JON FOSTER-PEDLEY
AS I WRITE this South Africa is fast approaching its second anniversary of lockdown. We have been battling the greatest public health crisis in living memory for so long that even our vocabulary has changed. But that’s not the only thing that has changed. COVID 19 hasn’t just pressed pause on many of our lives, it has also been the greatest disruptor any of us have ever lived through.
We have been speaking of digitisation and remote work for years. 24 months on, that’s old hat but the change that has been unleashed cannot be stopped. Like Pandora, we can’t put it back in the box. We are riding the whirlwind, in our personal and professional lives.This has a huge impact on managers and business leaders. Suddenly we have to content with a situation where it is increasingly safer to return to our old workplaces, but many staff want to continue working from home. Our customers have changed and are changing; they’re more empowered than ever before with greater expectations and greater freedom.
If it seems too much to handle, it probably is. Over and above all of that there’s the reality of what we once held true and the skills that we had mastered going the way of the dinosaur, if they haven’t already. We are now firmly in the age of innovation and change – which, no one ever tells you, then also has to be the Age of Obsolescence. We are always on; connected across platforms and programmes and drowning in a sea of information, not all of which is mission critical even if it is fascinating to disappear down the rabbit hole.
If we don’t do anything about this, we’ll end up burnt out, feeling incompetent and impotent to do anything about it. But what can we do about this, in an ever-changing world where the only constant is change?The solution is to keep on learning, unlearning and relearning. We have to learn to pace ourselves, to develop our own resilience. We have to set boundaries and yet be vulnerable enough that we can relate to our staff and be able to lead them in the midst of the personal crises they are having to endure.
It seems like a very tall order, but the good news is that there are places where you can learn the skills to make sense of what’s happening in the workplace as well as in the deepest recesses of the mind. Business schools are a great resource and an executive MBA will give you the skills to make sense of it all; from systems thinking that let’s you join the dots to see the gap in the market and then create the market in the gap all the way through to personal mastery.
These are difficult times. They are scary. They often seem overwhelming, but they’re also times of the greatest opportunity if we can develop our own ability to step back from the maelstrom, still the tumult and think.
When you think about it, we don’t have an option really. Jon Foster-Pedley is dean and director Henley Business School Africa, a leading global business school with campuses in Europe, Asia and Africa and the only business school in Africa to hold quadruple international accreditation. It has the number 1 business school alumni network in the world for potential to network (Economist 2017); and is the number 1 African-accredited and -campused business school in the world for executive education (FT 2018, 2020), as well as the number 1 MBA business school in South Africa as rated by corporate SA (PMR.africa 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021). It is the first and only leading business school in the country to hold Level 1 B-BBEE ranking
