The purpose of this qualitative research is to gain a deeper understanding of the knowledge attributes that influence how South African business leaders get things done. Knowledge is described as the social and emotional skills that allow leaders to enact behaviours. Therefore the components of the knowledge necessary for leaders to get things done are based on an understanding of their skills (learned capacity) and their abilities (the natural talents). The research assessed the relative importance of knowledge and the relationship with personal traits and leadership behaviour through fifteen indepth interviews. Knowledge was seen as relatively less important than personal traits and behaviours although it provides a crucial link between these leadership attributes. The importance of key knowledge attributes, including an awareness of the mechanisms to acquire knowledge, enable emerging leaders to be more effective and achieve sustained results. Therefore, the value of knowledge may be seen as the process of acquiring the body of information, concepts and principles required to lead and get things done. Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

This master's thesis focuses on development of mini-applications for portal environments called portlets. Portal is an alternative type of web information systems used to dynamic portlet management, content personalization and aggregation of content from different data sources. The aim of this thesis is to try an alternative combination of technologies of portals, portlets and portlet bridges. This thesis is one of the first demonstrations of the described combination of technologies and will be used as an educational material by Red Hat company for development of portlets on their portal GateIn. The set of portlets manages user calendars, tasks and contacts. The theoretical part of this thesis compares existing tools for time management and mentions standards for data exchange in this domain. Subsequently it describes all important technologies used in this thesis. The practical part describes the design and the implementation of portlets and evaluates results of this work. The development of the described set of portlets proved that combination of technologies of portals, portlets and portlet birdges is fast and appropriate way how to develop information systems.