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It’s time to prepare for the brand new world beyond

Friday 27 March 2020 will be inscribed in the memory of generations to come. It’s the day President Cyril Ramaphosa shut down the country to save it from itself. It had never been done before, but then again, as he noted, this country hasn't faced a public health threat of the nature of COVID-19 in the last 100 years. The decision didn’t just disrupt all our lives for the next three weeks, it has fundamentally and irrevocably changed the way we will live afterwards. Just how, we don’t really know yet.

Here at Henley Business School Africa, we were able to prepare – because thanks to our international network of faculty, students and alumni chapters we had been monitoring the transmission patterns from China to the rest of the world and especially Italy by February. We immediately began implementing what we knew; adopting international best practise and evolving our own: social distancing, sanitising campus, educating staff and students and – critically – starting the pivot to virtual education across all our programmes from our unique accredited ladder of learning up to our flagship MBA.

We had already made the transition when the president announced the first restrictions on movement and assembly. By the time he ordered the unprecedented nationwide quarantine, we had perfected our virtual platforms and delivery. We were lucky, but as the saying goes, the harder you practice, the luckier you get. A CEO’s job is always to be aware of the environment and to change and to adapt as the terrain changes.

What has been amazing has been the speed of the Coronavirus transmission. When we started putting these safety measures in place there were some who thought we were being alarmist, now they’re not just commonplace, they have been overtaken by even more stringent measures across the entire country, if not the globe.

The key throughout for us has been to ensure we continue to do what we are supposed to do, which is to teach during all of this incredible disruption to normal life because at one level the economy has to keep going on, but at another more fundamental level, we have to survive and emerge with the capacity to rebuild the country and the continent.

At the moment, the injunction is to stay home and flatten the curve of the Coronavirus infections, but at the same time we have to build national capacity. This is the rationale that underpinned our decision during the first week of the lockdown to freely share all our virtual education insights, learning, innovations and methods with public and private South African universities and business schools.

South Africa can only rebound after the lockdown if we have the capacity to do so. The capacity to do that is created through education, something that is not solely our prerogative but the duty of all business schools and universities throughout the country. Our contribution to this is to help ensure that those who haven’t already pivoted to virtual learning can move their teaching online without having to re-invent the wheel or experience the teething problems that we had, so that the critical business skills for recovery can be energetically taught.

In some sectors, though it’s become obvious that a ‘wait and see’ approach has begun settling in, a creeping lassitude in the wake of the lockdown being implemented. One of the greatest corollary contagions of fighting a pandemic like this is fear.  In times of crisis, people can give up hope, be filled instead with fear and paralysed by indecision. The antidote to fear is not hope, but action.

Action inspires hope and with that the belief that we will get through this crisis, further focussing our minds on what has to be done. Education helps us achieve this. Some people ask what the point is. The answer is simple; if you park the philosophical rationale of energising yourself and combatting fear with action for a moment, the more pragmatic answer is that the world you will enter after the lockdown is lifted will be dramatically different to the one you left.

How you deal with that will depend on the skills you have honed while you have the opportunity to do so, in truth there’s probably never been a better time to study. We need to upskill aggressively – a top international and flexible MBA is definitely one of the best ways of making sense of a future which is rapidly evolving into our present reality.

That’s not the only lesson we should be learning though, there should be some even deeper epiphanies taking place. The key one should be about our common humanity and interdependence: COVID-19 doesn’t respect wealth or privilege; it certainly doesn’t see colour or creed. We need our economy to function, we need to create jobs, we need to fashion a society based on prosperity, not profiteering.

We are on a war footing, but COVID-19 is only a battle in the greater war for our future. It’s a future that’s predicated on all of us working together, not spinning off into secure estates or nationalist constructs, putting up walls and excluding others – but the polar opposite; breaking down walls, actually working together, collaborating to find solutions that benefit all of us so that we can live in a world without walls, without fear in a vibrant international economy that sustains all of us and protects the planet that we live on.

If we win this battle against the virus, which we can and which we will do, we need to harness that experience and everything we have learnt into fighting the next battles of this war – and there will be many. But when we do, the dividends of our final victory will be sweet indeed, this time for all of us not just the elites. DM

 

Jon Foster-Pedley is dean and director of Henley Business School Africa, a leading global business school with campuses in Europe, Asia and Africa. It holds elite triple international accreditation; has the number 1 business school alumni network in the world with the potential to network (Economist 2017); and is the number 1 business school in Africa for executive education (FT 2018), as well as the Number 1 MBA business school in South Africa as rated by corporate SA (PMR 2018, 2019).

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