Inspire - issue 9

INSPIRE LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS BI-ANNUAL MAGAZINE ISSUE 9

HOW RESILIENT ARE WE? COVER STORY: Secure and resilient societies: Why resilience is key to our future P10 7/7: Rob Dover looks at the world 10 years on from the London bombings P18 Achieving personal resilience: Techniques to boost your inner strength P22

Editor: Ondine Barry Designer: Ian Jepson Photographer: Phil Wilson

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LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS

WELCOME Welcome

Dean Angus Laing

I’m delighted to welcome you to the ninth edition of Inspire, the magazine of the School of Business and Economics at Loughborough University. This latest edition provides an insight into a range of the School’s activities, the performance of our staff and students, as well as the experience of our alumni.

The experience of hosting the School’s Awards Dinner earlier in the year has once again confirmed the outstanding success of our students and alumni, and the commitment of our staff to transform organisations and to inspire students.

When discussing what makes the School’s graduates so successful, what makes them stand out from graduates of other business schools, the recurring theme from the alumni themselves as well as employers is the can-do attitude of our graduates, their grounded understanding of management and, ultimately, their resilience.

The concept of resilience has gained increasing prominence in recent years, reflecting the turbulent environment which individuals, businesses and governments face in the 21st century. From the fostering of individual resilience, or character, through to ensuring that critical infrastructures are able to withstand natural catastrophes or deliberate attack, the idea of resilience is increasingly core to management concepts and practice.

Business schools globally are increasingly engaged in research and, in turn, development programmes around organisational resilience. The School of Business and Economics at Loughborough is at the forefront of this development. Through its established work around emergency planning, crisis management and security, the School has built a distinctive body of expertise and excellence in supporting governments and organisations developing resilience capabilities.

Reflecting the multifaceted challenges facing organisations, the work of the School around organisational resilience draws on expertise from information management, operational research, international relations and organisational behaviour in developing research-based interventions to support organisations. The work showcased in this edition of Inspire represents only a small part of the work undertaken by School colleagues in this area, as well as the work undertaken in collaboration with academics from across the University. Reflecting Loughborough’s ethos of research-informed teaching, the totality of this research underpins

the School’s new suite of organisational resilience programmes – designed to support organisations in confronting the challenges of the 21st century.

I am sure that you will find the articles on organisational resilience stimulating and occasionally provocative. If you have particular interest in specific articles, I would encourage you to contact the relevant colleagues to explore your interests. As a School, we are committed to working closely with organisations of all sizes and across all sectors, and colleagues will welcome the opportunity to explore the development of their research with interested professionals. I hope this edition of Inspire provides further insight into the work of the School and, in particular, how the School’s research benefits organisations and society, and encourages you to get involved in the School’s activities.

Finally, on a personal note it is with a degree of regret that this will be my final edition of Inspire as Dean.

I have enjoyed five years at Loughborough, and in that time seen the School develop into a leading British business school, with this reflected in accreditations, rankings and research performance. There is no question that the School is on a strong and sustained upward trajectory.

Maintaining that momentum will fall to my successor, and I will be reduced to the role of observer from my new role as Dean of Lancaster University School of Management. However, I will be an interested and indeed concerned observer as I have hugely enjoyed my time at Loughborough and feel a strong degree of attachment to the School and my colleagues.

I would like to express my appreciation to my colleagues in the School for providing the very best support for which any Dean could ask. It has been a genuine pleasure and source of pride to be associated with the School of Business and Economics, and I wish the School, and Loughborough, the very best for the future.

Sincerely yours,

Angus Laing Dean, School of Business and Economics Loughborough University

TRANSFORMING PRACTICE, INSPIRING WINNERS

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NEWS

Celebrating the best of research, teaching and student excellence The third SBE Dean’s Awards Dinner was held earlier this year (26th February) at the Sir Denis Rooke building on campus, with more than 150 people in attendance, in recognition of and to celebrate the outstanding contributions and excellence achieved by a select group of students, graduates and staff.

This year’s award recipients included three Distinguished Alumni of the School: • Nick Bunker, CEO of KP Snacks • Andrew Fisher, Executive Chairman of Shazam; and • Paul Philpott, President & CEO of Kia Motors, UK & Ireland Staff awards for Outstanding Academic and Support Contributions went to Professor Neil Doherty and Sue Cotton respectively. And a first-ever award for Impact on Practice was awarded to Cathy Hart for her exemplary high-profile research on the Future of the High Street. Additionally, awards recognising the School’s preeminent staff went to: • Professor Jiyin Liu, for Researcher of the Year • Dr Brian Searle, for Teacher of the Year • Dr Rupal Rana, for Early Career Researcher of the Year • Dr Amanda Berry, for Early Career Teacher of the Year (1) • Dr Alex Wilson, for Early Career Teacher of the Year (2)

Awards were also presented to a group of truly outstanding students and a recent MBA graduate: for Excellence in Academic Achievement (to Thomas Harrison and Abbie Robus), Student Enterprise (to Helen Ots), Student Employability (to Charles Kay); Doctoral Student of the Year (to Michael Mortenson), and the award for the Santander Universities MBA Prize 2014 was presented to graduate Claire Bellamy.

The evening was MC’d by Professor Alistair Cheyne with a thought-provoking keynote speech by alumnus Richard Hill on ‘Reflections of Leadership’, which included several inspiring sports and thespian analogies of how to successfully lead teams of people.

A highlight of the evening included the inaugural viewing of the first-ever short film by the SBE called ‘Let’s Talk Business’, created with local creative company Affixxius Films, which was received with great interest.

A wonderful and inspiring night, the 2015 SBE Awards Dinner will be remembered not only for the many awards, but also for the superb legacy that the School’s students and staff have built through sheer graft and academic brilliance.

Top: Left, Ian Stopps Right, Andrew Fisher Far left: Left: Claire Bellamy Right: Vicki Unwin Left: Left: Ian Stopps Right: Paul Philpott

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LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS

SBE: Top 15 for Research Power The Research Excellence Framework 2014 results, which were announced December 2014 after the last Inspire went to print, will determine the future of research funding for each UK university over the next six years.

The SBE performed very well, rising to 13th overall in terms of research power, with 75% of its research classed as ‘world leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’.

Seal of Approval The Guardian University League Table 2016, released late May, has cemented SBE’s standing as a top-10 UK business school. The SBE ranked 5th for Business, Management and Marketing, improving on its 10th place position in the 2015 table, and ranked 8th for Accounting and Finance, a leap up from the 16th place position last year.

Loughborough University itself has risen to 11th place, improving greatly on its 2015 ranking.

Vice Chancellor Professor Robert Allison said: “I am delighted Loughborough has improved its standing in this important league table which bases its results on the factors that matter to students. Our results are a testament to the hard work that has taken place, and I congratulate everyone who has helped us get to this position.”

The high Guardian ranking is the latest in a string of successes for SBE, which secured top-5 rankings for Business and Information Management and a top-10 ranking for Accounting and Finance from The Complete University Guide 2016, released earlier this year.

The School’s research power ranking is based on both the quality and the quantity of the School’s research. Furthermore, since the last research assessment exercise (in 2008), the School has increased the proportion of its research rated as ‘world leading’ and ‘internationally excellent’ from 60% to 75%.

This signals that the School is a major force in leading-edge research, and that students can expect to be taught by staff who are at the forefront of their fields.

Significantly, within the area of Information Management, the SBE has been ranked 4th in the country (GPA x intensity), with 100% of IM research being rated as either ‘world leading’ or ‘internationally relevant’, and with an outstanding impact rating of 100% ‘internationally excellent’.

In recent years, the SBE has grown and strengthened its research considerably, creating six prestigious research centres focussed on top-level research projects and 9 research interest groups, which identify new and emerging areas of research.

Professor Stewart Robinson, Associate Dean for Research at the School, said: “These latest REF scores confirm that we have consolidated and strengthened our position as a research-intensive school, showcasing an outstanding breadth and depth of research applied to practice.”

Well done to all of our recent graduates!

With summer graduation right around the corner (July 16th, Netball Centre), we must first give a very fond farewell to our students who graduated in December. Held at Fusion Bar once again, the SBE’s 2014 winter graduation reception on December 15th was a lively celebration, with drinks, canapés and a student awards presentation.

For those of you graduating this summer, we look forward to celebrating with you!

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NEWS

Glendonbrook Institute for Enterprise Development What could be more exciting than starting with a blank page for a brand-new programme on a brand-new campus? That is exactly the opportunity that was presented to the Glendonbrook Centre for Enterprise Development Education when the concept of Loughborough University London was born. A new programme was required, distinct from anything already offered by the SBE, which would fit the ethos of the new campus: to deliver ‘enterprise throughout the curriculum’ for all students.

In times of recession, innovation is required to drive growth and recovery. We wanted to build a programme that demonstrates the importance of the innovation process, to encourage people to display entrepreneurial

behaviour and show them that, with the right resources and attitudes, ideas can be turned into profitable products and services.

Five institutes make up the new campus on Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park: Design Innovation, Sport Business, Digital Technologies, Media & Creative Industries and Enterprise Development, and the aim is for all of the programmes to be truly multidisciplinary. There is a selection of joint programmes and in addition to these, all

students on the single-subject programmes will take a second subject option from one of the other disciplines.

The challenge, therefore, was to design a programme that had a

coherent structure when taken as a single subject, but with individual modules that could stand alone when they are taken as options by students from another discipline.

The Glendonbrook Centre for Enterprise Development here on the Loughborough campus already delivers a wide range of modules to multidisciplinary groups of students. These modules give a broad overview of the important aspects of innovation management, but we have never before had the

opportunity to teach these topics in the depth that they warrant.

Our new programme, MSc Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management, allows us to indulge in this luxury. Subjects that previously only had one or two lectures devoted to them will be studied as complete modules.

The six brand-new modules are Innovation Management, Entrepreneurship, Intellectual Property, Funding, Strategy & Planning and Understanding Business Failure.

Innovation Management will look at the environment surrounding innovative organisations and how they put innovation into practice.

Entrepreneurship will be studied in the context of both academic theory and self-reflection to investigate whether participants have the qualities to take action. Intellectual Property, clearly of vital importance to the entrepreneur, will be studied with an emphasis on the practical application of this rarely studied topic.

Failure in business is often seen as a negative outcome, but there are vital lessons that can be learnt from failing, and we will put this into context in Understanding Business Failure.

We will look at the reasons why many organisations do fail, how to avoid it and how to wind up a company successfully if you do fail. Strategy & Planning will use some elements of the Managing Innovation module from our MBA programme, but with an international flavour; and Funding will give students an insight into the variety of ways to finance a new venture, and will help the budding entrepreneur negotiate the minefield of options for kick-starting a

by Amanda Berry

new business.

To complement their studies, all students will take part in a collaborative project module in a mixed team where they will work on a brief from an outside organisation. This will provide students with the opportunity to further develop entrepreneurial skills, such as problem solving and strategic planning, whilst working together to solve a real social or business problem.

The aim of the Glendonbrook Institute for Enterprise Development in London is an extension of what we started on the Loughborough campus – we want to encourage all students to develop entrepreneurial and innovative skills through our dedicated modules. A small percentage of students may aspire to set up their own businesses, and we suspect that many of our London cohort may come to study with us with exactly that intention.

Entrepreneurial behaviour, however, is not solely restricted to this small minority. It is a key competency required by a growing number of employers.

Regardless of their degree discipline, having a robust understanding of the innovation process, coupled with the skills required to take action, will help all of our graduates to succeed in the current marketplace.

If you want to speak to Amanda she can be reached on: E: a.j.berry@lboro.ac.uk T: 01509 223 261

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LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS

Supporting SMEs with Santander Internships Over the last three years the School of Business and Economics has supported more than 80 SME businesses with Santander Internships to help them employ Loughborough University students.

The Santander Internship programme this year will provide 25 grants to businesses who want to employ students for a 12-week internship. The grant from Santander of £1,500 has to be matched by the employing business.

Our students have added significant value to a number of SMEs by bringing fresh ideas and innovation to projects. In the past year, businesses including Sunline, Soup Creative, Nottingham Panthers Ice Hockey, ASAP Watercraft, Solutions 4 Feet and Lynx Golf have improved their performance by offering opportunities to talented Loughborough students.

Soup Creative, a video production, design and animation studio, said of the programme after employing a Loughborough student recently for the 12 weeks: “Without a doubt, we’d recommend the Santander scheme to any business. Graduates can bring a breath of fresh air to your business and have lots of valuable life skills.”

Vicki Unwin, Business Development Manager in the School, said: “We are always keen to support small businesses and have a range of ways we can do this.

The Santander Internships really add value to our activities, and we are keen to talk to more businesses that are interested in the opportunities the Santander Internship programme can offer them.”

Please contact Vicki Unwin: E: v.e.unwin@lboro.ac.uk or T: 01509 222 160

video clip from ‘Let’s Talk Business’

SBE proud to partner with award-winning organisations The School was delighted to see Leicester-based charity Action Homeless win the Best not-for-Profit Organisation award at the 2015 Leicester Mercury Business Awards.

The School has been working with Action Homeless since 2014 when it developed a partnership with the charity to support the admirable work they do on behalf of the local community.

Other winners at the awards event associated with the SBE included Affixxius, which won the Creative Industries Business of the Year award.

Affixxius, based in Loughborough, partnered with the SBE to create the hugely successful ‘Let’s Talk Business’ short film – the first in a series for 2015 – which to date has received more than 70,000 views on YouTube since it aired on February 26th this year.

TEDx Loughborough 2015 A Road Less Travelled In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TED created a program called TEDx, a program of local, self-organised events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. The Students Union in 2013 developed an event for Loughborough called TEDxLoughborough: “Sometimes, doing things in the same traditional way can be daunting for highly energetic individuals and limit the potential of specific ideas.

At TEDxLoughborough, we therefore wish to explore innovation through alternative ways of thinking and acting about the present, and also become an active voice in the global TEDx movement.”

Two academics from the SBE, Dr Huw Edwards and Dr David Roberts, were invited to contribute to TEDxLoughborough 2015, with videos of their work available online: www.tedxloughborough.com

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GRADUATE PROFILE Kerrine Bryan, MBA

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LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS

FORMULA FOR SUCCESS Kerrine Bryan is an MBA graduate who completed her degree part-time whilst working as an engineer for a large oil and gas organisation.

Although she specialised in control systems whilst reading electrical engineering at Birmingham University, she was offered a job in the electrical power department of her organisation upon graduation, which she accepted and has since excelled at.

“In engineering especially I think,” explains Kerrine, “what you learn at university enhances your brain to think more logically, so whatever you go into you just can think your way through it using logic.”

In her role as a principal electrical engineer, she is responsible for the design of electrical systems and equipment for oil and gas offshore and onshore projects, but is currently on secondment in the sales department where she is gaining experience as a contract development manager, preparing proposals, understanding the market and looking at commercial aspects.

“At first I was slightly nervous about starting an MBA,” she says. “Although I had the entry requirements, I was at the lower end of the scale in terms of years of professional experience. Luckily, I had been given a lot of responsibility early on in my career and that was a key factor in successfully completing the MBA. “Before I moved to the sales team, I was given the role as lead engineer for the living quarters of a North Sea oil platform.

So all of sudden I was managing a team, handling personalities, which I wasn’t quite used to. As it is a male-dominated industry, it is very rare to have a female leading the team, so it is something which the team were not used to either.

“Being a natural introvert, the MBA taught me how to utilise my existing skills to be a better leader. Additionally, a few of the modules that I took were to do with personal development and how to deal with different types of people, which I found very useful. Having learnt about other people’s experiences during the MBA and how they handled various situations, it made it easier to deal with my own, sometimes challenging, situations.”

Upon completing her MBA, Kerrine worked with Senior Lecturer Ian Herbert on the subject of her dissertation, centres of excellence, turning it – with Ian’s help who is an expert in the field – into a publishable article.

“Ian is very enthusiastic and motivational, which made him an excellent supervisor.

He had suggested that the dissertation could be used to create a good article, so I worked with him to get the article into shape.”

A real surprise was getting into the 2014 Management Today’s 35 under 35: “My husband nominated me after reading the entry requirements in the magazine, and then when I got the email to say I’d been shortlisted, I was so surprised!”

For Kerrine, a real highlight of the MBA was the two weeks in Aarhus, Denmark for the Essam module: “That was amazing. You’re not only meeting people from the UK but all over the world. It was good just to share the experience that we had.”

Next on Kerrine’s agenda is getting more involved in promoting STEM subjects, especially to younger children as she says there’s a real gap in the education

system. Career wise, she has just started a secondment as a contract development manager, and has found many of the subjects covered during her MBA, particularly strategy, the business environment and accounting modules very useful.

Any words of wisdom for prospective students?

“Loughborough has the advantage of being excellent for sport,” says Kerrine, “which is an advantage for students studying any subject. There are certain skills that you might not pick up from your degree course that can be developed through sport participation. For me, being a volunteer fitness instructor and training in taekwondo has greatly improved my confidence, public speaking and presentation skills.

“In terms of gaining an MBA, MBAs are not only useful within the workplace, but also for everyday life, to have a deeper understanding of economics when purchasing a house or understanding some of the decisions made by world leaders when reading the news, for example.

“In the end though: Do what you enjoy and enjoy what you do. You should ensure that you choose a dissertation subject that you feel passionate about, that way the work won’t feel like it’s a chore, but more like a hobby.”

SECURE AND RESILIENT SOCIETIES

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SECURE AND RESILIENT SOCIETIES WHY RESILIENCE IS KEY TO OUR FUTURE

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LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS

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The next 16 pages comprise a dedicated section on resilience

Societies around the world are changing rapidly and face major potential environmental hazards and human-induced threats. To ensure that we remain secure and resilient within this setting, it is vital that we undertake risk reduction strategies, prepare ourselves against future adversity and develop ways of responding rapidly and effectively in times of crisis.

This requires an interdisciplinary approach that brings together individual, organisational and community resilience innovations in using information to aid decision makers and cuttingedge technology.

Loughborough University’s research agenda has recently been enhanced by the creation of six research ‘challenges’ that are interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in scope and breadth.

One of the six research challenges, entitled Secure and Resilient Societies, is led by the SBE’s Professor Mark Freeman. This research challenge will be looking at the influences and impacts of decision makers across a wide range of political, commercial, military, community and public sector organisations.

Within these new challenges, the University will create and disseminate internationally excellent research at the interface of three focused academic fields: • the development of individual and organisational resilience, particularly in relation to performance under stress and in preparedness for, and response to, emergencies; • the gathering, interpreting, presenting and managing of information to increase resilience and to aid decision making at times when actions must be taken rapidly; and • the development of a wide range of leading edge technologies related to security and resilience that are optimally designed for use in the field.

Mark explains: “There are around 200 academics on campus split across 10 academic schools who are involved in Secure and Resilient Societies in some direct way. Some are building ceramic armour for vehicles, some are involved with large data visualisation in the areas of resilience and defence, some are dealing with the management of information on governmental levels. There are others looking at grassroots resilience, the setting up of flood defences in cities, post-conflict peace-building projects and the development of personal resilience.”

Members of the group here in the School include a good range of researchers, including Dr Rob Dover (you can read his interview on page 15), Professor Tom Jackson (Director of the Centre for Information Management), Gordon MacDonald (Gordon’s article on resilience in the healthcare sector is on page 26), Dr Lili Yang (head of the Emergency Management Research Interest Group) and Dr Chris Zebrowski.

At the helm of this diverse group, Mark is working on building up external links, which has been, in his words, interesting: “because it is a genuinely interdisciplinary group, and so constructing a coherent narrative around it is challenging.”

Mark will be looking to identify the core academic and non-academic partners from a challenge perspective: “The work is excellent across campus, and I am excited about the collaborative nature of the project. In terms of building a community around security and resilience, we have much to do, but I have no doubt that it will be an stimulating and hopefully rewarding challenge.”

SECURE AND RESILIENT SOCIETIES

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STAFF PROFILE Mark Freeman

A MAN OF VALUE To all intents and purposes, Mark Freeman should have been an accountant. He graduated university with a degree in mathematics and went to work in London as an analyst, which was (in his words) ‘great fun’.

But after three years, he came to the realisation that it wasn’t for him.

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LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS

“It was all too much firefighting,” said Mark. “I wanted something a bit more thoughtful, but rather than coming straight back to university, I thought I would do something real for a while, so I went out to Fife and worked in a whiskey bottling factory, first on the floor and then at the head office.”

Similarly, although he enjoyed his time in Fife, he decided that two years was enough of the ‘real’ world, and he applied to do a PhD in accounting, looking specifically at the way in which markets read accounting information.

“As I started my thesis work, I realised that some of the very basic things were steeped not in accounting but in finance, so I moved further and further away from accounting and deeper into finance.

The focus of my dissertation was on this question: If you invest in a stock market, how much better will you do than if you invest in a bank? On average, a stock market will give you a higher rate of return than a ‘safe’ investment. But it’s not a simple question as it turns out. In fact, it’s an extraordinarily difficult question, and it is one of the biggest questions in finance.”

Currently, Mark has been getting involved in some very interesting research in the area of environmental economics, and is teaching valuation on the MBA programme, looking at the rates of return and the issue of maturity for short-term risk versus long-term risk.

“I began looking at maturity and risk and whether for a high-risk project you should apply the same rate of return for a year as you would for ten years. That is a very simple question and a lot of people have asked it, especially in the area of environmental economics – but it pulled me in. I would say my work now predominantly lies on the line between finance and environmental economics.”

Although most people might not fully understand what ‘environmental economics’ means straight away, certainly one issue that springs to mind is climate change.

“Climate change is obviously a big issue. You tend to get some hypersensitivity to evaluations connected to climate change, which makes it a challenging issue to look at objectively, but that’s what I try to do. The questions I and my co-author, Ben Groom at LSE, deal with focuses on the economics of climate change ‘solutions’ and evaluations; the costs to society.

“If you look at the argument for putting solutions in place now to tackle climate change, the evaluations of the costs of these proposals vary hugely, especially when you factor in short term versus long term. I look at how you value the societal advantage of funding proposals to deal with issues like climate change now versus 100 years from now – when we may very well be in a much better place to tackle it, in terms of what we know and the technology we will most likely have at our disposal then to deal with these issues in a more cost-effective way.”

Mark and Ben have recently given advice to Her Majesty’s Treasury, which publishes a document called The Green Book, which tells government bodies how to do evaluation in the public sector.

Their research has also been presented to the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Norwegian government. In addition, Mark has advised the OECD with regard to how greenhouse gas emissions should be evaluated within transport proposals, and has advised the Dutch treasury in the Netherlands with regard to funding flood defences.

“Our method of value could potentially be used on any long-term cash flows. If we look at the social cost of carbon, which is the cost of putting one tonne of C02 in the atmosphere. According to different government agencies in Europe, the cost of that varies between $5 a tonne and $250 a tonne. Therefore, somebody can reduce their cost merely by moving a factory over a border.

“But we explicitly say, we are not stating what the right answer is.

We are just saying there are these different approaches, and you make your own judgement. If you believe Obama, he would say that 97 per cent of scientists agree that climate change is real, and the IPCCs say it is very likely more than half of (global) warming had been attributed to human action. Now, we don’t take a view on that because we are not scientists. We are the space between the policy maker and the scientist. Even if climate change is real and dangerous, you can reasonably argue that the future generation should deal with it.

“Here’s a good example: over population. We potentially have an issue in our society of over population. Would we have expected people in the 1700s to do anything about that? I suppose not. So, why then, if we would not have expected previous generations to help us, should we logically expect our generation to help future generations? It’s not unreasonable to suppose that people in 300 years will be materially wealthier than we are now.

“One of the things I dislike about the climate change debate is the ‘should we do it or should we not do it’. The question that should be asked is, ‘You have ten billion pounds worth of money that you are going to spend on societal good. Are you better providing clean water in Africa, or are you better spending it on climate change?’

“The definition of economics that I like best is where economics is about the allocation of limited resources: If you say, ‘I want more money in my area’, you have to say, ‘as a consequence, I am not going to spend money in an alternative area’. With regard to climate change, you are gambling the welfare of the people you know are dying today against a potentially much worse calamity that may or may not happen.

“But there is, of course, debate on both sides, and one can make very convincing arguments either way. But I am of the mind that we are not quite where we need to be to be able to tackle it today.”

Mark Freeman is Professor of Finance and Co-Director of the Centre for Post-crisis Finance, as well as leader of the Secure and Resilient Societies research challenge. Mark can be reached on m.c.freeman@lboro.ac.uk

Mark Freeman

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GUIDING GLOBAL BUSINESS:

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AT THE SBE Recently, the SBE was privileged to gain four new academic members of staff who moved from PHIR (the University’s Department of Politics, History and International Relations) last autumn to join the School, having clear lines of research and teaching that not only fit in with, but that would also enrich the SBE, covering international crisis management, security and risk, political economics and power politics in particular.

International Relations in the SBE is applied and is focused on two distinct areas: • Political Risk • Organisational Resilience and Business Continuity The International Relations group comprises Rob Dover, David Roberts, Chris Zebrowski and Taku Tamaki.

All four academics are in the School’s International Business, Strategy and Innovation discipline group. Rob is a member of the Centre for Information Management (with his interests in network-enabled devices), and Rob and Chris are members of the Emergency Management Research Interest Group.

The IR group are directly involved with the new suite of courses and executive education programmes being launched: the new professional Masters suite of organisational resilience programmes (you can read about these programmes on page 27), as well as the new and completely unique BSc in International Economic Relations.

“The area of political risk is the one that is most applicable to business,” explains Rob. “Business certainty, understanding the political context within which one is doing business, and therefore being

able to dial out risk by understanding the political context and developments within it. The international and political contexts in terms of trade negotiations and power politics are important aspects of a business school’s provision, which we can now help unlock because we are acutely concerned with international power and how power is exercised.”

An exciting initiative stemming from the IR group’s joining the SBE is the development of the new governmental policy and diplomacy programmes at Loughborough University London being launched next year (the new campus opens this September and you can read more about it in the news item on page 6). Their combined expertise in the expansive field of international relations allowed the SBE to conceive a suite of new programmes that will truly enrich its portfolio.

Dr Rob Dover is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations. Rob is an expert on the use of intelligence, surveillance and espionage, the defence industries and European power. He is currently working on the security implications of the ‘internet of things’, and is actively involved in work concerning social enterprise innovation. Rob’s article on the 7/7 London bombings is on Page 18.

Dr David Roberts is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations. His research is concerned with the failure of orthodox peace-building to build stable peace, and visual teaching methods. David developed the HearingVoicesProject. org as part of his research to help communicate to the international community the knowingness, priorities and peace-building methods of local people in post-conflict spaces. His research in teaching methods involves ending ‘Death by PowerPoint’ by

replacing list-laden slides with powerful images and visual metaphors, to positive effect. David consults on his teaching methods and has won multiple teaching awards including ‘Lecturer of the Year’ and a ‘Loughborough Legend’ award.

Dr Taku Tamaki is a Lecturer in International Relations. Taku’s primary research interest lies in the international political dynamics of the Asia-Pacific region. His current research focuses on analysing how the various stakeholders perceive the way they conduct diplomacy and business in East Asia. He is currently looking into how national identity is reflected in Japanese policy towards the region, and exploring Japan’s national branding as part of Tokyo’s soft power strategy.

Dr Chris Zebrowski is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations.

His research investigates the impact of resilience discourses on the ways in which security is understood and practiced. Thus far, his research has primarily investigated the impact of resilience ideas on the ways in which British emergency governance is organised and conducted. In his upcoming book (September 2015), entitled The Value of Resilience: Securing Life in the 21st Century, Chris conducts a genealogy of resilience that demonstrates how the advent of resilience strategies marks a significant departure in the ways in which emergencies have been historical responded to.

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STAFF PROFILE Rob Dover

KNOWING UNKNOWNS Dr Rob Dover has been at the University since 2007 and is Director of the Glendonbrook Institute for Enterprise Development and a member of the Senior Management Team of Loughborough University London, as well as being its first Associate Dean of Enterprise. Rob joins colleagues Chris Zebrowski, Taku Tamaki and David Roberts, all researching and teaching in the expansive area of international relations.

Rob is an expert on the use of intelligence, surveillance and espionage, the defence industries and European power, and is a past winner of the UK Political Studies Association’s annual prize for best article in political studies. He is currently working on the security implications of the ‘internet of things’, and is actively involved in work concerning social enterprise innovation in London. To this end he has worked closely with the social innovation space in Hackney Wick (just yards from where Loughborough University London will open in September) called 90MainYard, to provide support to the East London Social Innovation Centre.

Along with Megan Powell Vreeswijk (Director of The Studio) he has also secured funding from the University to expand ‘The Studio’ provision that is hosted on Loughborough’s LE11 campus to take it to London. This is known as ‘The Studio@ LUL’ and it is currently supporting four alumni businesses in East London in the MainYard site, before it moves over to LUL’s campus in September.

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Rob has an unusual background for an international relations scholar: his first job – at the University of Bristol – had enterprise as a twin focus with research. Rob cut his teeth on securing and helping colleagues to secure public policy consultancy contracts and external research funding: Rob himself ran a prize-winning start-up company (as he likes to say, “when I had hair”) and has advised the UK and European Parliaments, the Ministry of Defence, Cabinet Office and NATO in his time.

As Associate Dean (Enterprise) for Loughborough University London, he personally drove the commitment to the ‘making’ agenda, which includes 3D-printing and the ‘internet of things,’ as well as crowd-sourcing and the emergent sharing economy.

During his tenure he retained a focus both on high-growth start-ups and also on social enterprises engaged in innovation practice, something that resonates well in the part of East London in which Loughborough will operate.

Rob is currently the convenor of the Political Studies Association specialist group called Security and Intelligence Studies Group (SISG). He runs the Hurst & Company intelligence studies series (with Michael Goodman, Richard Aldrich and Sir Lawrence Freedman), as well as managing the membership of the ECPR Study Group on the European Union.

Along with Michael Goodman (King’s College London), he runs the ‘Lessons Learned’ project, which provides open source challenge to the Cabinet Office, and oversees the securityrelated public policy publications series for the research council which funds the project.

Rob is part of the Loughborough team that has just won €13million euros from the European Commission for a project that examines the security of urban spaces, which will run from 2015-2019. Rob will be using his considerable experience in the public and private sector sectors in the School of Business and Economics’ Executive Education programmes on security and risk, organisational resilience and emergency management.

Rob’s research on the internet of things (e.g., network-enabled devices, such as wearable fitness trackers or connected home devices) focusses on the implications they have.

“We know that these emergent technologies work brilliantly, and have revolutionised the way consumers are beginning to understand their own fitness and how to manage their houses.

These devices have been cleverly marketed and pitched to consumers, including me. What we don’t understand is how government agencies and private intelligence agencies will use the resultant meta-data level to understand what is normal and what is out of line: core indicators of what or who constitutes a threat.

“Some of these tangential uses are undoubtedly a public good, but some of them might not be. We just don’t understand the implications because technology moves faster than regulation, laws and our understanding of it. Some will be intended and directed, but some uses will be the result of unintended consequences that fall out of the architecture of the internet and the way that data is processed and understood.”

Rob’s cyber security research is concerned with the issues surrounding the impact on the ordinary citizen of cyberinsecurity rather than the physical results of a cyber attack.

“There was a recent case of a German incinerator that had its temperature control overridden by an attacker which meant it melted down. There is another example of an attack (known as Stuxnet) on the Iranian nuclear programme, which was again to shut it down, and they couldn’t override it. Service attacks such as the North Korean internet (or, more precisely their intranet) being taken down or the Estonian government computer system being over-run in 2008… These are examples of one brand of cyber security. The other brand is what I would call the ‘Snowden effect’, which is the surveillance of the ordinary individual, looking at the patterns – and that is the bit I am more interested in.

“I’m more intrigued by the impact it has than who did it.

Intelligence serves a purpose to condition a social and political environment. Now the vast majority of us would say that is a good thing, but I suppose I am liberal enough to think that we don’t have the whole answer, but instead that we should be open to some dissent.

“The question that begs is then, of course, how much dissent should you allow? The most visible acts of dissent are really dangerous: the Charlie Hebdo attacks for instance earlier this year. To say you should allow someone that level of dissent is very difficult indeed. But inevitably, at the less extreme end, there is a balance that needs to be struck, but that discussion of this balance is under-specified currently not just in government intelligence but in corporate intelligence too.

“The long-running battles between boards and activists in sensitive industries have often erupted into an unedifying cold war, followed by public clashes. Within more normal business practice we have at the benign end of the spectrum businesses making use of sophisticated data analytics - and I immediately think of the freemium models used in computer gaming (where the game models were tweaked in the light of the analytics to ensure people kept playing and sharing, drawing more contacts into the gaming community), to the loyalty cards of supermarkets trying to improve the bottom line through targeted advertising, through to the less benign end of organised criminals using similar datasets to find vulnerable individuals to defraud.

“So, someone like Snowden did commit treachery, but treachery that showed some very interesting things that probably need addressing.”

Rob Dover is Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Director of the Glendonbrook Institute for Enterprise Development at Loughborough University London. Rob can be reached on r.m.dover@lboro.ac.uk

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“ We just don’t understand the implications because technology moves faster than regulation, laws and our understanding of it.”

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7 7 HOW JULY 7TH CHANGED THE WORLD:

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TEN YEARS ON

By Dr Robert Dover

On July 6th 2005 the nation celebrated the announcement that we had secured the 2012 Olympic Games, something that has of course become entwined with the growth of Loughborough University as a truly international higher education institution with the opening of Loughborough University London on the Olympic Park site in 2015.

The day after the Olympic announcement the nation was reeling from what is known in security circles as variously ‘a terrorist spectacular’ or ‘postcard attack’. Both phrases underplay the horror and misery for those caught up in those attacks, or those who lost loved ones because of it, but both are apt: an attack of this sort is a ‘spectacular’ because of the disproportionate impact a small number of individuals can have on a large city, public policy and public perception.

The attack was ‘postcard’ because the picture of the Russell Square bus has become a totemic memorial to the destructive power of suicide bombers on our streets. Viewed from ten years on we can make some strong assessments of the impact of that day across the range of political, economic and social effects.

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7/7 TEN YEARS ON

“Whilst Snowden did reveal some disturbing abuses, he helped to cement the need of our enemies to get ahead of the technological curve.”

The Centre of Gravity

The Paradox of Total Security

Acts of terrorism might be more accurately described as forms of political violence. These are violent and criminal acts of people who feel that they have nothing to gain from taking part in regular forms of political engagement. Jihadist terrorism has several clear aims: 1) the attack itself aims to create an immediate effect (in the case of 7/7, a show of force in disabling the mass transit system using synchronised explosions, and to bring suicide as a shock component of that attack); 2) to create a long-term political effect in an immediate collapse in economic sentiment due to uncertainty, a collapse in public morale, to cause a public policy response that places onerous restrictions on the public and to foster animosity towards the ordinary law-abiding and peaceful Muslim populations which in turn the terrorists hope will help to radicalise those communities.

The development of mobile phone and other electronic communication had vastly increased the scale of task for intelligence and policing agencies in the UK. Some described the attempt to find relevant information as like trying to pour a drink using a firehose. The New Labour government was keen not to be tarred with the brush of being soft on terrorism and so enacted ever-tighter and permissive laws to assist agencies with intercepting and understanding the threats presented.

The majority of news reporting at the time, and subsequently, has this type of terrorist as an unthinking strategic player. The individuals carrying out the attacks may well fit this category, and Chris Morris’ film ‘Four Lions’ - which sought advice from government sources - is an easily digestible dramatised account of this. But those terrorist ringmasters are far from unsophisticated: the 2004 attack on Madrid transformed the general election there, and 7/7 was an astutely focussed attack on what the classic Prussian strategist Clausewitz describes as ‘the centre of gravity’, that is an enemy’s pressure point upon which victory might be secured.

The revelations of the former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about the extent to which the NSA and Britain’s equivalent, the GCHQ, had intercepted and stored communications data shocked publics across Europe and America – you no longer had to be suspicious to be suspected, and some of the abuses of the technology were unfortunate: people of very limited interest to the security services had their webcams intercepted, and thus a flourishing cottage industry in recording naked webchats was founded in the west country.

For the UK, disabling London and the financial centre is highly significant in the short-term, whilst causing societal fracture is a more damaging and longer-term aim. So, far from being a mindless act, it was in part a response to the war in Afghanistan (the pre-attack videos cited Iraq, but this was to try to appeal to the large numbers of British citizens opposed to the Iraq campaign). The 7/7 attack would have taken around 15-18 months to put together, and if you wind back to late 2002 and early 2003 the American and British militaries had effectively destroyed all of the heavy Al-Qaeda infrastructure in Afghanistan, and so an attack against Britain outside of the field of operations makes some sense militarily.

Such an attack, which contained a suicide element (unheard of in the UK) and from home-grown sources (again, virtually unheard of if you assume that IRA members identified themselves as Irish, rather than British) was geared at making the large Muslim community in the UK ‘alien’, and I think it has to be said that the fear of terrorism and the lack of effective intercultural understanding has seen that aim more or less realised in the UK. The economic impact was far less pronounced than those planning the attacks would have hoped for, and this was not a particular piece of British resilience as the same could be observed in the US post 9/11. Resilient economies suffer temporary shocks from terrorism, but the fundamentals remain fundamental and money feels for those.

Similarly laws were enacted that prevented the glorification of terrorism, which was sensible, but the wording of these provisions was somewhat wide, and a rather large number of people found themselves tagged with being a person of concern for unrelated acts of political dissent, even if this involved just saying moderately unwise things online.

The security paradox exists in the perception of the ‘all-seeing eye’, and then by implication and extension of total security; whereas the reality is that catching those self-radicalised individuals who wish to remain quiet is still the business of needles and haystacks. Whilst Snowden did reveal some disturbing abuses, he helped to cement the need of our enemies to get ahead of the technological curve.

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The Next Ten Years When looking at the next ten years, a security analyst is forced to say some contradictory things: 1) the UK remains acutely vulnerable to attacks from Jihadist terrorists, but 2) in pure security terms there are more significant threats for us to be concerned about.

The UK remains vulnerable for many clear reasons: our presence in controversial and contested theatres of operation, like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and over Syria, has made the UK a key target for Jihadists.

The number of young British Muslim men and women going to fight against western forces in those theatres is significant (proportionately it is not as significant as for Belgium and France), and these returners are well trained and essentially dangerous. The growing economic inequality in the UK, and glass ceilings for minority groupings in particular, give rise to interfaith tensions and a breeding ground for discontent that has the potential to become a vent for violence.

The British intelligence agencies make the strong claim that they are losing the technological and regulatory war to secure access to terrorist communications and thus are partially fighting blindly at the moment.

Those with malintent are using secure forms of communication and finding unique ways of using unsecure communication to plan and coordinate their activities, and no system of intelligence and security can offer an absolute guarantee: some attacks will inevitably get through.

At Loughborough we have looked at different and alternative ways to think through these communication challenges (outside of the terrorist threat) to use crowd-sourced intelligence to reach parts of the urban environment that is inaccessible to law enforcement agencies.

However frightening Jihadist terrorism is – and it is – in pure security terms there are more urgent concerns: biosecurity, as highlighted by flu pandemics (most recently 2009) and by the potential of Ebola (2014-present), is a far more significant threat to the security of the individual, to society and to economic activity: international impotence in the face of these biological threats is still to be addressed, and a large part of our research agenda within the School focuses on business continuity and society resilience.

The impact of climate change seems esoteric and far off into the distance, but represents a large threat to international politics, cohesion and our resilience to major weather events.

And lastly, the threat from economic pressures (e.g., austerity leading to a degradation of the health of ordinary citizens be it via primary healthcare or the quality and amount of their food, and to their acquisition of skills and learning, be it to state schools or libraries etc) is similarly more significant than the terrorist challenge.

Our national resilience is dependent on a large pool of healthy and capable people: national systems of healthcare and education were founded in large part to provide capable soldiers for the existential wars of the 20th century. We ignore those challenges now, because we live in a time of relative peace. In the pecking order of threats terrorism shouts louder: the postcard effect, writ large.

So, the next ten years will continue to bring terrorist threats, and sadly some of them may be successful. Shoring up our prosperous and resilient centre of gravity is, however, our best defence against these threats.

Rob Dover is Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Director of the Glendonbrook Institute for Enterprise Development at Loughborough University London. Rob can be reached on r.m.dover@lboro.ac.uk

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By Cheryl Travers and Ray Randall

HAVING THE RIGHT TOOLS FOR THE JOB Developing Individual Resilience Resilience refers to our capacity to positively adapt when faced with adversity. Research shows that resilient individuals tend to find ways of being optimistic when confronted with difficult, challenging and stressful situations, displaying perseverance and a good range of healthy coping strategies. Resilience is also about our capacity to maintain our focus, functioning and performance when faced with big life events, setbacks, adversity and significant episodes of change.

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The importance of resilience and the role it plays in determining our success, both in and out of work, has been clearly demonstrated. It is linked to life satisfaction, physical and mental health, the quality of our relationships and also how we lead and manage others.

We may not display resilience in all areas of our lives (people who appear resilient at work might not cope well with adversity in situations outside of work), but evidence reveals that it is possible to boost your level of resilience. For example, we can change our ‘thinking habits’ so that we ‘process’ adversity more constructively. We can also develop resilience-boosting strategies and create opportunities to practice these by setting ourselves resilience-enhancing goals.

Our work with business students, managers and leaders suggests that resilience develops from the interaction between an individual’s personality and character and external factors and events. This affects how they assess, evaluate and act on the challenges, problems and decisions that they face.

We help people reflect upon their resilience capability by considering nine different resilience factors for which specific and personally important goals can be set. The pursuit of these goals motivates the individual to develop resilience in a way that is significant and helpful for them.

Following are brief descriptions of these nine aspects.

Perhaps you might want to reflect on your strengths and weakness in each? Having done that, can you identify a specific and challenging goal to develop or improve an aspect of your resilience? (Remember to set a goal that gives you a chance to practice and develop your new skills.)

“Resilient people encounter the same temptations and distractions as everyone else, but have strategies for stopping themselves saying or doing anything that is not in their best interests.”

MANAGING EMOTIONS Emotions can sometimes overwhelm us, making us experience fear and preventing us from taking action. We can end up feeling like a victim of ‘emotional-mugging’. Understanding the nature and causes of our emotional reactions can lead to constructive personal change. By noticing our own and others’ feelings and emotions, we can utilise strong caring and supportive networks. A lack of emotional awareness can cause us difficulties when expressing emotions and empathising with others, potentially damaging our psychological wellbeing and ability to bounce back from challenges.

IMPULSE CONTROL Resilient people encounter the same temptations and distractions as everyone else, but have strategies for stopping themselves saying or doing anything that is not in their, or others’, best interests. They have a ‘stop and think’ internal message system that means they make focused, considered and informed decisions. People with low levels of resilience can be impulsive and may appear unreliable, which can be unsettling for others. Developing strategies for self-discipline has been shown to raise resilience, as greater levels of impulse control leads to greater self-confidence and effective coping strategies.

OPTIMISM Does your mind-set see a glass as half-empty or half-full?

Optimists (‘glass is half full’) tend to be happier, less depressed, healthier, more productive and successful, and have better relationships than pessimists (‘glass is half empty’). Optimists search for positive outcomes from problems, see themselves, and others, in a positive light where possible, and seek social support when required. They face the same setbacks as pessimists, but live longer and recover from ill health more readily. They don’t ignore problems, or project them onto others, but use positive self-talk, whilst taking ownership and action (avoiding ‘I am a victim of circumstances’ thoughts).

They aim high, whilst keeping their feet on the ground.

CAUSAL ANALYSIS Resilient individuals tend to be aware of, and sensitive to, changing circumstances, but also have a keen awareness of their own life purpose and values. They create lasting solutions and have an awareness of how different problems interlink.

This awareness of the ‘bigger picture’ enables a realisation of the limits of their capacity to influence the situation and expect the unexpected. They are proactive in dealing with problems and approach issues without undue delay, even when there is no obvious or fast solution.

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EMPATHY

REACHING OUT/PEOPLE SUPPORT

SELF-CARE AND STAMINA-BUILDING

High empathy means being in touch with others’ emotional reactions to things and knowing how to manage these. It also involves a high level of awareness for the emotional health and expressions of others. Resilient people are able to ‘connect’ with others and are perceived as supportive and responsive to others’ needs and emotions. People who care, are interested in other people’s feelings and experiences, and want to offer support through tough times, are more likely to have strong, healthy friendships that are an invaluable resource in times of adversity.

Resilient people tend to have a strong relationship network within which they share ideas, problems, solutions, frustrations, hopes and so forth. They call upon this network for support, affirmation and problem solving. While sometimes we can only face our challenges alone, a supportive friend or colleague can help lighten the load. Those with strong networks stay healthier and happier throughout life and cope well with stress.

Good mental and physical health equips us with the stamina to ‘bounce’ back after adversity, which, when handled correctly, may lead to transcendence and enjoyment of new challenges (some people call this psychological ‘flow’). Exercise has been correlated with stronger levels of resilience, possibly due to the effects of released endorphins on mood, as well as physical health benefits. Our poor health can impact on others, who cannot rely on us to have the stamina and energy to cope when things get tough, and may also lead to us lacking in tolerance and empathy.

SELF-EFFICACY A strong belief in one’s ability to do things (self-efficacy) is often found in resilient people. They believe that they are effective in the world, have knowledge of their strengths and weakness and use their strengths to navigate life’s challenges.

Self-efficacy is about believing you can perform and effect change in a specific challenge, task or role and can develop through the experience of success. It helps people to deal with a crisis, because it prompts resilient people to tackle ‘headon’ what life throws at them (rather than to be paralysed by worry or perceived incompetence).

TOLERANCE OF STRESS AND RISK Though not necessarily gambling with their health and safety, resilient types identify appropriate risks that will help them to develop and grow. They are willing to try new things to increase their learning (e.g., further education), achievement (e.g., a new work role), and enjoyment (e.g., a new hobby), even if failure may result.

Fuelled by optimism and self-efficacy, they know failure and mistakes are an inevitable part of life and learning. Their mind-set could be summarised as: ‘while I can’t always control circumstances, I can control how I respond to them’ and ‘what doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.’

How to enhance your resilience capability: 1. Consider your own resilience capability.

2. Select a suitable, specific and challenging resilience goal.

3. Visualise yourself acting in this resilient way and identify suitable role models.

4. Write down your goal in as much detail as possible, including how you will measure success.

5. Consider what and who you need to help you.

6. Put it into practice as often as you can, and regularly reflect on and review your progress.

Cheryl Travers is Senior Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour and Human Resource Management and Director of Executive Education at the SBE. Cheryl can be reached on c.travers@lboro.ac.uk Ray Randall is Senior Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour and Human Resource Management and can be reached on r.randall@lboro.ac.uk

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H OW RESILIENT I S YO U R BUSINESS? In simple scientific or engineering terms, resilience describes the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape after suffering extreme stress or change. At the point at which the object is no longer resilient but experiences further stress, it breaks or suffers catastrophic destruction.

By Gordon MacDonald

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“In order to fully understand societal vulnerabilities, we need to identify emerging local and global risks and the causal issues that need to be addressed to ensure future resilience.”

However, resilience does not just apply to inanimate objects but also to people. Psychological resilience is an individual’s capability to adapt to stress and adversity, in their emotional, family, financial and work environments. People who are recognised as resilient are generally those who come into management and leadership roles. Unfortunately, one’s personal resilience can be adversely affected by great stress, such as a major emergency or disaster situation in their environment.

Now let’s consider ‘societal resilience’. Modern communities are structured upon multiple interdependencies in order to function properly. Consequently, when an emergency or crisis event combines the recognised resilience stressors of objects and people, those interdependencies can suffer major disruption and cause the breakdown of normal living.

In addressing these disruptive events, communities need to develop appropriate strategies in order to either prevent or mitigate destruction physically, mentally, financially and environmentally. This is done through the application of societal resilience processes, which aim to provide communities with the knowledge, flexibility and capacity to withstand stress and to adapt or change in order to effectively manage the consequences of the crisis.

Achieving societal resilience necessitates understanding the vulnerabilities of communities and societies. As we know, the beginning of the 21st century has already presented the world with considerable global strategic and disruptive challenges: natural and environmental disasters, climate change, conflict and war, financial crises, terrorism….

In order to fully understand societal vulnerabilities, we need to identify, through the application of an integrated risk management process, emerging and dynamic local and global risks and the causal issues that need to be addressed to ensure future resilience.

Moreover, societal resilience research coupled with lessons identified from previous events could be used to inform policy and provide guidance for practitioners, thus helping communities to anticipate, prepare for, respond to and recover from societal disruption.

There are a number of existing MSc programmes that deal with disaster management, risk reduction and, to some extent, resilience. However, there is nothing currently available at MSc level for professional groups, managers and practitioners working within healthcare and associated fields with a health focus.

Recognising this need, Loughborough University has designed a Masters-level programme of study, addressing healthcare and societal resilience to meet the needs of those practitioners: MSc in Healthcare and Societal Resilience.

Such degree programmes are fast becoming recognised as an essential requirement for those practitioners who wish to pursue a career in the field of resilience and emergency management.

This programme is one of several new programmes launching soon in the School in the area of organisational resilience and include:

HEALTHCARE • MSc/PG Dip/PG Cert in Healthcare Management and Governance • MSc/PG Dip/PG Cert in Healthcare and Societal Resilience • MSc/PG Dip/PG Cert in Occupational Health and Safety Management

CRISIS AND EMERGENCY • MSc/PG Dip/PG Cert in International Crisis Management • MSc/PG Dip/PG Cert in Crisis and Emergency Resilience

SECURITY • MSc/PG Dip/PG Cert in Security and Risk Management • MSc/PG Dip/PG Cert in Intelligence and International Security

These innovative and unique programmes will seek to enable participants and organisations to anticipate, assess and prevent (or at least manage) disruption, including effective recovery measures, whilst remaining agile and able to adapt to disruptive challenges.

The intended outcome is the development of resilient communities and organisations ably equipped to not just survive, but thrive in the future.

Gordon MacDonald is Director of Studies (Organisational Resilience Programmes) and can be reached on g.w.macdonald@lboro.ac.uk

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AN ASTONISHING YEAR Charlie Kay is a final year student on the International Business programme, having returned to his fourth year of study after completing a truly unique placement at GlaxoSmithKline last year.

STUDENT PROFILE Charlie Kay, International Business

Charlie has not only proved to be a solid student throughout his course, but has also surpassed even his own expectations during his placement at GSK. Taking on the unexpected challenge of managing a multimillion pound account for Asda whilst only a few months into his placement, Charlie ended up boosting sales and profitability for the line, MaxiNutrition, and was asked to stay an additional 10 weeks to continue to add value within the business.

It was not by luck then that he received the Dean’s Award for Employability – as high calibre as our students tend to be here at the SBE, Charlie is truly exceptional. We sat down with him recently to see what his plans are for the future.

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“I chose Loughborough University because, for me, it was the perfect match,” said Charlie. “It’s very good for sport, business and the arts, all of which I did for my A-levels, so straight away it was perfect.

“I always knew I wanted to study business, and I knew I wanted something quite broad, so I chose IB [International Business] because it would allow me to gain wide business understanding, but also covered the areas I was most interested in: sales and marketing.

“I had planned to play rugby, but just before I got here I badly injured my shoulder and had to pack in rugby for good. But I love exercising, so I found something low-impact but that would be fun to do and joined the LU cycling team and quickly grew to love it.”

True to his gung-ho nature, Charlie took a week off last summer from his placement and cycled from John O’Groats to Land’s End with three of his family members, raising £3,500 for Help for Heroes and MacMillan charities.

For his third-year placement, Charlie began looking at large, multinational companies which would align with his IB degree, focussing in on FMCG [fastmoving consumer goods] firms because they interested him.

“I need to be constantly busy,” Charlie explained, “so I knew I wanted to work with FMCGs. I can see how a product sits on the shelf and how it’s positioned, how they push it for sale, the large volumes they get through – I find all of that really interesting.

“GlaxoSmithKline’s brand portfolio was what really attracted me – covering brands like Panadol and Beechams through to Sensodyne. What I found really interesting was their MaxiNutrition brand [then called MaxiMuscle] – I’ve always been interested in sports supplements, and the brand was doing quite well at the time.”

When Charlie first started on his placement, he worked on sales for the Asda account, looking after the Ribena and Lucozade brands.

“It was a normal placement role, looking at competitors, monitoring promotions, etc. But Lucozade and Ribena got divested off in January, so my manager moved on

“Straight away everything had to be resold into retail outlets. It was a massive task of getting all these new products in Asda, talking to the buyer and selling in over 20 new lines.”

to a different role, and pretty much within a week the customer business manager for MaxiNutrition at Asda had to leave unexpectedly. So I put myself forward for that and was supported by my manager.”

Charlie was given a conditional role initially and ended up staying on for close to five months.

“Initially, it was quite daunting – the targets were huge [up to £500K-a-month sales targets]. But the really interesting bit for me was that when I came on board, they were rebranding everything for the product (going from MaxiMuscle to MaxiNutrition).

“So straight away everything had to be resold into retail outlets. It was a massive task of getting all these new products in Asda, talking to the buyer and selling in over 20 new lines.”

Although he was well supported by his line manager, Charlie’s knowledge of the products and sports supplements in general helped immensely as he knew a great deal about the market already.

Again, true to his nature, Charlie not only survived but thrived, boosting sales for the product at Asda through multiple promotions.

After that fast-moving role, Charlie moved into a wider placement role to finish up his third year, supporting the three accounts of Asda, Morrison’s and Waitrose.

“I have to admit I found it hard to settle into a slightly slower-moving role,” he confessed, “so I convinced my line manager to help me move into another role that was much more fast-paced and held more accountability again in terms of customer management, working with the Ocado and Morrison’s accounts.

“I was working on similar projects as before, selling in new ranges and creating promotional plans, but what was good about this role was that I was able to see how different retailers approach it. Asda is all about the value proposition, whereas Ocado strives for a premium look online with easy-to-ship, high-quality products.”

Charlie was in that role for the remaining five months of his placement, and then, quite unusually, was asked to stay on for an additional 10 weeks to help train the new placement student coming in – as well as working within the MaxiNutrition brand team, which he was quite happy about.

Leaving placement to return to his studies was, he admits, the biggest challenge.

“Moving out of placement year and into my final year was hard to begin with, because I was used to doing quite long hours. But what helped me was just getting up and getting on, making the most of the day.

The regime at GSK works well for me here as a final year student. I can apply that to revision and coursework, and I can see now how what I’m learning applies to business, so that’s really valuable.

“What are my plans for the future? I’d like to go to the US definitely – just because they lead the way across many markets, and having done an International Business degree I’d like to make use of that. Also China and the emerging economies – I’d love to travel over that side of the world to really broaden my experience.

“My career plan at the moment is to stay within FMCGs – that’s where I can add the most value I feel at the moment, working across a broad range of areas, though within the sector and building my understanding of the different functions.

“In terms of advice to students, I definitely think you should apply for a large multinational company and get as much experience as possible, as you’ve only got one placement year.”

Charlie, we know you’ll go far and we wish you all the best! If any company directors are reading this article and thinking that you could use a man like Charlie, you may find a queue already forming…

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WORK IDENTITIES, BODIES AND TALK

By Christine Coupland

My research over the last 14 years has been looking at how we craft who we are to get things done. I am interested in answering the question ‘How do I know who you are until I see what you say?’ Everything we do or say (or don’t do or don’t say) says something about us.

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WORK IDENTITIES, BODIES AND TALK

A large proportion of my empirical work has been based on language drawn on to do discursive work in many different contexts. Discursive work may be described as, what gets done by what gets said, where language and interaction is regarded as an act rather than, or as well as, a mechanism to describe an act. From newcomers in organisations to corporate websites, with a diversion into professional sports and older workers along the way, I continue to be intrigued by the creative potential of individuals to get things done, get other people to do things and live a meaningful life in the process.

For example, newcomers to organisations quickly learn how to speak appropriately, which operates as a form of institutionalised silencing in a workplace.

Certain phrases like ‘not a Smithco kind of person’; ‘not the way we do things here’ effectively silence new voices. However, a very close scrutiny of how a newcomer describes their navigation around these powerful regimes of control will illuminate our capacity to craft a knowledgeable but compliant employee – i.e., they know the game of fitting in and becoming established yet retain the (silenced) capacity to challenge organisational processes. It would depend on your point of view whether you require compliance or contestation at work – perhaps some of each some of the time?

I have an intellectual interest in the fine detail of talk and how we use it in mundane and surprising ways to persuade people, while simultaneously remaining a plausible member of a community.

This process also enables certain power holders to retain control – but this is never complete or totalising, which is why it fascinates me and makes me want

to render the cracks and fissures more visible. My research perspective keeps me focussed on the how of this process.

Consider for example a long pause in response to any of the following questions: ‘Will you marry me?’, ‘Did you kill him?’ or ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ The expected response should be immediate – anything else signals trouble.

Cultural norms in the way we speak and behave towards one another provide many clues about what matters in a workplace.

An example from my research includes members of a large engineering firm where ‘home grown’ senior engineering employees resisted the input and expertise of new senior employees, bringing in talents such as logistics or HRM. Oppositional tactics included labelling one another as ‘dinosaurs’ and ‘speed-merchants’, adopting a needfor-safety argument to criticise from the engineers’ perspective and a need to adopt faster processes from the other perspective. While they may be frustrating from an organisational viewpoint, they actually help to maintain a healthy, if at times volatile, control on conformity.

Cultural norms also operate around how our bodies are controlled at work. This can occur in mundane practices such as ‘looking’ the right kind of person for the job. We may think that an embodied career would belong to a physically active professional, such as a sports person, or a dancer, an actor, or a construction worker. However, recent research is beginning to indicate that how we look has taken on increasing importance since the introduction of UK age-discrimination legislation. As prospective employers are no longer allowed to enquire about chronological age, judgements are being

made on appearance, shape and gait to make an assessment around suitability for employment. Being ‘fit for work’ is beginning to take on new meaning, not simply for those who focus on sport, gender and age, but also with regard to growing concerns around obesity and disability.

My most recent work has been looking at the lives of elite professional rugby players, where being fit for work is part of crafting the body for work – for individual and organisational purposes.

It may be surprising to discover that hyper-masculine rugby players too are subject to forces of norms of masculinity.

Furthermore, emotional control in this particular work place is akin to the emotional labour usually attributed to feminised roles such as service work.

Despite the fragile and precarious nature of the professional rugby player’s world, there are some aspects of their embodied careers that are certain: they will end prematurely (in terms of life span), possibly with associated long-term injury and most likely without a certain view of the future. Their bodies will have been only temporarily made fit for purpose.

One of the jobs of an academic is to make visible what is ordinarily taken for granted. My kind of research enables hard questions to be asked, such as: Should we challenge the status quo? Is profit the only or best outcome? Why is the juvenile male the most preferred employee? Can an organisation deem you ‘too old’ or ‘too young’ using chronological age (judged often on appearance) as a proxy for ability?

Should judgements be made on how we ‘look’ rather than what we achieve and contribute? And, more specifically in terms of my most recent research, should

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“Recent research is beginning to indicate that how we look has taken on increasing importance since the introduction of UK agediscrimination legislation.�

we accept that professional sports people may be damaged and discarded?

These kinds of questions do not always make for obvious impact as a researcher unless you are a practitioner seeking solutions to some problems and issues that have been entrenched over time. Or you are seeking to address issues of inequality, of either procedures or outcomes. Or you want to investigate different ways of organising.

Or you want to unsettle accepted practice.

Interesting outcomes of my research include: a wider understanding that even the most masculine men encounter oppression of voice, emotion and physicality (usually seen to be the experience of women); newcomers quickly learn to speak up but not out of place (to the detriment of the employing organisation); chronological age does not determine usefulness (older and younger workers display a range of abilities and motivation to engage with new ideas and practices); and that gender should never be the most salient or important thing about an employee, even if organising and societal processes seem to want to convince us that it is.

Christine Coupland is Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Director of the Centre for Professional Work and Society and can be reached on c.coupland@lboro.ac.uk

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BUSINESS INSIGHT

A NEW APPROACH TO YOUR FINANCIAL FUTURE

By Jeff Prestridge It is nearly seven years since the US Government allowed investment bank Lehman Brothers to go bankrupt, triggering the world financial crisis and forcing some of the UK’s leading financial institutions - Lloyds Bank and Royal Bank of Scotland – to the edge of extinction.

In 2015, the ramifications of this crisis are still being felt as governments worldwide continue to stimulate economic growth through a mix of low interest rates and the printing of money (quantitative easing). Some – the US and UK, for example - have been more successful than others (the likes of Greece, Portugal and Spain) in regenerating their economies.

Observing from my privileged eyrie in London (home of Associated Newspapers), there is no doubt that the personal finance world has been transformed as a result of the 2008 financial crisis.

For a start, both Lloyds and RBS (thankfully) are now in far better financial health than they were even though- annoyingly and infuriatingly they continue to be mired in financial mis-selling scandals.

And although some financial brands have disappeared for good – Bradford & Bingley, Icesave, Northern Rock – others have stepped into the voids they left. The personal finance world remains as competitive as it ever was – probably more so in key areas such as current account banking and gas and electricity supply. Thank goodness for the Metro Banks and Ovo Energies of this country, the new kids on the block.

Since 2008, many households have reorganised their finances in order to make them more resilient. Debt – both unsecured and secured – has either been repaid or refinanced to make it cheaper to service. Homeowners have bought fixed-rate mortgages in droves to take advantage of record-low interest rates and to protect their finances against future rate rises. Ten-year fixed-rate mortgages have suddenly become de rigueur.

Although the value of cash saving has been undermined by low interest rates, cash savers are more savvy than they were. Although as eager to chase best rates as they were pre-2008, they have learnt their lessons.

Few will now dice with financial danger by saving more than £85,000 with any one financial institution – the cap on financial protection offered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. Equally, with tax-free savings now reinvigorated by a generous Individual Savings Account allowance £15,240 for the current tax year – more are turning to cash Isas to give them that little bit extra.

Fuelled by the rise of easy-to-use comparison websites, easier switching rules (especially in banking and energy) and educational personal finance articles in leading national newspapers, many people are also now waking up to the value of shopping around.

They’re saving money as a result – on everything from banking through to insurance and investing.

So, my message to you is loud and clear: If you haven’t done so already, it is time to make your personal finances as resilient as possible. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, there are no certainties in life other than taxes and death – and higher interest rates in the near future.

Jeff Prestridge is a Distinguished Alumnus and Personal Finance Editor of The Mail on Sunday. He can be contacted via Twitter @jeffprestridge

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