Latest News Archive
Please select Category, Year, and then Month to display items
13 August 2024
|
Story Anthony Mthembu
|
Photo Sibahle Dayimani and Amandla Kulu
Prof Peter Roseel, Managing Director of Management Consulting and Research – a spin-off of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium; and Prof Nicolene Barkhuizen, Director of the UFS Business School.
The Business School at the University of the Free State (UFS) hosted Prof Peter Rosseel, Managing Director of Management Consulting and Research – a spin-off of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium – for a guest lecture during his visit to the UFS Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences (EMS).
The guest lecture took place on 19 July 2024 in the Business School Auditorium and was attended by academics from the UFS.
Reflecting on the lecture
The lecture presented by Prof Rosseel focused on how combining strategy, strategy implementation, culture transformation, leadership, and learning successfully leads to sustainable growth, creates engagement, and delivers tangible results. Throughout the lecture, Prof Rosseel spoke about how experts tend to make bad leaders and therefore stop change from happening within an organisation. In fact, he highlighted that, “Experts stop change from happening within the workplace because experts, by definition, look through the eyes of their expertise, but you cannot reduce the world to different forms of expertise, as it is holistic.” As such, he argued that to change an organisation, one must see things from the point of view of others.
Furthermore, Prof Rosseel delved deeper into the hierarchical operating model within organisations. He indicated that the above model should be one community within organisations; however, unfortunately it is not. This is because organisations are made up of several departments such as finance and human resources. As such, he regards these departments to be silos that could prove to be detrimental to organisations, as each silo can create its own culture as opposed to an organisational culture. These are some of the points he discussed throughout the lecture.
After the lecture concluded, the audience had the opportunity to engage with Prof Rosseel on his viewpoints. In fact, Lyle Markham, Academic Head of Department and Lecturer in Industrial Psychology at the UFS, was one of the audience members and described the lecture as insightful.
Postdoctoral fellow at ISG focuses on environmental and human conflicts
2017-12-12
Dr Noel Ndumeya is a born historian who became interested in his research field through reading the works of historians while still at secondary school. Dr Ndumeya feels it is important to study the relationship between societies, institutions, and their interactions with the environment. This might help societies to understand the present clashes between humans and the environment, providing insight into future developments.
His specific research field is the environmental history of Southern Africa, with an additional interest in the land and agricultural history of the region.
Dr Ndumeya has worked as a History lecturer at Mutare Teachers’ College, the Belvedere Technical Teachers’ College in Zimbabwe, and at the University of Zimbabwe.
His present research, which is being conducted under the auspices of the International Studies Group (ISG) at the UFS, focuses on wildlife resources and people-vs-parks conflicts in Southern Africa. His future research plans include comparative histories of land, agriculture, and nature reserves in Southern Africa.