Just four years after it was launched, GIBS took Africa’s top position in the London Financial Times’s annual review of the world’s best business schools. It has never lost that position and in the 2014 ranking moved up a position to 42nd worldwide, comfortably the best in the Africa/Middle East region. As I discovered during this interview with Shaun Rozyn on CNBC Africa, GIBS has been working with Spain’s top institution to support the development of business schools in Nigeria and Kenya and expects to soon close the continental loop soon with an Egyptian partner. Interestingly, the Lagos school is already ranked second in Africa – ahead of prestigious local schools at UCT and Wits. – AH
ALEC HOGG: The annual U.K. Financial Times survey saw the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) maintaining its spot as the best South African/African/Middle East Business School. Shaun Rozyn is GIBS’s Executive Director of Executive Education. You’ve been quoted all over the place Shaun, as a result of this. It’s not the first time that GIBS has been the best in this area – and we’ll try to unpack that a bit later. How long have you held this position?
SHAUN ROZYN: I’ve been in this position for the last ten years. As you know, GIBS is 14 years old this year, so we entered the rankings in our fourth year and we’ve been holding our own for ten years now – a decade.
ALEC HOGG: That’s incredible, after four years. You obviously did something…you structured yourself in a different way right from the outset.
SHAUN ROZYN: I think that’s right. In South Africa, as you know the funding model around the MBA… You need strong executive education to have a diversified and balanced business school, so that was the one element. Professor Nick Binedell, the Founding Dean of GIBS…
ALEC HOGG: I know him very well.
SHAUN ROZYN: Yes. Our tagline has been close to business, so it was critical to really have a credible MBA – that you had a credible executive education portfolio. For example, most of our faculty have to have worked in business, or done significant consulting work to business to bring relevance to the business education.
ALEC HOGG: Well, like Nick himself. He came from business and travels a lot, as well.
SHAUN ROZYN: That’s correct.
ALEC HOGG: Is that part of what the faculty [inaudible 0:01:46.2].
SHAUN ROZYN: For sure. The other elements of what we do is that we’re firmly grounded in what we call dynamic markets – the emerging market story with a twist – so to talk eloquently on China, India, and the Middle East, you have to have walked the streets, spoken to people, business models, and how to do business. Those are all critical elements for faculty, in Nick’s case, to really be able to influence what we do in terms of working with practitioners. They will catch on very quickly if you’re not really in tune with the business language, and what’s really going on in the markets.
ALEC HOGG: Shaun, why did you join GIBS? There are many other business schools in the country. What was it about…? I’m trying to get to where the success model… It’s no mean feat to number one in Africa and the Middle East when you have quite a lot of competition, for ten years.
SHAUN ROZYN: Alec, I’m an economist by background. I worked abroad, worked at the IMF, came back to South Africa, and did some teaching. In about 2003/2004, with local economic development kicking off, you were pulled more and more into the economics and the social issues we were trying to come to grips with and really understand. I was pulled more into human capital work and capability development. I said ‘I need to do my MBA now’ and broaden the generalist insight, so I went to GIBS. They had a fantastic two-year program, and in my second year I said ‘that would be a fantastic place to go and work’ and joined the institution.
ALEC HOGG: Why did you pick GIBS for your MBA, rather than any of the other institutions?
SHAUN ROZYN: I grew up in Cape Town so naturally, two of the schools in Cape Town were good choices. Really, this close to business, I wanted a degree or a qualification that would launch me back into the business world and access… I think also important is who’s in the class. Through the executive education work, the Blue Chips here in this town, around the continent, and globally, send the MBA’s to GIBS for exactly that reason. It was the quality of the network that I would be building, and those are the three points that took me to that institution.
ALEC HOGG: Eating your own cooking… Lagos – 55 on the list. You’re 42 on the list – up one position this year. Lagos ahead of UCT and Wits – other business schools that you might have thought, as an outsider, would be better than anything in Nigeria is. What’s that success story?
SHAUN ROZYN: I don’t have to tell you about the rebasing and obviously, the success, or the nature of the economy. There’s a very prominent school called Aise in Spain and Spain, as part of its capability development really put many resources into Nigeria – Lagos Business School. Likewise, Strathmore in Kenya, and that involved faculty transfer, many joint programs, and many staff developments that actually deliver various initiatives partly because of the international assistance. Lagos…as you know the Nigerians travel extensively, have some good institutions (with some challenges), but that should be ironed out in the next couple of years, and extremely committed and loyal individuals to the institutions. I’m actually off to Kenya next week and I’ll be in Nigeria in a month’s time working with those business schools. We’ve actually, loosely formed a triad of schools around capability development on this continent.
ALEC HOGG: A triad – the three of you?
SHAUN ROZYN: The three of us, yes. There’s a fourth outsider in Egypt that we want to bring in to tie up the continent.
ALEC HOGG: If you look into the future, one-seventh of the world’s population lives on this continent; surely there’s still lots of upside for the business like Lagos, like Strathmore (as you mentioned, in Kenya) to move up the rankings.
SHAUN ROZYN: Definitely. I’ve had the privilege of spending this week with one of the global top three business schools who, after doing a lot of work in India and China, really turned their attention to the African continent. Not as a charity outreach, but it wants to significantly be a part of human capital development on the continent. With having the largest working age population in the next 15 years, what we’re seeing are all the global multinationals realising that if they don’t get a footprint now, they’re not going to get into the last billion, so there’s a massive upside. It’s also at many different levels for example, the general management band, the middle management bench, and the introductory skills – bringing people into the workplace – hopefully, by well-functioning school systems.
ALEC HOGG: Whom do you benchmark yourselves against? You’ve moved up – 43 to 42. Surely, the top ten would be a place to be eventually. Do you have a global role model?
SHAUN ROZYN: Professor Binedell reminds us to learn from everyone and copy no one, so we do. We look at Harvard Business School from a branding perspective. There are schools such as Wharton in the States around deep expertise and they’ve chosen finance. What we’ve also done is that we also wanted to understand the unique nature of our geography. We focused a lot on entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial thinking. We built an innovation lab. I was privileged to go to Stanford, take their idea, and replicate it (but in an African fashion) at our campus down the road. I’ve mentioned a couple of schools with whom we chat. We’ve received probably five MBA visiting groups from the Ivy Leagues, so there’s lots of interaction let alone the joint research that is happening.
ALEC HOGG: I had a boss once who said every overseas trip was like a new university degree.
SHAUN ROZYN: For sure.
ALEC HOGG: It sounds like you subscribe to that, to seeing the world.
SHAUN ROZYN: Naturally. Our staff travel extensively. We’ll also be in 24 countries this year, delivering programs for either South African multinationals looking outward or for global multinationals on the ground.
ALEC HOGG: Well, keep going, Shaun. Shaun Rozyn is with GIBS and he’s the Executive Director there of Executive Education.
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