About
Elaine Rumboll was appointed director of the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business Executive Education portfolio in 2005. A former performance artist, internationally published award winning poet, blues singer and academic turned businesswoman, Rumboll has an eclectic and exciting mix of skills. She holds a MA (cum laude) in Comparative Literature and an MBA (Wits). Working in the notoriously competitive and contested short course market, she brings a refreshing new approach to bear that emphasises cooperation and not competition. “We must not forget that as a university we are a national asset and cannot afford to squander what we have. We owe a debt to the people of this country in terms of continuous professional development and in generating a new body of leadership that is embedded and sustainable”.
(Source: Top Women in Business and Government)
Elaine’s Bio in more detail
A former performance artist (Echoes), internationally published award winning poet (Editor’s Choice Award, 1995; Nomination for Poet of the Year - American Library of Poetry 1995), blues singer and academic turned entrepreneur, Rumboll believes in the worth of mixing up disciplines. She holds a MA (cum laude) in Comparative Literature and an MBA (Wits) where her research report focused on Executive Coaching as a Leadership Development tool.
Elaine has lectured in the Comparative Literature department at Wits, at the UCT Graduate School of Business and consulted for local government on using creativity as a therapeutic and rehabilitatory tool in Jhb,Gauteng, RSA and in London, England, UK. After having spent three years working for Arts Alive in maximum security prisons for men and women running creative transdisciplinary workshops for which she received a nomination by Femina for Woman of the Year (1996), she reskilled herself and entered the world of business and went on to become Dean for Damelin Management School.
She has served in an advisory capacity to many organisations on leadership development including Johnson & Johnson, Massmart Holdings, SABMiller and Nestle. She is currently the programme director for the UCT GSB Business Acumen for Artists Programme - a world first short course through a graduate business school for teaching artists across multiple disciplines on the language of Business. Her fields of curiosity and practice are in the arenas of leadership development, programme design, strategic innovation and collaborative technologies.
She is currently working on a PhD, looking at the role of curiosity as a lens for attention and an enabler of learning in organisations.
As well as heading up the Executive Education unit, she also teaches on a number of customised leadership programmes for UCT GSB. Elaine writes a blog http://elainerumboll.com/ on Curiosity, for Thought Leader, http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/elainerumboll the Mail & Guardian online blogging platform and for Memeburn, http://www.memeburn.com/, “a Mashable/Techcrunch for emerging market technologies”.
Elaine is the winner of the Business Women’s Association Regional Business Achievement Awards in the Professional category for 2010.
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[…] Elaine Rumboll, Director of Executive Education at the UCT Graduate School of Business, described how many corporate executives were very excited about the prospect of gaming as a way of embedding learning back in the workplace. She is currently developing a game for a corporate client and wanted to connect with a group in this space. […]
[…] a dream.manifest of Director of UCT’s GSB Executive Education, Elaine Rumboll, also a published poet and blues.singer, who realised that her fluency with business, negotiation […]
Dear Elaine,
Learning from Leopold - I was travelling in Bavaria and had a look at some of Leopold 2nd’s unfinished castles - he was a visionary builder but unfortunately a total isolationist and thus his beautiful castles were never complete….. this continued on the theme that I was so struck by at business acumen for artists….
Things are going well otherwise, my film is being finalised and we’ll start screening it soon. All the best with the next business school for artists class.
I just wanted to say hi and let you in on wht I was learning from Leopold…
Simon 0731751829
Very often I visit this blog. It very much is pleasant to me. Thanks the author
[…] premise of a 4 year long wager that UCT’s Graduate School of Business Exec.Ed unit director Elaine Rumboll chose to bet on. She believed that artists with the right tools in their hands COULD excel in […]
Hello,
I am adjunct faculty at the new Athena Women’s Leadership Institute at Barnard College in NYC, and also teach high impact communication skills for leaders in the Executive MBA Program at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.
I am so excited to read about your work, your approach and your curiosity. I too have come from the world of the arts - I have been a professional actress for year in major theatres in the US - and I have brought my work on Authentic Presence, Voice and the exploration into the Core Leadership stories into my work. I actually graduated from UCT in 1968 (from the Theatre Department and English Literature), I would very much like to have more dialogue with you as I believe that what you are bringing to the world of Business and Women’s Leadership is in a word “Magnificent”. I do hope to hear back from you. I am mulling over coming to South Africa early 2011 for a few months.
Regards. Penny