Message from the Director

Doing a degree at the USB is your path to high-level business competence. Our job is to help you gain knowledge, skills and perspectives to give you a professional authority that will last you for many years, aimed at senior positions in your chosen field.

Ultimately, what you want from a business education is to become someone whom people regard as highly competent – your clients, your directors, your fellow professionals. We aim to develop those competencies. Naturally, you should expect to study the fundamentals of your discipline: the USB's courses cover all the basic skills. You should expect to work hard at these; they provide the foundation for many years to come. But we ask much more of you than just hard work. We will also encourage you to exercise your mind on a deeper and more critical level – this is a business school of international standing and we're serious about your development. Your success will depend on how you think as much as on what you know.

"Doing a degree at the USB is your path to high-level business competence."

And it's all possible. Your fellow students will help you, and we will support you; but, make no mistake, if you want to acquire the wherewithal to be a successful entrepreneur, company director, policy-maker, change agent … well, as the ancient Greeks said, "There's no royal road".

But it is fun and it is worthwhile. Engaging with lecturers who not only command the theory, but have done the job in practice (and in many cases at the very highest levels as policymakers, HR directors and CEOs) is both demanding and exciting. Stretching yourself to become someone bigger and better than you are now is a challenge, but it's a great feeling when you understand something you haven't fully grasped before, or when you've made sense of an imponderable for the first time.

It's called learning how to think ... how to think as a leader.

We need leaders who are lucid and critical thinkers. And at the USB we grow them. In fact, we'd like to grow you into a thinking leader.

Professor John Powell
Director
University of Stellenbosch Business School