Do you speak data?

The question, says Rhodes Business School director Owen Skae, used to be: “Do you speak French or Chinese?” Now it’s: “Do you speak data?” The answer, nearly always, is “No”.

Technology and business practices are changing at a pace that is almost beyond comprehension. Actually, in some cases, it is way beyond. Take data. In a single day, or even a few hours, more pieces of information are generated than in the entire history of mankind before the turn of the 21st century.

Do we know what to do with this flood of data? Probably not, says Skae. Companies specialise in telling us what some of it means but, overall, “I think we still don’t see what it’s telling us”.

If we could, it would ease some of the growing pressures being heaped on business leaders. Covid asked unprecedented questions of them. Now war, famine, electricity and water shortages, climate change and the collapse of traditional supply chains are doing the same.

All this comes at a time when there is a debate about the meaning of leadership. Once, management and leadership were considered synonymous. Now, says Skae, “there is a view that there should be less management and more leadership”.

“The traditional responsibility of leadership is under threat more than it has ever been,” he says. “Companies have to realise you can’t rely on one person. It’s about teams rather than the individual.”

It’s also about servant-leadership. Executives are there to serve the organisation, not the other way round. That’s particularly important as companies are peopled by younger generations who expect them to be socially and ethically correct.

“If you, as leader, won’t buy into these ideas, young people won’t buy into anything [you] do or say,” says Skae. “Malfeasance and bad corporate behaviour are no longer condemned just from the outside. Inside, too, people are less tolerant of this behaviour. They have had enough. Lip service alone is no longer enough.”

Business schools also have leadership challenges, though mostly of a different nature. Two years of Covid forced schools to acknowledge that the future of business education is largely online and virtual.

In line with most other schools, Rhodes is welcoming some students back on campus. Skae says he’d “forgotten what it was like hearing the sound of laughter in the corridors and people sharing experiences in person”.

The future is blended education — a mixture of online and face-to-face classroom teaching. “The university has made the strategic decision that we have to be more digitally enabled. I’m not sure anyone is certain yet where that will lead us. But wherever we go, it will be very different to pre-Covid.”

When the direction is clear, it will be time to talk again about providing the school with its own campus, rather than its current cramped premises inside the university theatre building.

The university had allocated funds but after two years of Covid cash constraints and the realisation that blended teaching requires less classroom space than originally envisaged, the plan needs to be revised.