Very relevant to Policy role and objectives – use the model to refine strategy!
HE leadership study
WonkHE and Minerva report on HE leadership challenges and styles.
The report explores how institutional leaders exercise their humanity in looking after themselves, and in building shared values with their teams and community. We argue that humanity – a sense of one’s own fallibility and a capacity for empathy, among other things – is undervalued in higher education leadership, and not widely recognised as a particular strength when times are challenging.
Consider how to draw into MBA work.
Strategy as active waiting
Sull, D. N. (2005) ‘Strategy as Active Waiting’,Harvard Business Review, 83(9), pp. 120–129
Borrow from this concept – acknowledge unprediuctability of the future, and monopolise on periods of relative stability – scan for golden opportunities and sudden-death threats.
Use as model for reconnaisance into the future – building into Policy role.
Explore potential opportunieis/threats – environmental scans – when you spot an anomaly, investigate with primary data.
‘Recon pull’ trumps ‘HQ push’ – managers closets to facts on ground should act on basis of first-hand data about shifting situation rather than preconceived plan from HQ.
Blue Ocean Leadership
Kim, W. C. and Mauborgane, R. (2014) ‘Blue Ocean Leadership. (cover story)’,Harvard Business Review, 92(5), pp. 60–72
Seems like great model to use in leadership development – involves whole team and focused on execution – think about opportunities to do this!
- Leadership canvases provide concrete visual frameworks to surface improvements required by leaders
- Fairness of process makes implementation and monitoring changes easier than top-down approaches
- Achieves transformation with less time and effort because not trying to alter who leaders are and break habits – action focused, changing tasks they’re carrying out
- Scalability – don’t have to wait for top management to launch this – can do it in your team
Important to my role!
Connected curiosity
Idea of ‘connected curiosity’, to seek views from:
•Those who are stakeholders in your area of interest
•Experts who can correct your evolving understanding
•People at the periphery who can bring interesting new perspectives
This is what a lot of my job involves! I have to be curious about Industry, sector, organisation, department, team •Customers’ sectors & organisations, etc.
Connect this to conversation skill – to what extent am I deploying that to best use?
Applying theory
Noticing how theory can be applied to my work, but also others’ – observing colleagues’ projects and how they’re operating, successes, failures, and noticing where theory applies.
Looking forward to more practical sessions now that the theoretical parts of module have been studied.
Reminder to keep noting how theory applies to my work, and raising questions to return to in later assignments.
Making connections
Good discussion in Stephanos’ lecture last night about competing interpretations of events, actions, etc. and management implications. Satisfying to connect with last week’s reading – eg. science firm’s elite perception amongst employees as appealing to personal conceptions of value, and therefore influencing interpretations of management actions, vs less effective efforts of many organizations that aim to use marketing and communications to steer interpretations of employees in desired direction.
Idea for research
Investigate how organizational culture contributes to the paradox of a university being a place of knowledge and knowledge generation (eg. organisation theory), yet doesn’t appear to implement that theory to organisational benefit – to what extent is the dominant culture preventing this? Do subcultures exist which examine university’s actions, but either feel unwilling or unable to express those views? And what happens when they are – are they valued, or interpreted as challenging status quo?
Catch up!
Missed week 3 lecture as on holiday, now slightly daunted at the amount to catch up on!
Did some reading on holiday: book review and journal articles on Morgan’s Images of Organization, and firts chapter of Handy’s Understanding Organizations. Starting to see how key texts connect with each other in terms of historical overview of organization theory, and also consensus on which texts are considered ‘canon’. Interesting getting slightly different perspectives on same theorists and theories.
Really need to get round to reading Images of Organization!