ABSTRACT
My purpose in this article is to offer a reflection on a career that has taken me from being an academic to head of a school of management to faculty dean and on to vice-chancellor positions. While this journey might appear smooth or planned, in reality it has emerged through a mixture of taking opportunities, experiencing deadends, getting rejections, but trying to keep learning and adapting. For quite a period of my career there was a prevalent assumption that if you were a decent researcher you would have the ability to take on leadership roles (although you might take some persuasion because of the impact it would have on your research). There was little or no training in management or leadership and it was not uncommon for these activities to be classified as ‘administration’ as though they were of low value or to minimise the role, ‘just appoint good people and let them get on with it’ was not an unusual attitude.
