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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 an institution of choice for the most gifted academics
2013-12-05
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| Prof Rob Gordon |
Two lecturers at the University of the Free State’s (UFS) Department of Anthropology proved once again that the UFS is indeed an institution of choice for some of the most talented and gifted academics in the country.
Prof Rob Gordon was co-author of the book “Recreating first contact,” which explores how adventure travel, which emerged during the early twentieth century, influenced popular views of anthropology.
It was in this period that new transport and recording technologies, particularly the airplane and automobile and small, portable, still and motion-picture cameras, were used in various expeditions to document the last untouched places of the globe and bring them home to eager audiences.
These expeditions were frequently presented as first contact encounters and enchanted popular imagination. The book further explores the effects – both positive and negative – of such expeditions on the discipline of anthropology itself.
Dr Riana Steyn was co-author of the first Afrikaans play by Athol Fugard, “Die Laaste Karretjiegraf.”
The play focuses on the Karretjie people, itinerant sheepshearers in the Karoo who are direct descendants of South Africa’s first inhabitants. Doing research on the Karretjie people, he came across a master’s thesis in Anthropology by Dr Steyn, who gave him access to her work and eventually co-wrote the play with him.