divergent views, but I wouldn’t know how to do that.

In any case, if you listen and empathise too much, you don’t get where you want to go. That’s my character. When I go for something, it can be at the expense of a few people. Maybe I made mistakes and ignored people too much. That’s why I think my successor should be a people person; someone to stabilise, to settle, to pay more attention to relationships.