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13 August 2024
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Story Anthony Mthembu
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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.
UFS strengthens EU cooperation
2010-04-22
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Seen here are, from the left: Prof. Ezekiel Moraka, Prof. Alain Verschoren, Rector of the University of Antwerp (UA), Prof. Aldo Stroebel, and Prof. Luc D’Haese, UA Presidential Steering Committee on Internationalisation, and UFS International Advisory Board Member.
Photo: supplied |
Prof. Ezekiel Moraka, Vice-Rector: External Relations, visited a number of institutions in Europe to strengthen collaboration and joint research activities. He was accompanied by Prof. Aldo Stroebel, Director: International Affairs. The Universities of Leuven and Ghent, both of which the UFS have longstanding and active agreements with, and both prominent research institutions, expressed their interest to expand and further support areas of collaboration in a number of disciplines.
The University of Antwerp, with whom the UFS has partnered in the pending Erasmus Mundus mobility partnership programme of the EU, was one of the main universities visited in the context of the Strategic Academic Clusters, long-standing collaboration in the areas of public health research and linguistics, and the exploration of international research funding opportunities.
Prof. Moraka was a special guest at the Going Global Conference in London hosted by the British Council in the session on Autonomy and Accountability: Achieving a balance between the needs of the State and tertiary education institutions. In addition, successful collaborative discussions were held at the Association for Commonwealth Universities (ACU) with Dr John Tarrant, Secretary-General, on funding opportunities for staff development and mobility support.