Bryson Pather - teaching, assessment, learning and innovation manager at Regent Business School.
Something peculiar is going on in South African boardrooms. Seasoned executives, formerly the embodiment of business experience, are heading back to classrooms. Not because they are obsolete, but because what it means to be a leader has changed. In this uncertain economy, experience is no longer enough to ensure relevance. Senior executives are signing up for formal study in record numbers not in humility, but in pride. It is a strange flip: the CEO who spends weekends in lecture halls, the director redoing coursework between strategy meetings, the veteran manager debating new business cases with pupils half their age. These are not stories of reinvention but of renewal, and in 2025, the strongest leaders are also the most curious (Deloitte, 2024).
When experience stops being enough
Seniority once equalled authority. Experience in the trenches commanded credibility and the right to lead. But the playing field of business has dramatically altered. Technological disruption is re-writing industries at an unprecedented pace. Artificial intelligence, automation, and digitisation are no longer future threats but today’s realities (World Economic Forum, 2023). ESG expectations environmental, social, and governance responsibilities imply leaders are accountable for so much beyond profits. Sustainability, ethical guardianship, and social responsibility weigh as heavy as balance sheets (PwC, 2023). Globalisation and localisation pull executives two ways simultaneously: reading off-shore trends and on-the-ground South African challenges of inequality, youth joblessness, and political unpredictability (South African Institute of International Affairs, 2024). Subtle strategy demands forceful decision-making far acuter than ever before, and any misstep on regulation, digitisation, or geopolitical positioning can send even the most venerable businesses to the bottom. Here, experience of the old-fashioned kind brings part of the toolkit. The rest thinking critically, new paradigms, and exposure to overseas insights must be intentionally developed, and hence why seasoned leaders are looking to disciplined learning again.
What the classroom offers that the boardroom cannot
So, what do executives actually derive from postgraduate study? Something more than a certificate. For most, it’s a return to the classroom to harden the mind and open the horizon. Formal study demands disciplined thinking; to enable leaders to question assumptions, test evidence, and question solutions in a way the boardroom echo chambers habitually disallow (Harvard Business Review, 2022). Access to the newest research and emerging trends ensures they do not fall back on weary playbooks. Whether it’s the application of behavioural economics to consumer strategy or sustainable finance models, classrooms become test labs for the ideas shaping tomorrow (McKinsey & Company, 2024). Business schools represent different industries finance, health, technology, public service. Cross-pollination of perspectives blows siloed thinking to bits and prepares executives to borrow across sectors. Cross-peer value should not be undervalued. Senior leaders recoup the value of professional networks, not for transactional advantage, but for collaborative solutions to problems in an interconnected economy (AACSB, 2023). Postgraduate study also exposes executives to global templates and grounds them in local realities, giving them the ability to translate global best practices through the South African prism of problems. The point is clear: executive education is not career-mending, it’s career acceleration. It’s about refining relevance, strategic agility, and positioning oneself as a leader who succeeds in the era of disruption.
For generations, the cultural mantra was simple: once you’d made it to the C-suite, learning was a choice. Senior leaders had “made it” education was for climbing-the-ladder juniors. That narrative is falling apart. The world’s most admired leaders are humble and inquisitive. They do not revel in afterglow from past success but are forever looking to improve. They understand that leadership is not an accomplished fact but a dynamic process of growth. In fact, leadership-effectiveness studies ever-more convincingly are showing that “learning agility” the ability to adapt, absorb, and apply continuous learning is a greater predictor of long-term success than technical expertise alone (Centre for Creative Learning, 2022). This cultural reframe is important. It makes development at the top the norm, sends powerful messages to organisations, and kills the myth of the all-knowing leader.
The ripple effect
When a leader returns to study, the ripples are large. New lenses become new business strategies. Leaders return with a mindset of insights altering the way firms become digital, sustainable, or customer-centric (Bain & Company, 2023). Teams experience the value of learning across levels, and it facilitates a culture of curiosity and development not anchored to HR processes but from the top. Executives who return to study are likely champions of formal learning pipelines, believing in investments in middle managers and prospective leaders who would have plateaued. Organisations also obtain leaders who are able to predict disruption, align strategy to emerging realities, and become competitors in volatile markets. In short, one executive’s decision of going “back to school” tends to strengthen the entire organisation’s ability to confront the future.
South Africa’s era of economic doubt, of social transformation, and planetary unpredictability means there is a question not of whether senior leaders should return to study but whether they can do without it. Are boards of directors prepared for what 2030 holds? Are leaders prepared to make difficult decisions aligning profitability and sustainability, and agility and accountability? The answer lies not in reworking past experience but in learning the new. In going back to school, today’s executives are showing us learning is not a diversion from leadership it is leadership. And maybe the best demonstration of wisdom is an awareness there’s always something to know.
