Baziel Barends, CBRM

Baziel Barends has over twenty years’ experience in digital transformation with executive roles including leadership of business relationship management, supply chain systems, and service management functions in a multinational retailer. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Accounting and has completed an Executive MBA (EMBA) with distinction at the University of Cape Town. His EMBA research focused on Leadership-as-Practice, intrinsic motivation, power, and shared ownership and was featured at BRMConnect 2020 The Risky Business of Distributed Power.

He has coached executives as part of the EMBA program in the modules of systemic leadership and organizational viability and he believes that Business Relationship Management and Relationshipism are powerful enablers in these areas. This has driven him to volunteer in various roles with the institute, including leadership of the Relationshipism team.

As a South African, he wants to help drive the story that South Africans and Africans can overcome the significant hurdles that they currently face. He wants to contribute to this through a combination of 3 things:

1) Driving fourth industrial revolution technologies in key areas such as Manufacturing, underpinned by effective Business Relationship Management to realize maximum societal value from these technologies.
2) Driving Leadership-as-Practice underpinned by personal transformation starting with each of us and ultimately empowering those around us.
3) Driving Integrative Thinking (as per ‘the Opposable Mind’ (https://rogerlmartin.com/lets-read/the-opposable-mind ) to create better solutions and counter the destructive partisanship that is prevalent in so many societies around the world.