Inspiring HR to act with impact P3

Are you suffering from me-me-me syndrome? P8

Changing consumer behaviour – are we becoming more demanding? P4

ISSUE 8. JUNE 2015

FocusBringing you the insights you need to drive your agenda

Who are the world’s most innovative companies? P12

Profile: Professor James Walker P13

Co-creating real commercial value P6

Developing brand partnerships P10

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READ READ READ

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Welcome to another issue of Focus@Henley – the home of essential business insights!

2 www.henley.ac.uk/executiveeducation

Welcome

This issue of Henley Business School’s online magazine is packed with the latest news and insights into management, leadership, strategy, HR, coaching and much more…

Read on to find out about… - Danone’s new vision for HR - Enhancing the customer experience - What to do if you’re suffering from me-me-me syndrome - If music be the food of … brand engagement - The world’s top innovators - The employee culture gap - The inside track on Professor James WalkerAs ever, all feedback is greatly valued, so do get in touch and play your part in continuing to make Focus@Henley essential reading.

Thanks for reading Focus@Henley. We look forward to hearing from you.

Claire Hewitt, Head of Learning Design

+44 (0) 1491 418767 exec@henley.ac.uk

www.henley.ac.uk

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For the full article,

Focus@Henley

Custom solutions

Inspiring HR to act with impact

An impromptu demonstration of Henley’s flexible and responsive style

resulted in the Business School winning a contract to deliver a major Executive Education programme for Danone, the French multinational food manufacturer.

Danone, which has a strong reputation for leadership development, regularly reviews its support functions in order to refocus them in line with its core business. In 2011, it was the turn of the HR function to benefit from this attention and investment.

The company began by defining its vision for HR and then translated this into competencies for its HR leaders. Rather than focusing on operational tasks, such as recruitment and training, the competencies addressed wider business objectives, such as supporting commercial goals, co-creating business strategy and developing high-performing teams.

Danone’s Group Learning and Development Director, Thierry Bonetto, then set out to find a provider to create and deliver a development programme aimed at the company’s corporate and regional HR directors.

Shared values shine throughAs a member of the Henley Partnership (a network of senior managers interested in the latest thinking in corporate best practice), Danone happened to mention its search for a programme provider. With just four days’ notice, Professor

Visiting Professor Nick Holley

Visiting Professor Nick Holley, Co-Director, Henley Centre for HR Excellence | @Nick_Holley

click here

Nick Holley, Co-Director of Henley’s Centre for HR Excellence and his team prepared a proposal and flew to Paris to deliver their pitch. A ‘watershed’ moment highlighted the shared values between the two organisations, when Nick adapted the proposal on the spot to respond to Danone’s specific requirements.

In addition to sensing a good cultural fit with Henley, Danone recognised that the Business School could bring academic expertise, up-to-date research and practical experience to the project. Another major benefit was Henley’s intention to co-create the programme, involving HR leaders from across the business – ensuring that it addressed the company’s requirements and fostered buy-in.

Programme develops hard and soft skillsThe resulting five-day programme, ‘HR Act’, consists of two modules. The ‘Interact’ module focuses on developing the HR leaders’ self-awareness and influencing

skills, to shift from being ‘order-takers’ to commercially aware ‘actors’. The ‘Impact’ module addresses Danone’s strategic and commercial aims, so that participants develop ‘hard’ skills in areas such as risk and return on investment, organisational design and change management.

Before starting the programme, each participant agrees their learning objectives with their manager, completes various self-assessment tools and undertakes pre-course reading. The modules are highly interactive and practical, allowing participants to develop strong bonds with each other. The learning continues back in the business, with participants completing group projects.

The programme has now run ten times at Henley but also in Brussels, Berlin, Jakarta and Mexico City with over 250 senior HR leaders having taken part. The company has evaluated its success and effectiveness ratings have been high across a range of measures. As a result, the programme is being extended to the next tier of HR management and will be delivered worldwide.

Danone’s endorsement of the Henley approach doesn’t stop there. We have delivered ten programmes for other support functions, including research and development, legal and regulatory and corporate affairs.

This is an adapted version of an article by Tom Nash first published in IEDP Developing Leaders magazine, January 2015 on www.iedp.com.

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For a copy of the full report,

Event

Changing consumer behaviour – are we becoming more demanding?

An eager and buzzing crowd turned out to see Professor Moira Clark

present her engaging and insightful view of consumer behaviour at Henley Business School’s ICMA Centre at the University of Reading in February.Professor Moira Clark, Director of the Henley Centre for Customer Management, began by looking at some of the extraordinary changes we have experienced over the past decade or so. Citing the rise of social networking, YouTube and Google Maps, the advent of 3-D printing, and the failure of the banks, Moira challenged the audience: ‘If you had known what life was going to be like now, what would you have done differently?’

The fact is our lives are changing exponentially. Consumers are living longer and ‘we’re getting more confident and grumpier!’ When it comes to poor service, we’re not afraid to complain and

Professor Moira Clark, Head of Marketing and Reputation, Henley Business School

we expect to be in control as consumers. ‘When we are ill we now Google our symptoms and then we go to the doctor! Basically we don’t trust authority in the way we used to.’

Moira highlighted the feminisation of marketing as another significant change. Women have now become an economic power in their own right but they are still not being appropriately catered for by companies. Few firms seem to have recognised this change; one exception is an American electronics brand that has distinctly different store formats aimed at men and women. Moira also emphasised the different consumption behaviours between the sexes: when shopping on the high street, women typically spend more time browsing than men. They enjoy the social occasion of shopping. Men on the other hand tend to shop more quickly and don’t like to hang around. Similarly, each generation has its own distinctive characteristics, and these must be

understood in order to provide the kind of service that will attract and satisfy each individual group.

What is the perfect customer experience?From research conducted at the Henley Centre for Customer Management by Moira and her colleagues, it seems that the perfect customer experience is context specific, and organisations need to engage directly with their customers to evaluate the factors that are most important in their relationship.

The research identified 119 factors that impact on the perceived quality of customer experience and it appears that there are some distinct differences between the most important factors in business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) relationships. For B2B organisations, the extent of personal contact is the number one factor, followed by flexibility of doing business

www.henley.ac.uk/executiveeducation

Professor Moira Clark

click here

5Focus@Henley

and an understanding of customer needs. The B2C audience, however, values helpfulness, timeliness and customer recognition above all else.

What can we do to enhance the customer experience?Developing a real in-depth understanding of the customer is a good starting point. Following on from this, it is vital to make it easy for customers to do business with you.

The concept of measuring customer effort (CE) as a means of evaluating the quality of a buying experience has been around since the 1940s, and is based on the notion that the easier you make it for customers to buy, the more loyal they will be and the more likely it is that they will repurchase and spend more money. The Henley Centre for Customer Management has been working with BT on researching the area of CE and its ability to accurately predict consumer behaviour.

A copy of the full report can be found here.

‘So ask your customers,’ Moira pleaded the audience, ‘Are we easy to do business with?’

Simple analytics now allow companies to identify the real issues much more quickly and accurately, and social media has

provided the means for them to respond instantly and achieve satisfactory closure before lasting damage is done.

‘Customers lead busy lives,’ concluded Moira. ‘By gaining better customer insight and by understanding what makes for a great customer experience, we can make it easy for our customers and regain their trust and loyalty.’

A selection of post-event feedback:‘It’s the first time I’ve been to a Henley event and, I must say, it was excellent.’

‘What a marvellous talk – I was completely fascinated from start to finish!’

Moira is superb, isn’t she? She has such a depth of knowledge and puts it over in such an engaging way.’

‘We’ve really enjoyed the talk tonight. When’s the next one?!’

Henley is now one of Europe’s largest business schools, with over

5,000participants

We have more

DBA students than any

other school in Europe

Professor Moira Clark and Andrew BryanThe Henley Centre for Customer ManagementApril 2013

Customer Effort: Help or hype?

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MSc SML Programme Structure

Module 6

Module 1

1a: Preparing for Success 1b: Fundamentals of banking business model

Module 2

Setting Programme within Strategic Business Context

Starter Workshop

Module 3

Strategy and Marketing Planning

Module 4

Services Marketing

Module 5

Business to Business Marketing

Contemporary Consumer Behaviour

Stage One

Module 7

Managing the Brand

Module 8

Managing Relationship Networks

Module 9

Strategic Innovation and New Product Development

Module 10

Customer Centric Marketing

Stage Two

Module 11

Manager as Investigator; Research in Marketing

Module 12

Management Challenge

Stage Three

For the full case study,

Dr Anne Dibley

www.henley.ac.uk/executiveeducation

Co-creating real commercial value: the ING Henley MSc Strategic Marketing Leadership programme

Case Study

In January 2012, 24 ‘top talent’ from leading global financial

institution ING embarked on the Henley MSc in Strategic Marketing Leadership Programme, followed by a further 27 a year later and another 20 at the beginning of 2014, drawn from the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Romania and India.

From a variety of marketing-related roles – including product management and social media, business development, regional management, sales, business

support, brand and communication management – it is expected that 70 participants will have graduated by next year.

And after more than eight successful years of running the programme with clients such as Microsoft, 3M and Deutsche Telekom, it is fast becoming Henley Business School’s flagship corporate Masters offering.

Each participant completes the programme in just over two years, following six highly interactive four-day

Dr Anne Dibley, Associate Professor in Marketing, Henley Business School

workshops, three stages, 12 modules, seven written assignments, and an exam, all specially contextualised to meet the needs of ING.

The programme focuses on marketing in the broadest sense, understanding and implementing a customer-centric approach that fits perfectly with ING’s challenges and strategy.

We share relevant theory, models and frameworks with the participants, such as the latest research into customer effort and customer experience. Workshops

click here

7Focus@Henley

include a blend of Henley tutor input, alongside ING and external practitioner guest speaker presentations, discussion, case studies, syndicate work and presentations in teams. Simulations, games and role-plays are also used to enhance the impact of the learning experience, but are always applicable to the real-world environment of ING, in order to continue to improve marketing practice within the organisation.

Learning is supported by the Henley/ING virtual learning environment where bulletins, readings and presentations are posted, and which can be used as a communication platform by participants.

The final programme assignment is the Management Challenge project – a major, individual, research-based assignment that results in actionable recommendations for ING.

Each programme member has the support not only of a Henley supervisor, but also of a senior-level sponsor within ING, thus ensuring that only the most important, relevant topics are selected.

By the end of the programme, participants will have developed a clearer strategic vision and be able to develop and implement successful marketing strategies.

The following quotes from ING programme members illustrate the high value they have gained from following this programme:

‘…an enlightening experience… the programme encourages strategic thinking…’

‘This programme… gives you the opportunity to learn from each other and create a valuable network. The second major strength lies in combining academic views and business content. Combining theory and real cases provides you with a very useful set of tools and frameworks that are applicable in a real business environment.’

‘I am sure that the Henley influence definitely played a part in the adoption of the customer effort score.’

‘I notice that the Henley way of thinking now impacts a lot of discussions in the organisation.’

Ranked in the FT top

35 business schools globally

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Are you suffering from me-me-me syndrome?If so, the good news is that it’s very common, and there is a cure…

In the latest instalment of Nick Holley’s tongue-in-cheek series exploring

common HR problems, the HR Doctor looks at one of the most prevalent afflictions: me-me-me syndrome. The good news is that there is a cure…

What are the symptoms?• Me-me-me syndrome is closely related

to narcissism. Sufferers think it’s all about them, and they are often driven by a lack confidence. They spend huge amounts of time measuring HR activity to prove how good it is, when the business only cares about what difference it makes.

• As a result, HR never looks at things from someone else’s perspective and never seeks or acts on feedback, as it sees it as criticism rather than a way to improve.

• Sufferers make poor coaches, as their inner voice is focused on being a good coach rather than on the person they are coaching.

• Finally it can manifest as impatience, which can prove fatal: ‘Why do I have to waste my time on them and their needs, when it just gets in the way of what I need to do?’

The HR Doctor

Visiting Professor Nick Holley, Co-Director, Henley Centre for HR Excellence | @Nick_Holley

www.henley.ac.uk/executiveeducation

What is the impact?• Me-me-me syndrome results in lower

trust; after all, if you are only interested in yourself, why would you trust anyone else to work in your best interests?

• Henley’s research shows that a critical role for many HR people is to be the confidante to the managers they support. These managers expect that they will get a sympathetic

To read the full article, click here

but professional response to their concerns, but me-me-me syndrome often destroys the trust on which the relationship is built, so the manager has no one to turn to in the business. While this is great for the executive coaching industry, it isn’t so good for the bottom line.

I myself suffered from me-me-me syndrome when I was younger. I spent too much time trying to be liked rather than

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Edited from a paper by Nick Holley.

Author Nick Holley is joint programme director for The Advanced HR Business Partner Programme. Nick regularly contributes to articles in the HR press.

While at Henley, Nick has worked with: Agusta Westland, Amey, the Army, BAT, B&Q, Bestseller, BT, Cadbury Schweppes, Canon, Cisco, Danone, Government of Abu Dhabi, GSK, Imperial, Inchcape, Kelly, Kone, KPMG, Mercedes Benz, Microsoft, Ministry of Justice, Nestle, NHS, Oracle, Oxfam, Oxford Instruments, Panasonic, RBS, S3, Sainsbury’s, Shell, Siemens, Smiths, Travelport, TSystems, Unilever, Vodafone, and Willmott Dixon

Business Snippets

Your employees don’t all want the same company culture… now what?No two people are exactly the same.

And like consumers with the brands they choose, employees don’t all want the same things from an employer, and yet some companies continue to take a ‘one size fits all’ approach to workplace satisfaction.

‘Each employee has different needs,’ says Andrew Johnson, Resource Manager at staffing firm Kavaliro, ‘with different goals and perceptions of corporate culture. Corporations must adapt to formulate different approaches to seal the generational gaps and diverse personality traits, for all employees to thrive and be happy.’

Employee engagement is and should be important to any employer, and most companies now have some sort of employee recognition programme in place. But psychologist Paul White says these programmes are generally ineffective.

‘Traditional programmes aren’t helping people feel satisfied or valued, and simply focus on words – emails, achievement awards, etc. Not everyone feels appreciated like this, so if you do the same actions for most people, you’re going to miss a lot of them.’

Some individuals view words of affirmation as superficial and inauthentic, and may respond with scepticism. They want to see something more substantive, such as individual attention or quality time with their boss and/or colleagues, acts of service that make their jobs easier (offering to pitch in on a project or do a favour), tangible gifts or bonuses.

Employers need to be aware of which ‘language’ speaks best to each employee, and remember that it may not necessarily align with their own personal ideas of appreciation.

‘If the recipients think the affirmation is not authentic, it can make them think you’re trying to manipulate them.’

Corporations must embrace a broad, efficient culture that allows every employee, regardless of personality or generational difference, the opportunity to be heard and achieve their particular individual goals.

Adapted from an article by Nicole Fallon, Business News Daily.

Read the full article at www.businessnewsdaily.com/7253-employee-satisfaction-differences.htmlw

Follow on Twitter @HenleyBSchool@

Focus@Henley

respected, with the result being that I found it difficult to make tough calls, but eventually I learned to take myself out of the equation and be more objective.

So what’s the to cure?The cure is simple, you need to:

• ask yourself constantly whether what you are doing is driven by the needs of the business or by your own needs

• remember that there’s no limit to what you can achieve if you don’t have to take the credit

• take a moment, every once in a while, to stop and shout in the mirror: ‘IT’S NOT ABOUT ME!’

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Developing brand partnerships Programme Director - MBA for Music & Creative Industries | @Helen_Gammons

Brand partnerships

www.henley.ac.uk/executiveeducation

For the full article,

S taying on top – building brand/fan loyalty and increasing

monetisation – requires a fresh perspective on sustainable music and brand relationships.

As Programme Director, I lead the MBA for the Music & Creative Industries, which is now alive and well in both the UK and South African markets. The MBA’s purpose and vision are quite clear – it is a strategic undertaking to support the myriad of creative propagators bring their endeavours to market, by increasing the pool of management and leadership executives able to work in the middle of significant market turbulence and business model disruption.

Alongside the MBA for the Music & Creative Industries, we have developed a series of one-day programmes, known as the Creative Dynamics series, through which we engage with the creative sector to envision and de-tangle current and future challenges. To date, we have had over 450 executives from the creative sector attending these events at Henley. Topics have varied from ‘Managing for Disruptive Innovation’ (a white paper published in April 2015) to ‘Marketing with Bytes – Analytics with Attitude’ (a paper co-authored with IBM in 2013). The level of participation has been high, with executive speakers from companies as diverse as Spotify, IBM, KAE, 7digital, Streamhub, Google and Musicmetric.

click here

Helen Gammons

While these discussions predominantly focus on the creative sector, the outcomes of the discussions, however, resonate far beyond. In fact, Henley’s alumni and other corporate clients are seeing value in engaging with this work to draw fresh insights. This is of course as it should be, as we are attracting some of the biggest entertainment and media organisations in the world, such as Universal Music, Disney, IBM and Sony, to these events.

Fresh insights recently came to the fore when we examined how Spotify and BBC Radio 1 came to work together, which you can read about in the Managing for Disruptive Innovation white paper. The two organisations are competitors and unlikely collaborators, being a business disruptor and a business incumbent respectively, but the success of their work demonstrated an enlightened and innovative strategic capability that solved a problem for both parties.

A key discussion at our Music & Brand Partnership event explored and unpicked business attitudes to brand engagement. Using fresh primary research conducted on the day, we were able to expose some attitudes that the sector had been blind to and thus provide insights on better partnership alignments for improved business. This is, of course, valuable to all business sectors travelling the brand partnership road.

One of our key speakers at this event, Richard Moore CEO of Capitalize (the ‘BrandFan’ agency, whose clients include: Puma, Bacardi and Ray-Ban), presented a market comparison between sport and music and stated:

The glue between the industries is very real. Both industries, at their core, want and need customer loyalty and long-lasting relationships. Music and brand work is not new for the industry, but what is changing is the attitude of both sectors.

Richard cited PwC’s outlook report on sport and entertainment for 2013–15, which showed total sponsorship revenues of $43 billion , with sport commanding $31 billion of that sum and music accounting for less than 10% of the total revenue (approximately $4 billion ). The point being that the sector assumed it was doing well, but in fact there was significant opportunity for growth. What we uncovered was a misalignment of attitudes and expectations of the partnership. After discussing this in detail, programme members developed a charter that both the sector and brands could use, which could lead to increased return on investment (ROI) for both.

They highlighted the importance of:

• clear contractual negotiations

• ease of business

• labels and artists valuing the relationship and moving away from prioritising the capital injection

11Focus@Henley

• collaboration

• new business models and revenue streams – the potential for shared risk

• delivering on creative ideas

• establishing benchmarks and ROI for both brands and label/artist – all rights holders

• fresh perspectives – identifying market opportunities

It was agreed that ‘value benchmarks’ needed to be developed within the area of music and brand partnerships, and this flagged up a clear opportunity for further research.

Interestingly one of the points brands wanted to make was that they felt the music industry should stop giving away music for free. They conveyed quite strongly that it diminished the perceived value of the music and that free music should only occur as part of a strategic market campaign, its use as a primary business model being totally flawed. With the recently stated market position of Lucian Grainge, CEO of Universal Music

Group, who argues for a move from an ad-supported to a paid subscription model, this will be an interesting time for key industry players, specifically Apple and Spotify, as they both position for growth.

Our most recent work in the brand arena saw Henley sponsor the Music & Brand Partnership category of the Music Week Awards 2015 – and we’d like to congratulate Sam Smith and Google Play Live for their winning campaign.

And finally, our next Creative Dynamics event will be SuperBrands to SuperFans on 7 July 2015 at Greenlands. This is a topic with wide appeal, but of course we will focus on the creative sector. We are pleased to confirm that Kimberly Wyatt from the Pussycat Dolls, Raf McDonnell, Brand Director from CAA; and Olivier Robert-Murphy, Global Head of New Business from Universal Music Group, will be participating, among others. You can book your place online here.

www.henley.ac.uk/mbamusic

Music and Brand PartnershipsStaying on top – building brand / fan loyalty and increased monetisation requires a fresh perspective on sustainable music and brand relationships.

Join me on LinkedIn or email me to discuss any of the topics raised here, helen.gammons@henley.ac.uk.

And if you’d like to sponsor our next event, please do get in touch!

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5. Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc,Operates as a biopharmaceutical company that discovers, invents, develops, manufactures and commercialises medicines for the treatment of serious medical conditions. It has active R&D programmes covering ophthalmology, inflammation, cancer and hypercholesterolemia, and has operated since 1988.

6. Amazon.comprovides online retail services to four primary customer sets: consumers, sellers, enterprises, and content creators, plus online advertising and co-branded credit card agreements. Founded by Jeffrey Bezos in 1994, Amazon.com is based in Seattle.

7. BioMarin Pharmaceutical, Inc.develops and commercialises innovative pharmaceuticals for serious diseases and medical conditions, and is conducting preclinical development of several other enzyme product candidates for genetic and other metabolic diseases. The company was founded in 1997 in California

Listmania

Who are the world’s most innovative companies?

According to a list compiled by Forbes.com, 2014’s top

innovators are a mix of technology and pharmaceutical companies, with one or two very familiar names…

1. salesforce.com Top of the list for 2014 is salesforce.com, Inc., which provides enterprise cloud computing applications including platforms for developers to build and run applications. Founded in 1999, its salesforce is based in San Francisco.

2. Alexion PharmaceuticalsThis is a biopharmaceutical company that engages in the innovation, development, and commercialisation of life-transforming therapeutic products for treating patients with severe and ultra-rare disorders.

3. ARM Holdings, plcThe only UK-based organisation in the top 10 is ARM Holdings, plc, which operates as a semiconductor intellectual property (IP) supplier. The company designs microprocessors, physical IP and related technology and software, and sells development tools.

4. Unilever NVis engaged in the production and marketing of fast-moving consumer goods in the nutrition, hygiene and personal care categories. Unilever was founded in 1927 and is headquartered in Rotterdam.

8. CP ALL Plc. Thailand’s largest convenience store chain, with more than 7,000 7-Elevens, makes the list for the fourth year running. Sales jumped 46% last year and it has plans to enter the Chinese and Indonesian markets.

9. VMwareprovides virtualisation infrastructure solutions to help transform the way organisations build, deliver and consume IT resources by reducing complexity and enabling more flexible, agile service delivery. Operating since 1998, the company is based in Palo Alto, California.

10. Aspen PharmacareAspen Pharmacare manufactures and supplies branded and generic pharmaceutical, healthcare and nutritional products, covering a number of therapeutic categories. Michael Guy Attridge founded the company in 1997, and it is based in Durban, South Africa.

(This has been adapted from an article at: www.forbes.com/innovative-companies/list.

All figures are in U.S. dollars.Total returns as of August 2013.

The Innovation Premium is a measure of how much investors have bid up the stock price of a company above the value of its existing business based on expectations of future innovative results (new products, services and markets). Members of the list must have $10 billion in market capitalisation, spend at least 2.5% of revenue on R&D and have seven years of public data.

Sources: HOLT, a division of Credit Suisse, in collaboration with Innovator’s DNA LLC; FactSet; Bloomberg.)

13Focus@Henley

Profile

Professor James Walker Head of International Business and Strategy

I t’s fair to say that James has been around a bit.

Originally from New Zealand, his travels have taken him all over the world, and he has lived in Fiji, Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, China and the UK, but his feet remain firmly on the ground:

‘I was the only white boy in my school in Fiji, and in each new country, I learned to pick a fight with the biggest kid in the school, become his friend and assimilate!’

Back in New Zealand towards the end of his teens, James later graduated in economics, and then went on to work as a writer in the fund allocation department of the Ministry of Health, ‘responding to the hate mail!’

From there, his career took him to Beijing where he was involved in a small aid programme for the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, where he proved to be rather more popular, and therefore found the role rather more fulfilling.

Once back in New Zealand, James took a job as an economist for a consultancy group, which involved touring the country

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For more about James’ academic career click here

Focus@Henley

and speaking to members of the Treasury and executives from major companies. This experience taught him that audiences listening to relatively dry subject matters needed to be entertained.

The odyssey continued, taking in a spell of consultancy work in Hong Kong, before James eventually arrived in the UK. Heading straight to the LSE, where he notched up a Masters degree in international development and, subsequently, a PhD in economics and economic history.

Ultimately, though, he found himself drawn to a career in education. Attracted by the world-renowned scholarship in international business and business history at the University of Reading, he took on a role running the Management Department at Reading.

It was at Reading that James met Professor Alan Rugman, who was to have a profound impact on his life. Together, supported by a small staff, they set up the School of International Business in 2008, following the merger of the Henley Management College and the University of Reading.

As Head of International Business and Strategy – among many of his other accolades and roles – Alan never ceased to be an extraordinary scholar, and pressed for business-relevant research of the highest quality. After his untimely death in 2014, continuing ‘Alan’s legacy’ remains a strong focus for James’ work. ‘The Business School is doing very well across the board,’ says James, ‘but we have to maintain the momentum. We need to continue to grow steadily and reach a stage where we are comfortably able to replicate ourselves and be truly established and recognised as world class.’

And what of life for James outside work? ‘I now go to more parties than I did in my twenties!’ he jokes, adding that these are mainly for his six-year-old daughter, Olivia – the new focal point in his life! And along with his interests in cycling, his allotment, and a passion for films, his burning ambition is to learn to speak Italian – possibly to find out what his Italian wife’s family are saying about him!

But while there’s no denying that James has seen more of it than most, his enduring ambition is fuelled by his feeling that he still has much more of the world to see.

James Walker