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.
Eco-building workshop and rehabilitation through collaboration
2017-03-17
A demonstration of eco-building at Lebone Village
recreation centre
Photo: Supplied
An intimate learning platform was created when Velile Phantsi and Mokoena Maphalane, two community members who had received training in eco-building from the University of the Free State (UFS) Centre for Development Support (CDS) under the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences, presented a workshop for 10 Free State psychiatric patients in Bloemfontein on 23 February 2017.
Building self-sustaining communities
The training programme took place at Lebone Village recreation centre, at a structure that was built through the eco-building initiative, Qala Phelang Tala (Start Living Green). The collaboration between the Department of Occupational Therapy at the Faculty of Health Sciences and CDS has the potential to address unemployment and housing backlogs and forms a significant part of the rehabilitation of vulnerable people. It has also created prospects for community-based research.
Training and support to rehabilitate vulnerable people
Following the sharing of skills, the Department of Occupational Therapy will continue to work with patients through this community engagement project. Trainees will receive support in building a recreation centre structure at their own complex. During the presentation Mokoena Maphalane shared his personal experience of how physical activity such as eco-building helped him recover from the debilitating effects of a stroke. It is something he hopes will assist other patients in the future.
More information on eco-building.