that is really important. If you do it well, you have got connections all over the place, because people move and are mobile.


So, I focused on staff recruiting staff to increase our portfolio of skills, the subject mix, the demographic mix and the experience mix. Our customers are changing fast, our product is changing fast and we have got to make sure that we are in a position to be delivering quality.


What are London South Bank’s key objectives over the coming five years?


First and foremost I think a clear objective has to be financial resilience. So, a real objective is, in the purest possible sense, delivering a really fantastic value for money experience to our (I hate to use the word) clients. Students aren’t clients or customers, because they are paying. It’s more complicated than that. It’s a very nuanced and complicated relationship. And it is over simplistic to just call them customers, as if they were dropping


in to buy a Mars bar and the leaving again. It’s more complicated than that, mainly because we don’t sell degrees. We sell a journey. And if the outcome of that journey is a degree, then it is a self-achieved thing, and I think that is very, very important to get across.


In a business school environment the issue of relevance is huge. That doesn’t mean knee jerk reactions or anything of that nature. More simply it’s all about asking the right questions, such as, are we actually preparing people for the kind of challenges that institutions/ organisations and the world faces? One of the current issues in business is that the old model of strict divisions between public, private and not for profit is melting very fast. So, we now have the public sector operating in what used to be the private domain, we have not-for-profit operating in what used to be the private sector domain and all intertwining. And that is creating huge needs to work in different ways.


Business is changing. The models we have of working in the workplace are really under a huge amount of consideration, development and experimentation. We’ve had command and control, then we had flat hierarchy, all that is changing again, so I think business is going to be facing the challenge of how to run. How to manage successfully? How do we structure ourselves? How do we interact with diverse groups? How do we communicate with people? What does new communication mechanisms mean for management?


Another area that I’m seeing develop in a meaningful way is Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). As business person you have to begin to understand socio- economic factors a lot more. I think people are not as accepting of maximising shareholder value, as being the premise from which everything springs. I think that that is really under long term debate, which might lead to very different ways of doing business in the future:


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96