Two Harvard Business School professors and Business Day and Financial Mail publisher Peter Bruce are seated next to each other – in a Braamfontein ballet studio.
There is more to this most unusual picture. Six MBA students, the Harvard Business School (HBS) class of 2013, are also viewing the rehearsal of Don Quixote in the South African Mzansi Ballet’s (SAMB) Joburg Theatre home on a Friday afternoon. Ballet mistress Angela Malan is cajoling the dancers back into form after a five-week holiday break.
On that Monday the visitors, with their teachers, Sandra J Sucher, Professor of Management Practice, and Teresa Amabile, the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration in the School’s Entrepreneurial Management Unit and director of research, began their ongoing relationship with the company.
This year the SAMB, with artis-tic direction by Iain McDonald, is a global partner of the HBS. This international assignment is part of one of their required subjects: field immersion experiences for leadership development programme (Field). The three US students, one from Japan, Liberia and the UK, are not being “immersed” in the usual jargon which is synonymous with the service and manufacturing industries and other business-related genres.
Instead, at the working rehear-sal, and other practical balletic encounters over two weeks, the Field programme partners have swopped the language of financials for fouettes and ronde de jambes. Not forgetting the intricacies of choreographic interpretation and everything else which is part of the process of staging a classical ballet and a dance professional’s working life. Apart from interviewing SAMB staff and board members, the students went into the streets and malls to monitor how the product that they have to create a sustainable marketing model for is perceived, received or rejected.
This elite team of academics and business leaders of tomorrow are focusing on classical ballet which can be marketed and sold as a commodity. How did they end up in the world of tutus and tiaras in Joburg? Through his extensive connections the company chief executive, Dirk Badenhorst, (a former dancer with an MBA) heard about the Field global strategy which was initiated in Boston in 2011.
For 2013 the course work is located in Africa (Accra and Johannesburg), East Asia (including four cities in China), Europe (Istanbul) South Asia (four major Indian cities), North America (Boston) and Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile). “The aim,” explained Amabile is “to send faculty and students to new environments”.
SAMB submitted a proposal and was accepted. The other current HBS case studies in Joburg are Philips, Nike, African School for Excellence and Kommunity Project. Bottom line (to quote MBA candidate Jeff Stock who was giving feedback after the rehearsal): “How do we price tickets to sustain the business?” Not as easy as it may sound because the visitors soon picked up on the perception that “ballet is a white people’s dance. We don’t think that is accurate.
“We are very interested to be working in the arts in South Africa. We have studied the political history which has implications for all of us. If we look at ballet, or the arts, they are public funded.
“This company has had no public funding for 12 years. Amazing. It is a mix of two which survived. That is a testament to the passion we see from the dancers and the management team. People wear a lot of various hats. As students we are familiar with start-up companies. This feels like a start-up with all the slashes and hyphens behind the names. We were pleased to see that.
“We went to the malls, spoke to the public and asked ‘are you coming to the ballet’? Why aren’t they filling seats? A lot of people want to be here. Awareness, accessibility are some of the issues we have been grappling with. How do we price tickets to sustain the business?”
Field scholar Meryl Holt added: “We are interested in the place of the ballet company in Johannesburg where ballet is an important part of the artistic fabric. We are very optimistic about the future of ballet.”
Just what their global partner wanted to hear.
• See Don Quixote in the Mandela at the Joburg Theatre from March 8-24.