From doctoral research to a development system.

Dr Craig Ross Muller is the creator of the Super-Cube® leadership model and the founder and chief executive of the Big Five Group, based in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The model grew out of his Doctor of Business Administration at the University of KwaZulu-Natal: a thesis on leadership skills development, completed in December 2020 and conferred in 2021, built as a case study of an African FMCG business network. He surveyed 132 people and interviewed ten directors to learn which leadership skills matter and how they can be developed, published the research in peer-reviewed journals in 2022, and has since seen the model taught in accredited programmes, including the 12-week intervention with leaders at Imana Foods and Kerry Foods.

He has spent more than twenty years in blue-chip FMCG, supply-chain optimisation and global consulting. He holds an MBA (2006, with a distinction for his dissertation on sub-Saharan vendor reliability) and a Postgraduate Diploma in Management (2004) from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Natal (2002). His certifications include PMP, PRINCE2, Managing Successful Programmes and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt.

The Big Five Group’s mission is three words: feed, educate, empower; Super-Cube® and Big Five Learn are how it educates. Craig’s conviction, and the argument of his book Leadership Is Learnable, is that Africa’s progress depends as much on the skills of its leaders as on its resources, and that those skills can be learnt by anyone, at any age.

Above all, Craig is the very proud father of Georgia and Benjamin, and hopes this work will inspire them, and their generation, to do good and help humanity move forward.