Takeshi Kimura
ByWBSComms
My experience in the City of Johannesburg (COJ) in the late 1990s involved the restructuring of the institution to avert a financial meltdown.
The Wits Business School has played an incredibly important role in shaping not just my career but also much of the person I am today. There have been several defining moments in my career, but undoubtedly the moment that stands out was when I was enrolled on the Management Advancement Programme (MAP) in 2008 with classmates a lot more senior and experienced than me.
My career-defining moment presented itself in the form of a blessing in disguise. In 2001, after having graduated from WBS, I resigned my nine-to-five office job and decided to pursue my music passion.
Having always had a deep interest in science, I first qualified as a chemist, and thereafter at a later stage as an engineer. In order to broaden my capabilities, I started to lecture evening classes at the Vaal Triangle Technikon, now the Vaal Institute of Technology.
I was a really good social worker. I loved working in a community, doing long-term development work with individuals and groups. However, because I was a good social worker, I quickly became a manager of peers, then teams and projects, and ultimately organisations.
In February 2015, one month after getting married and two months after my best performance review at McKinsey & Company, I decided to end my career as a management consultant to pursue my lifelong passion of being a social entrepreneur.