What a two and a half year old can teach us about Strategy

Those of us who have children well remember the thrill of hearing them utter their first word. It is something that we had anticipated for a long time and signals yet another astonishing phase in their development.  You will probably also be familiar with the next phase a parent goes through which is "why can't they shut up!" as the child reveals its mastery of language by constantly asking 'why?' and 'how?'. Unless your child is Einstein whose first words (at the age of four) were allegedly "this soup is too hot", then you will recognise this all too clearly.

Visit to KAOSPILOT Business School Denmark

What would you do if your town had a persistent problem with people dumping cars? Write to your MP? Complain to the council to encourage them to increase spending to sort the problem out? Write to the paper? Moan to your friends? Get an agreement with the council to allow an arrangement for you and some friends to take the cars to a space in town where they could be used as seats for a drive-in cinema before they are then taken to the breaking yard? The latter is the unlikely solution created by students at KAOSPILOT Business School in Denmark. Other projects involved exporting scrapped bicycles to African villages and monitoring the resultant development of mini industries based on bicycle repair or making tow trolleys from scrap. One Translation service company is doing well in Sweden and Norway but poorly in Denmark and so they asked some KAOSPILOT students to design an awareness programme for the area.

Technology, does one size fit all?

Technological advancements have enabled a wealth of opportunities for learning opportunities to be delivered in an online context without the need to be physically in the classroom.

A recent BBC article, How do you stop online students cheating?, suggested that in the near future students may be able to take exams at home without the need to be a formal exam setting. In addition to issues such as how to effectively invigilate exams of this nature, it also raises the consideration of how the environment of a formal exam room has an influence on performance.  For some who respond well to pressure, the heightened pressure of an examination room can only increase performance.  For others, the anxiety created within an exam room can inhibit performance and an exam set within the comforts of their own home may help to increase performance.

This brings into consideration the wider discussion of the role of face to face interaction within learning and how this might affect the learning experience for participants with different learning preferences.

Chinese Change

A Chinese proverb for you this morning:

It is dangerous to try to leap a chasm in two bounds.

Management by Talking About

Another process innovation this week as people were off on vision visits, teaching and doing marking at times when I had suggested we have UG Review Group meetings. At least I hope that's what they were doing, otherwise I would have to take it personally.

Anyway, we still needed to get the second year outline done by the end of this week with or without meetings. And we've done it. The process was a series of one to one conversations, usually with coffee, often by chance, once with someone I didn't even know but turned out to be one of our VL's. A few ideas to start with, some changes here, accretions there and off we go.

We knew we couldn't design a structure for the second year in the way we have outlined for the third year as it will be more focused on the requirements of the distinct degree programmes. So what we have is some principles which we will be proposing for what needs to be in each second year to express the vision and values we want for the Faculty. We are also seeing the patterns emerging which can characterise the programmes - in how we manage transition for example, not just into university but also from one level to the next and from university into work.

Next step is to pull together the scrappy pieces of paper into some notes to discuss with the group and with Mark Atlay next week and then more drop-in sessions.

About the Author: Elizabeth Parkin
Elizabeth had a 25 year career in management before joining the University seven years ago as Manager for “Pod” Programmes. She also held the post of MBA Academic Director before moving on to becoming Head of Department for Management and Business Systems.

Bedford Drop-In Session

Excellent drop-in session at Polhill on Wednesday. I particularly liked suggestions for the incorporation of entrepreneurial projects in the final year. And of potentially doing projects with other students from other disciplines at Bedford such as sport or dance eg how to market some dance classes.

Some valuable practicalities about the increased impact of missing a week through illness or any other reason when there is a practice week or other intensive week.

Very aware from this session that we must always be clear that practice-based education is not practice instead of academic rigour. We are a university and academic rigour is the point – or a large part of the point anyway.  Employers want academic rigour and practice. Practitioners don’t leave their intellects and rigour behind when they graduate. They use them to help address problems just as much as PhD students are employing rigour. It's just that the context is messier.

About the Author: Elizabeth Parkin
Elizabeth had a 25 year career in management before joining the University seven years ago as Manager for “Pod” Programmes. She also held the post of MBA Academic Director before moving on to becoming Head of Department for Management and Business Systems.

The Right Price for Learning

Right at the moment, if there is one thing I would like our students to learn in the first year of our new courses, it’s that dropping the price is not the automatic route to higher sales, let alone to higher profit. They just automatically think that lower prices are better prices.

I more or less cracked teaching pricing to Exec MBA’s but I haven’t cracked it for first year undergraduates. Theory certainly isn’t the best route in. I have a marketing lecture for first years coming up next month and have to think more imaginatively about it but this reflection is prompted by having shared some marking of first year assignments this morning with colleagues at Preston University in Ajman, Dubai. Good quantities of reasonable quality theory but low prices ruled here too.

I know it’s rather dull to come home from visiting a country for the first time and be struck more by the similarities than the differences but there we are.

About the Author: Elizabeth Parkin
Elizabeth had a 25 year career in management before joining the University seven years ago as Manager for “Pod” Programmes. She also held the post of MBA Academic Director before moving on to becoming Head of Department for Management and Business Systems.

Leaping on the Neck of Ideas

I stole the idea of a blog about the process from a presentation a colleague was doing.  Ever the magpie, I’m completely unashamed of the fact but will credit fellow magpie Eliot Lloyd here to avoid plagiarism.

On the same day we had to come up with a solution to the fact that it was impossible to share our ideas with colleagues and gain feedback in the way we planned:  A large open meeting simply wasn’t possible: no rooms available at times when a reasonable number of people could come.  So, as my office seemed the only available option at Luton, what could we do?  Small was the logical conclusion and drop-in sessions were born.  Different members of the core group have met with groups of two, four, five colleagues.  And it was quickly clear that this was in fact a better approach, more personal, more likely to generate a thoughtful response and application to specific courses.  Feedback on the process as well as content has been good so far.

The Undergraduate Portfolio Review

The University of Bedfordshire Business School is taking its entire undergraduate portfolio of courses to periodic review. We are looking back at how well our current courses are meeting student needs and designing courses which will put us at the forefront of practice-based business education. This blog is intended to record the reflections of those involved in the process and invites comments on our posts.

This is a major exercise for the Faculty and a major initiative in combining management practice, business academic theory and sound, innovative pedagogy. We want to blog about this for two reasons. Firstly it helps us reach and gain responses from a wide range of people. Secondly it is part of the record of what we are doing which we will be able to use later when we write up our method more formally for publication.

We have already worked on the review process for some weeks. Two parts are running in parallel. The review of the current provision has started now that the Annual Monitoring Reports for the undergraduate courses are coming in and the Student Voice focus groups have been held by the Students Union. At the same time, a core group of course leaders and a few others have been working on the future course design. We have thought about what we want to focus on in the short term and the kind of graduates we want to develop. We have also designed the broad structure of the third year. Now we are trying out these ideas in a series of drop-in sessions at Luton and Bedford as we also embark on designing the second year.

So, that is the catch-up on what we have been doing before we started to blog. Now there are some posts of notes made before we set up the blog then can continue in something approaching real time.

About the Author: Elizabeth Parkin
Elizabeth had a 25 year career in management before joining the University seven years ago as Manager for “Pod” Programmes. She also held the post of MBA Academic Director before moving on to becoming Head of Department for Management and Business Systems.

Eating Soup with a Fork: Teaching Entrepreneurship to Business Students

More and more people are getting aware of the benefits of “inventing a job rather than finding a job”. Across the world, universities and colleges are rushing to introduce entrepreneurship classes. This phenomenon has rekindled the age-old debate, whether entrepreneurship can be taught in business schools or one is better off learning it ‘by doing’?

The MBA Legacy

As if a day at the Olympics wasn’t exciting enough, I happened across a couple of MBA classmates there. It was as uplifting as being in the stadium.

There is a special quality to meeting up with people who went through an MBA experience together. It hardly takes any time at all to reclaim the mutual support and respect which ran through the year I spent studying. I did my MBA course because I needed to learn more about strategy and finance. Like most people, I came away with that and so much more including the self-understanding which underpins leadership.

Have you fostered someone’s aspirations today?

At the University of Bedfordshire we understand very well that some of our students come to our classrooms with narrow, constrained aspirations and one of our roles is to show what is possible for them. We all relish the moments when students realise what they can achieve. It’s a hard but crucial part of our role as higher education tutors to create those glimpses of possible futures but maybe it’s even harder for any of us to see the constraints to our own aspirations, both our individual and our collective aspirations.

Can we recognise when we have faded? When we have allowed ourselves to be beaten back? When we have consented to be constrained because it is too hard to fight the world all the time? I suggest we can’t usually do that until something happens to re-invigorate us and to realise how we had reduced ourselves. We too need the equivalent of a tutor to release us sometimes.

A Deliberately Opaque Piece

I was thinking about the value of opacity last week, something I haven’t done since I worked in the paint industry. Opacity is crucial in paint but elsewhere transparency is the order of the day. Whether it’s open government, shining a light on corruption or businesses demonstrating attention to stakeholder interests transparency’s credentials as a liberal value and part of a healthy civil society rule supreme.

As part of a package of proposals on directors’ pay last week Vince Cable, Business Secretary, said that companies would be required to disclose the total value of a director’s pay, a further transparent step in this troubled area. Transparent so of course a good thing? Perhaps not unequivocally, I suggest.

The business case for fiction

In a recent blog I passed on Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s praise of philosophy and other serious reading. I want to make the case for reading fiction.

There are good reasons for reading including novels of all kinds – basically it’s enjoyable.  More than that though, I suggest there is a business case for fiction. So much of business is about people – your colleagues, your customers, your business partners – and a good novel provides insight into their hearts.

So, when friend asked me recently what to read before she went to China, I lent her three novels. I could have recommended a textbook which explains what it means to live in a communist country with a rampant capitalist economy but stories make it much more real.

Do you aspire to have a strategy?

I listened to a piece on the radio earlier today about the UK’s electricity generation strategy, or lack of it. One expert’s view was that we had a strategy in the sense of an aspiration but we had no plan. Although I understand what she meant in relation to energy policy, we need to be much clearer in relation to strategy itself because we mustn’t think of it as “aspiration” at all if we want to come up something useful.

It’s hard teaching strategy, particularly to anyone without much work experience, because they generally have no conception of what it is and nothing much we can relate it to. One route is to consider what strategy is not and “aspiration” is one of the things on the “not” list.

Why are you reading this?

I’m gradually working my way through a reading list from Ha-Joon Chang, reader in Economics at Cambridge, which was promoted by Heffers bookshop last summer. It’s an odd time to take up reading about economics as it is a discipline under some pressure at the moment. Behavioural economics has for a while been eating away at the rationalist principles underlying much of micro-economics. More recently the financial crash and subsequent recession continue to challenge macro-economics. I decided it was time to explore how thinkers in this field are responding to the challenges and remedy my own ignorance at the same time.

Dressing for success

Never mind "The Artist" what about the BAFTA frocks? Vivienne Westwood, Sybil Connolly, Armani and a Valentino “Eco-gown”. Much as I’d like to have the figure to wear one, I’m really glad I don’t have to bother quite that much about what I wear to work.

I did have a little flurry of bothering about it just before Christmas. I smartened up. I was meeting a potential external partner in some new MBA developments and decided that I needed a “customer facing” outfit. I dug around in the back of the cupboard and found things that I haven’t worn for ages. Straight black skirt, white top and short grey jacket. Cool new shoes. It felt good to be sharp. I felt I was standing up straighter and was more alert, potentially more impactful.

Is there any strategy?

It was amazing, when I read the news in November last year that Emirates have placed an order for an additional 50 Boeing 777-300 ER" planes, in addition to 20 Boeing 777-300ER as an option. This order was the single largest dollar-value order in Boeing's history.

According to emirates Group chairman ‘Emirates is financially strong enough to fund the purchase of new aircraft as part of ongoing expansion plans by one of the world’s fastest growing airlines. Emirates made net profits of Dh827 million in the first half of 2011, confirming its status as ‘one of the fastest growing carriers’.

In the current recession scenario when many airline companies are in either loss or debt what’s made Emirates so different from other airlines?

People in Beijing - richer or poorer?

I chose to fly back home during the Christmas period mainly because of my mother's severe back pain. It is an old problem that has bothered her for a few years, yet it gets worsen recently. My mother is a tenacious woman. She does not believe in surgery. A friend of our family recommended traditional Chinese massage as an alternative and thus we found her a reputable hospital in Beijing, well-known for its massage techniques and recovery treatments.

For this reason, I need to go to the hospital every Monday and Friday to make an appointment for her. Guess when I woke up? 4.30 am! The hospital sells "numbers" to patients on a first come first serve basis. Its official opening time is 8am. Since there are so many patients and limited medical resources, most "ordinary people" - if you are not as ‘important’ as those government officials or as rich as those celebrities - would have to join a long queue, about 200 people, in the cold winter mornings enduring the temperature hitting below -10 degree Celsius. Believe or not, online booking and telephone booking are totally out of question.