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News of NATO member Poland shooting down Russian drones after they violated its airspace during an attack on Ukraine made global headlines. It was the first time NATO forces confronted Russian assets – on their territory - during the war in Ukraine. In other news, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa announced he would not be bullied by the U.S. over export tariffs – at 30% currently the highest in Sub-Saharan Africa. On the other side of the globe, two activists received media coverage for hunger-striking outside the offices of AI companies Anthropic (San Franscico) and DeepMind (London), protesting against “the threat of superhuman AI”.
Any of these news stories, randomly picked in September 2025, could indicate fundamental shifts, uncertainty, and turmoil that might lead to large-scale transformational changes for businesses in South Africa.
Profound shift or “noise”?
“With hindsight it’s relatively easy to identify specific events as key shifts, but it’s so much harder to make a call when such transformational changes are emergent,” says Prof Nicola Kleyn, an Extraordinary Professor and previous Dean of the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) – the internationally accredited business school of the University of Pretoria. “In a world of rapidly shifting geopolitics and revolutions in technology, not to mention ongoing disruptions brought about by climate change, it’s hard to know which external events herald such inflection points in global, regional, or national environments,” she says.
AI is bringing about one of these profound shifts, but it’s too early to say whether Donald Trump’s tariffs and the war in Ukraine will impact business and society to the same extent. According to Prof Kleyn, the challenge for business leaders is figuring out when, how, and how quickly to rechart their course of action in response. To do this, they need to solve the following dilemma: “How do we look beyond our businesses and their immediate environments into the larger macro environment and discern which are likely to herald profound changes that require us to invest time, energy and resources into adapting our business to thrive? And which ones are mere ‘noise’ that’s going to distract us and deflect us for a while, but ultimately aren’t going to change the shape and form and strategies of our organisations?”
Navigating macro-environmental change
This question, how can business sift out “noise” and adapt to large scale transformational shifts, lies at the core of GIBS’ newly launched MPhil in Business Management specialising in Leading New Economies. The programme intends to inspire and develop leaders and change catalysts to see the “bigger picture” of how these external shifts will disrupt their organisations and stakeholders, and seek to collaborate to co-create and execute innovative, responsible responses both in and beyond their organisations.
Prof Kleyn, who designed the learning journey for the programme, explains that ‘new economies’ refers to significant macro-environmental changes – such as the digital economy, circular economy, and gig economy – that will present as opportunities for some companies and threaten others.
“Many business school programmes focus on the organisation and its immediate environment,” she says. “The focus on strategy, for instance, has often been about the organisation in the context of its industry. Other degrees focus on management or leadership. And my argument for launching our MPhil in Leading New Economies was that we need to put more emphasis on what is happening in the larger environment. While we can’t teach a degree covering absolutely everything that is happening in the world, we can expose students to a series of perspectives and tools to sense, anticipate, co-create, and adapt to large-scale change.”
These are the four words around which the four-part learning journey is built. The participants will learn to “sense” and “anticipate” which transformational changes are about to happen and what they should be paying attention to in that larger environment. They will need to collaborate and “co-create” with multiple stakeholders, and ultimately “adapt” their organisation to the new economies.
“It's one thing to anticipate multiple futures, but quite another to identify what companies need to do to not only mitigate risks, but to actively position their organisations to co-create and benefit responsibly from transformational changes,” says Kleyn. Therefore, the idea of the MPhil in Leading New Economies is not to turn the students into deep experts in one particular trend, but rather to equip them to deal with the multiple shifts that businesses will need to face in a changing world.
Why an MPhil?
An MPhil in Business Management is a research-intensive post-grad programme that hones critical thinking, deepens expertise, and prepares professionals for advanced scholarship or leadership in their field. “The beauty of an MPhil is that our students have an opportunity to study a master's in which their core studies weren't necessarily in that field,” says Prof Kleyn. “You don’t need an honours degree in your MPhil specialisation. It's geared for people who are at a certain level of thinking, because they've all done an honours degree across various disciplines, which makes the class really interesting.”
According to GIBS founding director Prof Nick Binedell, it’s beneficial to have participants with significant experience who “bring a few battle scars to the room”, so others can borrow from their experience, share the knowledge, and not just study the subject, but sharpen their skills at making decisions.
The way GIBS runs its MPhil is therefore highly dependent on who else is in the cohort, explains Prof Kleyn. There's a lot of peer-based learning and exploration in groups of peers, which is not always as present in other master’s programmes, which can be more of an individual-focused experience. She says, “If you're not interested in talking and sense-making with other people, then an MPhil at GIBS may not be for you.”
The school’s learning approach is interactive and favours exposure to real-world situations through a range of methodologies, including case studies, team-based projects and simulations, as well as practitioner engagements.
Customising your study path
GIBS offers four MPhil in Business Management degrees, each of which is a specialised, academically rigorous master’s degree that will enable students to transform from a traditional business manager into a specialist. The courses vary between 18 and 24 months, with a mix of online and in-person learning on the school’s Illovo campus in Johannesburg. The MPhil degree serves as a precursor to a PhD for those who want to follow an academic and research-oriented career.
Although the core subjects are prescribed, students can customise their study path by choosing a specialisation as well as electives, including the GIBS MBA suite of more than 80 electives and the school’s international partner institutions. The four specialisations are:
- MPhil specialising in Change Leadership
The objective is to develop human-centric change leaders who can confidently navigate the future world of work and the intricacies of organisational leadership for sustainability. The programme will introduce you to advanced research in change management while sharpening your skills to approach organisational change from two perspectives: commercial and social, helping you understand why change takes place, as well as how to manage it.
- MPhil specialising in Corporate Strategy
This degree aims to equip senior business managers and leaders with high-level business skills in the areas of strategic foresight, strategic management, and strategic leadership. The programme is a combination of courses taught by expert local and international faculty, together with an in-depth academic research project in an area of strategy that you are particularly interested in.
- MPhil specialising in Evidence-Based Management
Building a bridge between a business problem and a researchable question: this degree will enable you to define a provisional research question, and to develop a systematic literature review in your chosen domain. All courses are core courses; there are no electives. The final MPhil research project often provides the starting point for a doctoral proposal.
- MPhil specialising in Leading New Economies
As detailed above, this specialisation will equip senior leaders, who are intensely curious and want to see the bigger picture, with the tools, insights, and capabilities to lead organisations in a rapidly transforming global economy.
“Nobody studying for a GIBS degree is just learning for the sake of learning,” concludes Prof Kleyn. “They're learning because they're curious and because ultimately, they want to be agents of change in whatever subject they're studying.” The inaugural MPhil Leading in New Economies cohort is proof of this. DM
The Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) offers four MPhil in Business Management degrees, each one a specialised, academically rigorous master’s qualification that will transform you from a traditional business manager into a specialist.
