Obtaining an MBA is quite correctly seen as a steppingstone to senior management positions. Professional degrees build on your experience and develop your business decision making. You are exposed to the broad practice perspectives in disciplines you may never have studied before – can there be a better way to groom a well-rounded business professional?
Could this be the degree for you?
Understanding the operating flow of private sector, public sector and third sector enterprises is the realm of the MBA professional. You can be expected to preside over the coordination of the functionalities of business, guiding the coordination of capitals and the attainment of competitive business competencies that enable differentiated strategic positioning and distinctive market performance.
But take some time to think about why an MBA may be an eligibility requirement for a senior position. Could it be that employers desire to fill senior positions with incumbents with superior skills? And doesn’t it strike you that the rigour of a professional degree, with the attendant dilemmas of work-study-life balance trade-offs, builds stamina, discretion, and decisiveness? The qualities desired of a a senior manager with responsibility for making tough, evidence-based decisions.
In other words, your MBA is not an automatic ticket to greatness – it is a steppingstone, and a dynamic vessel. The work you put in to developing networks, developing diplomacy and conflict management skills, at juggling deadlines and personalities, will propel that vessel to achieve your career goals.
Think about whether you want to develop a professional network; to establish eligibility for the managerial positions for which an MBA professional degree is a sought eligibility requirement; about whether you want to develop an evidence-based decision-making ability, making your appeal to employers much greater. Key stakeholders want decision makers that can lead enquiry and back their decisions with evidence.
Perhaps your instincts are telling you that starting your own business empire is, however, the way to go! It might be – you could be an exceptionally innovative thinker, with an understanding of markets and if so, the best way to test your thinking is to test it against your MBA curriculum. The curriculum will allow you to develop your business plan and formulate your funding model, with an enhanced understanding of how to approach funders.
Our minimum requirements are:
The following documents will be required upon application: Certified Copies of
Lectures are conducted online, four evenings a week, Monday to Friday. Study groups are assigned to help bridge the gap of not being able to meet face to face to forge these relationships. Groups are rotated to give you experience of all of the skills sets and personalities in the virtual classroom. Your learning is evaluated through a continuous assessment regimen, over the duration of each module. University vacations are recognized, giving you some respite from the rigor of continuous learning.
The programme commences with a single intake, once a year, in February. There is an effective month’s break in the middle of the year, and opportunity to draw your breath at the end of the first year from about the beginning of December, until the end of the second year begins in February. However, we strongly recommend you use this break to do some uninterrupted thinking about your research project!
You study four modules a semester in your first year of enrolment and two in the first semester of your second year. You commence your independent research project at the beginning of the second year and are expected to submit you dissertation by the end of the second year. You are assigned a supervisor to help you navigate the trials and tribulations of researching a business problem. This business problem is one you choose to investigate. It is typically drawn from your professional life, whether you work for the private, public, or third sector. If you need help in making the project choice, your instructors and assigned supervisor will assist you in making the decision.
The break in the middle of the year and at the end of the first year, allow you to gather your wits, recharge and reset!
MBA curriculum is as dynamic as your career. Module content is refreshed and new modules are incorporated in the curriculum, as market and technology trends alter the dynamics of successful business practice. The current MBA curriculum of the Graduate School of Business and Leadership comprises ten modules and a dissertation Explore the drop-down menus to familarise yourself with each module’s overarching objective, and a broad description of the learning content.
You undertake eight modules in your first year, and two modules in the first semester of your second year. One of these two modules is selected from a limited choice: you can lean into financial strategy, with Investment and Portfolio Management, or you can select Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Worried that you’ve never studied finance before? Stop worrying – you’ll be led through the pattern by which we record profitability and net business value, in the first module of your first year, Financial Reporting and Analysis.
This module aims to provide students with knowledge and understanding of financial reporting forms, analysis, and evaluation of financial statements for decision-making. By tracing the anthropological roots of business enterprise, you will be introduced to business conflict, and the corresponding regulatory mechanisms imposed on business to limit stakeholder prejudice. You will learn to differentiate revenue, expenses, and profitability, as well as equity, liabilities, and assets. This enables you to undertake thorough financial analysis of a business enterprise’s financial reports to a level sufficient to be able to comment meaningfully on the performance of the entity over time. You will also consider the drivers of enterprise ‘social performance’ reporting, arguing the relationship between enterprise social reporting, stakeholder sentiment, and the dynamism of the non-financial factors affecting business performance. This, to give you a more holistic view of the investment appeal of the entity to shareholders.
Evidence based decision making at senior levels of business management require an understanding of the interplay between the creation and consumption of wealth, and politics, policy, and business. Economic forces drive social systems at the level of consumers, and business enterprise. This module is intent on teaching you to use macroeconomic concepts and tools to measure the performance of an economy, at the same time as you learn to use microeconomic concepts and tools to measure the performance of markets. Equipped like this, you will be able to use economic concepts and tools to improve decision making and the performance and profitability of business units.
The adoption of information and communication technologies and the growth of networking and intra-firm networking perhaps especially, has led to an explosive growth in the volume and intricacy of the business data points stored in company databases. Increasing practise of enterprise data mining, extracting meaningful knowledge from the large volumes of data residing in these enterprise databases, means managers must be competent at evaluating the many variables to consider in every business decision. This module guides you through defining business problems, conceptualising business solutions, and devising methods by which to gather, assess, and evaluate data to inform a defensible conclusion and thereby an informed business decision. In the context of business and here in the Graduate School of Business and Leadership, the research we promote is that which has a practical business problem solving emphasis.
A point of tension in business management is the role of leadership, vis-à-vis management. Thinking holds that the entrepreneurship of founders, unequivocally business leaders, must give way to the bureaucratic practice of administrative management, especially so as firms grow. Suitably emboldened, professional managers inculcate a culture of professional management – but in the process the leadership which drove the firm’s growth can become obscured, and as Merson says, these otherwise well-managed enterprises “become yet another over-managed, under-inspired, middle-aged business on a glide path to history”. This moule sets you on a path to thinking critically about business leadership – contemplating the role of leadership in facilitating group processes, as well as a catalyst of organisational learning and development.
Business strategy cannot succeed unless it is executed. A key component of business strategy execution is marketing strategy. With business strategy sets the desired trajectory of the firm, marketing strategy specifies the targets. It explains what markets to target, which products and services to offer, and how to price and promote them for optimal market growth and share. Strategic marketing translates business strategic goals into targeted market share. We coach you in the strategic marketing goals of attracting prospects and building engagement with those prospects. Engaged prospects represents customer opportunity – the development of market share. Moreover, sealing the deal with customers sets in motion impact chains – and these impact chains represent further prospects. Success breeds success!
The aim of the module is to develop the skills necessary to evaluate a corporation’s major strategic and investment decisions from a financial perspective, and how managers can create value through deciding optimal sources of finance, how bet to invest those funds, and effective management of financial risks. You are led through an examination of the major financial decisions made in organisations: capital budgeting, capital structure, working capital management. The module also examines, from a managerial perspective, aspects of performance measurement and management control systems design and use, including the tools used by accountants and chief financial controllers (cost analysis, risk analysis, budgeting, scorecards), and the relevance of these tools for decision making. In addition, there is a focus on mergers and acquisitions, the information conveyed by financial decisions as well as how managerial incentives affect financial decisions.
We first started thinking of human resource is as human capital, on the back of the computer revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. You can think of this as the origins of our notions of knowledge workers! The business process revolution of the 1990s, on the back of the revolution brought about by global networking, gave renewed emphasis to the relationship between business and professional managers. The best jobs were always going to go to the best human capital practitioners! This module guides you in contemporary theory and practise of human resource information systems and employee life cycle tracking together with HR service delivery and employee engagement. To this we add contemporary understanding of talent management, incorporating talent acquisition and optimised workforce management. The overarching objective is to equip you with an understanding of the role of human capital relative to a firm’s competitive advantage and the bridge that human capital management serves between managing talent and achieving strategic goals.
Strategy represents a pathway to durable competitive advantage. Your role in the process of steering an enterprise to greatness (or away from the brink of failure, if you specialise in business turnaround) will evolve over time. With this module, we intend that you become familiar with the process and tools of strategy formulation, and with the strategic options and choices this analysis exposes. Strategy execution is a function of leadership as well as strategic plans – and the development of your dynamic capability begins in this module. You will examine strategy implementation options and learn to question your own bias and misleading assumptions, as well as those of your team. You will learn about strategic architecture and last, but not least, you will be prompted to think about the limits of your strategy decisions as reliable vectors for a global competitive context characterised as it is by black swan events.
You will select this module, or Investment and Portfolio Management. If this is the module you select, you will be immersed in the conception of how entrepreneurial initiatives transform our world. The transformational role makes entrepreneurship a new management paradigm. A paradigm that serves business generally, and one which may well serve your interests as you navigate the choice of launching your own empire.
Undertaken in the second year of the programme, the module synthesises your learning in the programme first year, in the context of the establishment of an innovative entrepreneurial venture. This practical emphasis enlarges your understanding of the issues and challenges involved in the formation and operation of new ventures.
The research project is opportunity for collaborative knowledge production. You will be mentored through the process of articulating a business problem—one we can anticipate will arise or which has arisen in the context of your employment, or side hustle, or mainstream enterprise of which you are proprietor. You will be moved to conceptualize an approach to resolving (or at least assessing) this problem, devising a methodological approach to doing so in a manner which respects the precepts and principles of scientific enquiry. You will perform the fieldwork and write up your results in your research report, preparing this capstone project for submission to a panel of examiners. When you graduate, your name will be accompanied by your dissertation title!
