̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Christoph Loch

Cambridge Judge Business School celebrates 25th anniversary with new Simon Sainsbury Centre

Anonymous — Thu, 26 Nov 2015 19:46:54 +0000

̽��ֱ��groundbreaking for a £32 million expansion of Cambridge Judge Business School capped a 25^th anniversary year that also included a focus on women in business, creation of a new Entrepreneurship Centre and a gala reception at the House of Lords.

“This is a very special occasion,” said Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Vice-Chancellor of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, who participated in the 26 November groundbreaking ceremony. “Twenty-five years ago it was a dream that we would set up a business school here that is distinctive and different.”

̽��ֱ��new 4,790-square-metre Simon Sainsbury Centre, which will include new lecture theatres, seminar rooms and dining facilities, will help further “the integration of the business school into everything the ̽��ֱ�� does,” he said, adding that it was important that the business school is located at the heart of the ̽��ֱ�� community in the centre of Cambridge.

̽��ֱ��new building is supported in part by a generous donation from the Monument Trust, whose founder Simon Sainsbury was one of the business school’s original benefactors a quarter century ago. ̽��ֱ��new building, designed by London architects Stanton Williams, will sit directly behind the former Addenbrooke’s Hospital building that now houses Cambridge Judge.

̽��ֱ��role of women in business has formed a central part of the 25^th anniversary year at Cambridge Judge. A new Women’s Leadership Initiative was launched at the School to serve as a platform to enable women’s empowerment and leadership in the business world globally, and held its inaugural conference in June. A study on “ ̽��ֱ��Rise of Women in Society: enablers and inhibitors” led by Sucheta Nadkarni, Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at Cambridge Judge, was unveiled at a London conference and attracted worldwide attention; it found that increasing the economic power of women throughout society, rather than quotas, is the key factor in women reaching and staying on corporate boards.

In addition, the Executive Education division of Cambridge Judge teamed up in with LexisNexis to publish a new magazine, FLUX, which examines women in the legal profession, while Cambridge Judge also agreed to sponsor a Woman Entrepreneur of the Year award in Business Weekly publication’s annual awards.

̽��ֱ��new Entrepreneurship Centre, which in July welcomed to Cambridge its patron, HRH ̽��ֱ��Duke of York, KG, creates a new centre that reflects the full journey of entrepreneurship – from idea creation to attracting start-up funding to growth. It brings together several of the business school’s initiatives including the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (CfEL) and Accelerate Cambridge, while serving as a focal point for the School’s interaction with the wider Cambridge Cluster of research and enterprise.

“ ̽��ֱ��Centre is not just an academic exercise, but matters to Cambridge and indeed to the UK,” Cambridge Judge Director Christoph Loch told the Duke of York and other guests – adding that the new Centre will help individuals prepare for entrepreneurial activity, develop their management skills and address the “scale-up problem” that impairs many young companies’ ability to grow.

Complementing the new Entrepreneurship Centre is a recently opened Centre for Social Innovation, which is overseeing the launch in 2016 of a new part-time two-year Masters in Social Innovation programme.

̽��ֱ��25^th anniversary reception in September, attended by 250 people at the House of Lords, was hosted by Lord Bilimoria of Chelsea, CBE, DL, a member of the Cambridge Judge Advisory Board. A nine-minute video shown at the event recounted the School’s origins and themes – including student diversity and how business can play a positive role in society.

“Cambridge didn’t have a business school at all, but within the Engineering Department students could take management studies,” Professor Stephen Watson, inaugural Director of Cambridge Judge (1990-1994), recalls in the video. “We thought there ought to be more than this, we thought in fact there out to be a full-scale business school in Cambridge.”

So that’s what happened. From a first class of just 19 MBA and 19 MPhil students, Cambridge Judge this year has 157 MBA students, 63 Executive MBA students, 64 Master of Finance students, 32 PhD students, 126 MPhil students and 41 undergraduates attending classes.

̽��ֱ��expansion of programmes and the student body means that the historic Addenbrooke’s Hospital and adjacent buildings are too small to accommodate all the school’s activities. So when completed in 2017 the new building will provide world-class teaching and conferencing facilities for the School’s next quarter century and beyond.

Groundbreaking for Cambridge Judge Business School expansion caps 25th anniversary year that included focus on women in business and entrepreneurship.

̽��ֱ��Centre is not just an academic exercise, but matters to Cambridge and indeed to the UK

Christoph Loch

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Cambridge MBA gains position in global FT rankings

th288 — Mon, 26 Jan 2015 12:51:01 +0000

̽��ֱ��Cambridge MBA was also ranked in the world’s top 10 business schools in two key areas of the FT’s survey: 4th for aims achieved and 5th for value for money, based on feedback from alumni in response to the survey.

̽��ֱ��FT’s ranking of MBA programmes follows by one month the results of the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF), which rated nearly nine out of ten submissions from Cambridge Judge as “world leading” or “internationally excellent”.

Dean of the School, Christoph Loch, said:

“I am heartened and proud of the excellent result by Cambridge Judge in this major ranking by the Financial Times.

“This ranking of the Cambridge MBA in the global top 15 builds on several years of solid results, and is complemented by our recent REF position and the rankings of our other programmes.

“While these surveys are useful, they do not define our strategy and mission – which is to deliver a transformational experience to students of varied career aspirations, and to create a world leading research based business school that values excellence in teaching.”

̽��ֱ��annual Financial Times global MBA rankings, published today (26 January), place Cambridge Judge Business School 13th, up from 16th the previous year, holding its place as the top-ranked one-year MBA programme in the UK for the third consecutive year.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

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̽��ֱ��intoxication of power

tdk25 — Wed, 18 Sep 2013 08:46:23 +0000

They say that pride comes before a fall, but in business, it also often triggers the collapse. History is littered with examples of corporate giants who were, according to subsequent post-mortems, felled by bad decision-making, brought on by excessive self-confidence, arrogance, and pride. In the final analysis, the word “hubris” crops up again and again.

Now board directors and senior managers from around the country are being invited to find out why. A conference in Cambridge this week will explore the perennial problem of hubris in leadership, and attempt to offer some tips designed to school the participants out of repeating others’ past mistakes.

Entitled “ ̽��ֱ��Intoxication Of Power: Leadership and Hubris”, the event will involve presentations from experts in business, management and academia, all of whom have examined what it is about leadership that distorts a person’s thinking and character, inflates their ego, and frequently causes them to make rash and damaging decisions as a result.

It will include analysis of the relationship between senior executives, and the mechanics of sycophancy in the workplace. There will also be a presentation of psychological research which suggests that humans may be hard-wired to make dubious decisions about the future, and that CEOs could learn a thing or two from crows, which are much better at forward planning.

In addition, there will be a workshop inviting the participants to contemplate and discuss the implications of hubris both for their companies and for themselves.

̽��ֱ��conference, on Thursday, 19 September, is being organised by Cambridge Judge Business School - part of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - and the Daedalus Trust. ̽��ֱ��latter is dedicated to the cause of trying to understand problems of hubris, and was set up “to raise awareness and understanding of the changes in individuals, groups and whole organisations that can come with the exercise of power”.

“Hubris is not a mental disease - it is the result of psychological reactions to power and status to which we are all subject,” Professor Christoph Loch, Director of Cambridge Judge Business School said.

“In healthy people, it serves to enable confidence and reduce stress, but in some, it creates a perception of oneself as a giant and others as minions. This distorts the individual’s sense of goals and decisions. It’s this effect that makes hubris a highly relevant risk-management issue for businesses.”

̽��ֱ��decline of numerous companies has been attributed to moments when those responsible for leading the firm began to make poor judgements based on previous successes, with the result that they failed to respond to changes in the market and fell behind their rivals.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge event will attempt to show participants how to assess themselves and their colleagues to make sure that their own companies do not suffer from the same causes and effects. It will also examine how business leaders can harness the energies and passions of their staff, without at the same time allowing a culture of hubris to develop.

Speakers will include the former British Foreign Secretary, Lord David Owen, who has authored a book on ̽��ֱ��Hubris Syndrome; Martin Taylor, former chairman of Syngenta AG and former CEO of Barclays Bank; Professor Manfred Kets de Vries, an authority on leadership development; and Professor Nicola Clayton and Clive Wilkins, from the Department of Psychology at Cambridge.

De Vries argues that hubris starts to lead companies astray when senior executives stop recognising that many of their subordinates are lying to them - even if they don’t realise it. Most corporate leaders, he suggests, are surrounded by people who tell them what they want to hear. ̽��ֱ��danger occurs when they start to believe in this, and to enjoy it.

This breeds more than a sycophantic culture - in some cases, “intoxication and intimidation go hand in hand”. “Subordinates become intimidated by the power of office and leaders become the vessels of their projected fantasies,” de Vries’ synopsis for the conference says. ̽��ֱ��accoutrements of this are things like “large, impressive offices, chauffeur-driven cars, private jets, fawning secretaries - all adding to a climate of awe that surrounds many leaders. Power leads to dependency reactions, and even physical illness in others. Many top executives don’t realise, however, the extent to which people project their fantasies on to them.”

Nicola Clayton, Professor of Comparative Cognition, and Clive Wilkins, who is currently artist in residence, both in the Department of Psychology at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��, meanwhile offers an intriguing take on the relationship between hubris and the human brain’s capacity - or lack of it - to plan ahead. Their presentation will argue that our brains suffer from a natural short-sightedness about the projection of self in time, which makes envisaging the future rather difficult.

̽��ֱ��phenomenon is referred to as “temporal myopia”. “We assume that what we feel as we imagine the future is what we will experience when we get there,” Clayton and Wilkins explained. “In fact, our sensations as we imagine it are often our response to what is happening right now.”

If we want to find a way to get round this hard-wiring, the unlikely subject of crows might just offer some answers. Surprisingly, crows do not succumb to the same failings. Clayton and colleagues have studied how these birds hide food for the future, and her research shows that they can anticipate accurately what they will want when they come to recover it in the future.

In other words, crows appear to be more capable of disengaging from their present motivational state when choosing for what may lie ahead. “It’s a skill that every CEO in the land ought to have,” Clayton and Wilkins added.

̽��ֱ��Intoxication Of Power - Leadership And Hubris, will run at Judge Business School, Cambridge, on Thursday, 19 September, 2013. For further information, visit www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/insight/2013/the-intoxication-of-power-leadership-hubris.

For more information about this story, please contact Tom Kirk, Tel: +44 (0)1223 332300, thomas.kirk@admin.cam.ac.uk

Why are so many companies brought down by an excess of self-confidence, and rash decision-making by out-of-control egos at the top? A Cambridge conference aims to explain why power corrupts, and whether corporate leaders could learn a few lessons from the humble crow.

Hubris creates a perception of oneself as a giant and others as minions. This distorts the individual’s sense of goals and decisions.

Christoph Loch

01228 by Victor 1558 from Flickr

̽��ֱ��conference will examine the effects that the projected fantasies of subordinates have on managers when the latter begin to believe in them.

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