Monthly Archives: April 2013

The best of both worlds

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One of the first lessons I learnt when I qualified as an accountant was how different studying the theory of auditing was, to walking into a client’s office and trying to work the auditing software.
It is such moments in your early career that you realise the shift between ‘learning’ and ‘doing’.

Tomorrow, the Business School, PwC (PwC) and awarding body ICAEW, will celebrate its ten year anniversary of the ‘Flying Start programme’, a business, accounting and finance degree: a course that has had a decade of experience in merging ‘the learning’ with ‘the doing’.

The course is a long-standing example of how fusing theory and practice benefit the student proficiency of a subject. There is no denying that good work experience only benefits future career prospects.

The importance of this to the Business School is paramount, but it also raises interesting questions about what employers expect of graduates in today’s competitive job market, and what we can do to meet these needs.

Delivered by a team of academics and PwC, the Flying Start programme is a four year degree that enables students to put classroom theory into commercial practice on placement, and relates practical experience back to studies.

The degree affords students with an insight to the world of work, providing them with a great opportunity to harness the practical skills needed, with their own knowledge-base gained from within a lecture theatre.

In my position as a degree programme director, I have spoken to many employers about what they want to see in a graduate: one who can ‘hit the ground running’, a good level of industry, with team work and communication skills.

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are charged with the brief to create students who are prepared for the demands of the workplace – something that the Business School has been dedicated to achieving, and meeting such needs through programmes like Flying Start.

HEIs are moving away from the ‘chalk and talk’ educational experience to far more innovative and practical ways to impart knowledge: it’s an exciting time for the Business School and we are looking forward to the next 10 years.

Dr Simon Parry, Degree Programme Director BA (Hons) Business, Accounting and Finance

Dr Fiona Whitehurst reflects on the importance of being ‘civic’

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Newcastle University aspires to be a world-class civic university delivering benefits to individuals, organisations and to society as a whole, so it was a delight for the Business School to host Professor John Goddard OBE, Emeritus Professor of Regional Development Studies and former Deputy Vice Chancellor of Newcastle University to speak about his recently published book The University and the City  co-authored with Paul Vallance.

John is a leading proponent of the civic university concept, arguing in a 2009 NESTA Provocation that all publicly funded universities in the UK have a civic duty to engage with wider society on the local, national and global scales, and to do so in a manner which links the social to the economic spheres.

John revealed three tensioned themes emerging from his research – passive local physical, social and economic impacts of universities (campus footprint, student purchasing power, employment generation) vis a vis their active engagement in the development of the city; economic vis a vis more holistic views of engagement with civil society and the ‘external’ civic role of the university vis a vis ‘internal’ processes within the university and state higher education policies that shape these external relations.

John’s distinguishing attributes of a ‘civic university’ are:

  1. It is actively engaged with the wider world as well as the local community of the place in which it is located.  This engagement is achieved through dialogue and collaborations with individuals, institutions and groups locally, nationally and globally.
  2. It takes a holistic approach to engagement, seeing it as institution wide activity and not confined to specific individuals or teams.
  3. It has a strong sense of place.  While it may operate on a national and international scale, it recognises the extent to which is location helps to form its unique identity as an institution.
  4. It has a sense of purpose – an understanding of not just what it is good at, but what it is good for.
  5. It is willing to invest in order to have impact beyond the academy.  This includes releasing financial resources to support certain projects or activities, or to ‘unlock’ external sources of funding.
  6. It is transparent and accountable to its stakeholders and the wider public.
  7. It uses innovative methodologies such as social media and team building in its engagement activities with the world at large.

Plenty of food for thought, especially for a Business School. What does a ‘civic’ business school look like and how well does Newcastle University Business School fit that description?

Those are questions for a later post, but as I was pondering them I came across an article in the Financial Times (15 April 2013) by Della Bradshaw on German Business Schools. She notes that while Germany is the fourth-largest economy in the world, the country has no world-renowned business schools or top-ranked MBA programmes. In the article Robert Wardrop, research fellow in sociology and finance at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, ascribes this to the stakeholder value model of German business, which is incompatible with the methodologies that drive most Business School rankings. The MBA rankings tend to have an emphasis on salary maximisation, the traditional US individualist justification for undertaking an MBA. So, another question, does the third of John Goddard’s tensioned themes – the external role of a civic institution vis a vis internal processes and state policies have an added dimension for Business Schools?

Do Business School rankings take sufficient regard of an institution’s ‘civic’ role? In a time of unprecedented societal challenges globally I would like to suggest they should.

Dr Fiona Whitehurst, Director of Accreditation

 

Failure of strategy

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The failure of strategy has led to an era of fiscal, institutional, and legitimacy crisis with major moral tensions.

Five years after the financial crisis hit, almost destroying the UK banking system, we continue to try to understand the factors that contributed to the disaster. This was a disaster that, as the world knows, overwhelmed the Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS to the extent that UK taxpayers are still majority owners of these banks (HBOS having been taken over by Lloyds).

The UK public may well be puzzled as to how the disaster happened and who, apart from the publically scapegoated and dishonoured ‘Sir’ Fred Goodwin, is responsible for its occurrence. 

This month (April 2013) has seen the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards produce a report in a bid to continue to try and unravel what happened when private loss was made a public debt, and we slipped into a recession. 

The Commission has been set up to consider and report on:
• professional standards and culture of the UK banking sector, taking account of regulatory and competition investigations into the LIBOR rate-setting process
• lessons to be learned about corporate governance, transparency and conflicts of interest, and their implications for regulation and Government policy
The report on HBOS is refreshingly willing to name names, and allocate blame to the leaders of HBOS at the time of the crash, naming in particular Sir James Crosby, Andy Hornby, and Lord Stephenson.

The (formerly) highly paid senior bankers quoted in the report continue to claim that the crisis was a sort of unforeseeable natural disaster (‘tsunami’ is a term used on a number of occasions). This report and the written and oral testimony collected by The Commission provides invaluable evidence of individual, group, and institutional dysfunction.

In particular, the main issues that emerge from the report are (1) that HBOS was doomed irrespective of the financial crisis; (2) the bank’s ‘retail culture’ played a role in perverting the aims of the bank as a customer service organisation, (3) that the HBOS board lacked banking, rather than retail, experience, and was (4)  unwilling or unable to address issues of existential risk that were undermining the bank, even when brought to the board’s attention by a whistleblower.

The report raises questions for practising managers and for business school academics concerning how managers can manage large and complex organisations.

Hopefully this report will contribute to another lesson: how we teach future business leaders to sufficiently analyse corporate issues with responsibility and ethical practice. 

Dr Ron Kerr,  lecturer in Organisation Studies at Newcastle University Business School. 

 

Response to media coverage of early-stage research into cannabis use

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Responding to articles in today’s Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph, Dr Nils Braakmann of Newcastle University Business School, clarifies his provisional research findings, which are part of a working paper ‘Cannabis consumption, crime, anti-social behaviour and victimization – Evidence from the 2004 cannabis declassification in the UK’.

The research, which was recently presented at the annual conference of the Royal Economic Society, is still in the early stages and does not demonstrate an absolute increase in real-terms in cannabis consumption since declassification.

In fact, the increase presented is a relative increase between previous consumers and previous non-consumers, pre and post declassification, of between 18-26% depending on a number of social and demographic variables.  This does not therefore represent an absolute increase in consumption and it is misleading to represent this research in this way.

This situation does, however, raise some interesting questions for educators. The difference between absolute and relative difference is significant in this case, and shows how important it is to understand these terms before we interpret them in any meaningful way.

I look forward to sharing the findings when the research is complete, at which point it would be appropriate to interpret the research in a social context.

Dr Nils Braakmann