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.