TEACHING PROJECTS

On this page I describe some of the teaching projects I am currently involved in.

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Blue Sky Thinking

For several years now, I have been taking digital photographs of the sky at various times of the day and night and in differing weather conditions. This has produced a bank of images that I use in workshops and classrooms to achieve two things. The first use is to stimulate people’s creativity. The images help people find new ideas, find solutions to difficult situations, think outside of the box, and envision different futures. The second use is to help people reflect. This has been particularly successful in the classroom to help students think about how to maximise the benefits they get from their courses and also how their qualifications will fit into the rest of their lives. For example, I have been running these sessions at Cranfield University, where I help their doctoral students think about the route through their DBAs.

  
  

If you would like to find out more about this project, please go to the project’s website at www.skypictures.co.uk where you can see examples of the images, learn more about how the images are used, and have the opportunity to buy images as computer wallpaper or for illustrating your work.

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Moving Images

This project is gathering together expert opinion and experience on how to teach management related subjects with films and television. Working with Julie Charlesworth (Open University) and Pauline Leonard (Southampton University) we are commissioning articles from some of the leading experts in the field. I'm delighted to say that we have agreed a deal with Information Age Publishers for the publication of the book. Chapters are flying in now and we hope to publish in 2009. Contributors include:

  • Véronique Ambrosini, Cardiff University
  • Emma Bell, Bath University
  • Jon Billsberry, The Open University
  • Joe Champoux, University of New Mexico
  • James Chapman, Leicester University
  • Julie Charlesworth, The Open University
  • Nardine Collier, Cranfield University
  • Mark Easterby-Smith, Lancaster University
  • Andrés Fortino, Polytechnic Institute of New York University
  • Peter Galvin, Curtin University of Technology
  • Troy Hendrickson, Curtin University of Technology
  • Maeve Houlihan, University College, Dublin
  • Pauline Leonard, Southampton University
  • Paul Olk, University of Denver
  • Stephen Sloane, St. Mary's College of California
  • Janet Sutherland, Curtin University of Technology
  • Richard Thorpe, Leeds University
  • Craig Webber, Southampton University
  • Thomaz Wood, Escola de Administração de Empresas de São Paulo

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Management Education Under the Knife

This project looks at the current state of management education and wonders how it would look differently if it were modelled on the way we teach doctors. What would we teach? How would we teach it? What would be the implications for faculty? In looking at these issues, I hope to inform the debate about whether management is a profession or an art, and also to see whether there are more effective ways of developing managers. In the first outcome of the project, Sharon Williams (Warwick University Medical School) put together a symposium for BAM that sketched out the main issues (please click here for the flyer). Four excellent speakers, Matthew Cooke (Warwick University Medical School), Ben Hardy (Cambridge University), Fiona Patterson (City University) and Ann Esain (Cardiff UNiversity) all spoke to a packed room. Following the symposium, Sharon and I received offers to develop the ideas further and it looks as if we will be putting a book together. The members of the project include:

  • Richard Adams, Cranfield University & AIM
  • Jon Billsberry, The Open University
  • Matthew Cooke, Warwick University
  • Ann Esain, Cardiff University
  • Ben Hardy, Cambridge University
  • Lynne Caley, Warwick University
  • Fiona Patterson, City University 
  • Sharon Williams, Warwick University

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The Future of Management Education

With a colleague at the National University of Singapore, Andreas Birnik, I have been worked on a project that looks at the future of management educaiton. In particular, we are interested in trying to reconcile the tussle between rigour and relevance by drawing on ideas from antiquity such as the Golden Rule and Aristotle's intellectual virtues.