Mr Sizwe Nxasana, Chief Executive Officer of FirstRand Limited, during the SBL Research and Innovation Day
“The Unisa Graduate School of Business Leadership (SBL) is committed to pioneering research excellence that advances the creation of new knowledge and innovation in business and leadership. This Research and Innovation Day is thus not just another business as usual day in the research history of the SBL” said Prof Elmarie Sadler, SBL acting executive director and CEO during the welcoming address of the first Research and Innovation Day hosted by the SBL on 15 March 2013.
The Day was officially opened by Prof Mamokgethi Phakeng, Vice-Principal: Research and Innovation, Unisa. Prof Phakeng introduced the Research and Innovation week at Unisa in 2012. She said that the main purpose of the Research and Innovation Week is to provide a platform for cross-disciplinary engagements by Unisa researchers, networking and showcasing the various Unisa research programmes and flagships.
The programme of the day was carefully crafted to set the tone for pioneering research at the SBL in areas such as ethics and social responsibility. The day was attended by senior representatives from Unisa, academics, students and key stakeholders of the SBL. Keynote speakers to the calibre of Prof Deon Rossouw, CEO: Ethics Institute of South Africa and Mr Sizwe Nxasana, Chief Executive Officer of FirstRand Limited, addressed the issues of ethics and community engagement, respectively. Our guest speakers included Cynthia Schoeman, Managing Director: Ethics Monitoring & Management Services, rof Sunette Pienaar, Deputy-Director: Community Engagement, Unisa and internationally renowned public governance expert, Prof Goos Minderman, from the Universiteit, The Netherlands.
Innovation is key
Prof Divya Singh, Vice-Principal: Advisory and Assurance Services, Unisa introduced the first keynote speaker, Mr Sizwe Nxasana, Chief Executive Officer of FirstRand Limited. In her introduction she mentioned that, after completing his studies (at both Fort Hare and Unisa) Mr Nxasana became one of the first ten black Chartered Accountants in South Africa. He joined Telkom SA as Chief Executive Officer in 1998 and was responsible for listing Telkom on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) as well as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). He was appointed CEO of FirstRand Limited in 2010.
Mr Sizwe Nxasana said that South Africans must create a problem-solving attitude that can find innovative solutions to its problems rather than viewing those issues as challenges. Mr Nxasana explained to attendees that innovation is key in the FirstRand arena. All employees of the organisation are encouraged to participate in the innovation process. This has evolved into exciting new ideas being implemented in the organisation. “A room full of engineers will think one way but, bring into the mix people from various disciplines and background and an innovative solution will evolve. That highlights the importance of embracing diversity, different backgrounds and genders,” he said.
First National Bank (FNB) recently opened operations in India. “Operations in India are managed by people from India. Employing people who understand the challenges of the country and its community is key” said Nxasana. This has proven to be a success recipe. The bank is also continuing expansion in Africa.
Mr Nxasana also addressed the South African education system and the problems it is currently facing. He believes that children should be taught problem-solving from a young age which will empower them to develop solutions-orientated thinking.
His view is that the effective implementation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives should not be taken lightly. It is not achieved through whimsical fancies, simple chequebook philanthropy, or even the vagaries of short-term returns on investment that our other day-to-day work often expects. It requires a long-term view, managing risks and defining measurable outcomes to achieve the required impact of this investment.
The relevance of ethics for business leadership students
Prof Singh also introduced the second keynote speaker of the SBL Research and Innovation Day, Prof Deon Rossouw, CEO of the Ethics Institute of South Africa and Extraordinary Professor of both the University of Pretoria and Stellenbosch. After completing his studies at Stellenbosch University he started his teaching career in Philosophy in 1986 at the Rand Afrikaans University in Johannesburg where he later became Professor and Head of the Philosophy Department. He moved to the University of Pretoria where he was Head of the Philosophy Department and Director of the Centre for Business and Professional Ethics. He joined the Ethics Institute of South Africa in 2010. He served as a member of the Research Team for the King II Report on Corporate Governance and is a member of the Sustainability Committee of the King III Report on Corporate Governance for South Africa.
Prof Rossouw said that the King III Commission defined business ethics as the ethical values determining the interaction between a company and its shareholders. He introduced the three levels of business ethics as: the systemic level, incorporating economic ethics and global sustainability; the organisational level, including corporate citizenship and intra-organisational ethics and the individual level that addresses personal ethical responsibilities and dilemmas.
In his presentation Prof Rossouw focussed on business ethics as a field of study, the strategic importance of business ethics and the challenges and opportunities in business ethics research. In his discussion regarding the strategic importance of business ethics he emphasised that there are various demands that has to be adhered to in order for an organisation to retain an ethical strategic edge, these include:
- societal demands (declining distrust in business to do what is in the best interest of the society),
- investor demands,
- legislative demands (anti-corruption legislation and corporate law),
- reporting demands (sustainability reporting and ethics reporting) and
- self-interested considerations (the benefits of ethical behaviour including reputation and stakeholder trust)
He identified major ethics challenges for the next five years as: enhancing the responsibility of business in society, global justice and fairness in business and trade, rethinking the ethics of capitalism, business and planetary sustainability and institutionalising ethical corporate culture.
Ethics in Business
Ms Cynthia Schoeman, Managing Director of Ethics Monitoring & Management Services boasts a Bachelor of Arts as well as an MBA degree. She is part of the external faculty of Duke Corporate Education and the University of Stellenbosch Corporate Education, and is an external lecturer at Wits Business School and Henley Business School. She developed a web-based survey, The Ethics Monitor, which enables organisations to measure and monitor their ethics. Her aim is not only to improve ethics in the workplace, but also promote the proactive management of risks.
According to Ms Schoeman the topic of ethics in business often prompts a response that ethics and business are an oxymoron, a view well supported by many ethical failures in the public and private sectors here and abroad. For leaders who strive to make ethics an asset in their organisations, there are three primary issues they need to understand and address: ethics is a choice, the leader’s role and how ethics is viewed in the organisation.
Says Ms Schoeman, “The people in the organisation already know the difference between right and wrong, their ethical choices are shaped by their values and moral principles; the laws governing the country; codes of conduct, procedures and systems as well as culture leadership.”
She reiterated the fact that leaders should be the custodians of ethics. They have the primary responsibility to enhance and uplift the ethics of their organisations. According to her ethics is a necessity in all organisations due to the fact that it makes good business sense and it gives the organisation a competitive advantage. The cost of ethical failure to the organisation is very high.
She concluded that there are various benefits of sound ethics, it includes: the attraction and retaining of top staff and board members; the enhancement of corporate reputation and brand equity as well as enhancing customer loyalty and stakeholder support.
Community engaged scholarship: contextualisation
Prof Sunette Pienaar, Deputy-Director: Community Engagement, Unisa holds a BA (cum laude) from the University of Johannesburg and BD (cum laude) as well as a PhD from the University of Pretoria. She has published articles and presented papers at national and international conferences on HIV/AIDS, gender, the politics of care and Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) to mention a few. She served as Chairperson of the Research Ethics Committee and the Community Engagement Committee in the Unisa College of Economic and Management Sciences between 2010 and 2012. In November 2012 she was appointed as the Deputy-Director for Community Engagement. She is also the founder and chairman of Heartbeat, a NGO supporting 60 000 orphaned and vulnerable children in South Africa.
According to Prof Pienaar community engagement is increasingly being acknowledged internationally as scholarship. Unisa thereby defines community engagement as the scholarly activity of academic research and teaching that involves external communities and stakeholders in collaborative activities that address socio-economic imperatives of South Africa and the African continent, while also enriching the teaching, learning and research objectives of the university. Unisa has become South Africa’s first university to take community engagement to the next level by earmarking R37 million to boost education and teaching in 130 projects across the country. One such initiative was the 500 Schools Project whereby a multi-disciplinary team researched South Africa’s underperforming schools and developed targeted interventions to boost the quality of basic education.
She said that community engagement was one of the founding principles, together with teaching and research, of the post-apartheid reconstruction within the South African higher education system. She referred to a study done in France five years ago that showed the most prolific researchers were those who actively engaged with the public.
“Becoming the African university in serving humanity can only be realised if we move past the isolation and insulation of live in academics to break down the walls that separate us from society,” Pienaar said. She stressed that community engagement involved scholarship is not public relations and that it is an essential issue, not a luxury.
Relevance of community engagement for business leadership students
Goos Minderman is a Professor in Public Law and Public Governance and the Director of the Zijlstra Centre for Public Governance and Control at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Since 2011 he holds a position as extraordinary Professor of Good Governance at the University of Stellenbosch and he is a board member of the Centre for Executive Leadership in Government (CELG) at Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey. He is trained as a Constitutional Lawyer. After a career in the Dutch civil service, he was a member of the Dutch Senate and is still advising on a broad number of issues on national and local level.
In his presentation Prof Minderman focussed on the importance of business involvement in social networks and (semi) public activities. He viewed this issue via two angles namely; the European view, where government is changing its role rapidly and seriously as well as the African view, where he focussed on the importance of business in the combating of corruption.
Prof Minderman said that the public sector has been changing worldwide; being under pressure to become smaller and thus not being the only arena from which social, political and economical solutions would develop. This implies that an interdependent relationship has evolved between the market, government and civil society. “If we do not understand the ways market, government and civil society go together in an open and constructive way, there will be no solution of many needs (public and private); neither the market nor government will solve problems or expectations on their own or even in the combination of the two: there is also a social network to be connected,” said Prof Minderman.
According to him corruption costs the South African economy more than R150 billion annually and was bleeding around 30 percent from the public sector budgets. He said that these losses, coupled with inefficiencies, were strongly limiting South Africa’s problem-solving potential.
The SBL Research and Innovation Day was concluded with a student workshop that focussed on research ethics for business leadership students.
