Original Thinking Podcast

The Scale-Up Forum is a peer-to-peer network for ambitious scaling up businesses in Greater Manchester. It gives businesses at all stages of the scale up journey the opportunity to share experiences, challenges and lessons learnt for mutual business benefit. After two years of online-only events we are hosting the first Forum event of 2022 in-person and bigger than ever, all welcome.

At our annual review of 2021 in December the most popular theme proposed for an event theme in the 2022 series was workplace wellbeing, particularly how this relates to productivity. Professor Sir Cary Cooper is an internationally renowned author and speaker on the subject and we are delighted to have him deliver a keynote talk as we launch the 2022 Forum event series.

Cary is joined by Alexia Roberts, Head of People, Bruntwood, Zak Fenton, Founder of Bloom AI, and Maria Mander , Health & Wellbeing Specialist – Skills For Growth Programme , The Growth Company.

Speakers

Professor Sir Cary Cooper

Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health at Alliance Manchester Business School, Cary is a world leading expert on workers’ health and well-being. He is President of the Chartered Institute of Personal Development in the UK and Co-founder of Robertson Cooper. He co-founded The National Forum for Health and Wellbeing at Work in 2015, which is focussed on improving workplace wellbeing in the UK and globally

Alexia Roberts

Bruntwood is a property company specialising in workspace, retail, and leisure destinations in both the commercial and life science/tech/digital sectors across the UK. With over fifteen years of experience, Alexia leads People Services that span across Strategy & Culture, Wellbeing & Engagement, People Operations, People Partnering, Talent Development & Talent Attraction.

Zak Fenton

Zak has an MSc in Workplace Health & Wellbeing from the University of Nottingham's School of Medicine and specialises in empowering organisations to make smart, data-driven, and evidence-based employee wellbeing and benefits decisions.

Maria Mander

Maria is a Health & Wellbeing Specialist at The Growth Company. She is a renowned expert and leader in employee wellbeing and provides specialist advice on the Skills For Growth Programme supporting SME’s across Greater Manchester to develop a healthy, thriving and productive workforce for business success. For the last 3 years, Maria operated her own company providing Wellbeing Consultancy providing strategic direction to SME’s and corporate companies (both private and public sectors) across the UK and globally.

Business Engagement & Knowledge Exchange (BEKE) at The University of Manchester

The BEKE team supporting business innovation by facilitating collaboration between academic researcher and non-academic partners, finding ways for our academic expertise to address business and societal challenges through co-produced research, consultancy, facilities sharing and knowledge exchange programmes.

The Scale Up Forum was launched in 2018 to provide a platform for businesses to share experiences and learn from each other and to gain insights from our experts across a range of academic disciplines.

Seed-Funding competition

We recognise that early stage work is often the most challenging when trying to establish effective partnerships for research and development, as such we’re launching a competition to kick-start projects that could address your business needs.

Find out more about the Scale-Up Forum here.

Looking to make new connections and speak with other inspiring and aspiring business people?

Brush up on your people skills and join us online for the networking event of the month! Speak to like-minded business women for an amazing online event. Discuss your ideas, share your knowledge and your expertise. Prepare your digital business cards and make new connections in an informal setting.

This month we will hear from Dot McCarthy, farmer at Cronkshaw Fold Farm.

Dot runs Cronkshaw Fold, a traditional hill farm with a passion for environmentally friendly farming, animal welfare and teaching about the importance of sustainable agriculture. They use sustainable farming practices that promote a healthy environment, care for the countryside, increase local wildlife and preserve traditional rural skills such as dry stone walling, hedge laying, coppicing and companion planting. They are also working hard to raise money to invest in renewable power technologies so we can produce and store energy on site.

Hosted by MBA alumna Claire-Marie Boggiano, Lurig Change & Development.

At this event, we are joined by Dr Emma Fitzgerald and Dr Jenny Rodriguez. Professor Fiona Devine, Head of Alliance MBS, will open the discussion.

Dr Emma Fitzgerald

Emma is a business leader with a passion for building great teams and bringing innovations to market to address the worlds big challenges.

Most recently she was CEO of Puma Energy focused on delivering affordable and sustainable energy solutions to emerging markets in Africa, Central America and Asia. Prior to this she ran gas, water and waste networks for National Grid and Severn Trent in the UK. She also spent many years running Downstream Retail, Lubricants and LPG businesses for Shell around the world. She has served on the boards of plc, privately owned and not for profit organizations in both an Executive and Non Executive Director capacity including Puma Energy, Severn Trent plc, Cookson Group plc, Alent plc, DCC plc & Windsor leadership Trust.

She is currently a Non-Executive director of UPM Kymmene, an innovative global paper & biomaterials business, Seplat Energy, an indigenous Nigerian Energy company which is dual listed on the London stock exchange and the Nigerian premium exchange, and Newmont Corporation, the recognised industry leader in the execution of principled environmental, societal and governance practices in gold mining. She is also an Expert Advisor for the World Economic Forum on acceleration of energy transition in developing markets and a Mentor on the climate workstream for the Creative Destruction Lab.

Emma holds a DPhil in Surface Chemistry from Balliol College, Oxford University and an MBA from Alliance Manchester Business School.

Facilitator: Dr Jenny Rodriguez

Jenny is Senior Lecturer in Employment Studies at the Human Resource Management, Employment Relations & Law Subject Area Group and member of the Work & Equalities Institute at Alliance Manchester Business School. Prior to joining Manchester, she worked at the Dept of HRM at the University of Strathclyde Business School and at Newcastle University Business School. Dr Rodriguez's research focuses on intersectional inequality in work and organisations, and the interplay between identity, work and regulation. She is particularly interested in the transnational experiences of skilled migrant women. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and an Academic Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

Dr Rodriguez is the Chair of the Equality and Diversity Committee at Alliance Manchester Business School. Between 2019 and 2021, she was Associate Head of Social Responsibility & Civic Engagement in the People, Management and Organizations (PMO) Division at Alliance Manchester Business School.

She is also involved in scholar activism as founding member of the Decolonizing Alliance, an international community committed to intellectual and practical collaboration, translation, active solidarity and resistance to tackle intersectional inequalities and neo-colonial power relations faced by people of colour in the Global South and the Global North.

At this event we will be joined by Emma Sheldon, Non-Executive Director and Business Consultant, Kellie Noon, founder of Onno, and Ian King, Business Presenter for Sky News.

Emma Sheldon

 Over the past 20 years, Emma has built businesses internationally and led cross-functional teams in marketing, sales, operations and research and development. She participated in a management buy-out of a healthcare business in 2015.

Emma now works as a coach and consultant, with recent projects including the development of an international commercialisation strategy designed around Internationalising Healthcare. The main sectors in which she operates are healthcare tech, pharmaceuticals, med-tech, AI and digital. She is also a Group Board member of UK India Business Council, and sits on the board of the Growth Company and Future Everything. She has recently been appointed Chair of the charity Odd Arts.

Emma achieved her Global Executive MBA from Manchester Business School in 2016 and was awarded her MBE for Services to Exporting in 2018. Emma promotes international trade, digital transformation space technology and investment.

Emma has her own consulting and coaching business, focusing on growth, innovation and commercialisation. She is a qualified coach and mentor, working with the SpaceHub to mentor advanced technology businesses.

Jyoti Mehan

 Jyoti is a highly experienced health care leader, with over 18 years of experience in transforming health care within the UK and combining this with international best practice she is regarded an expert in her field.

Currently the CEO of Health Care First, a General Practice at Scale serving over 32,00 patients across 7 sites, she is focusing on transforming and growing the business.

An ex-big four consultant with specialist skills in motivating teams to design, deliver and run complex, never-been-done-before programmes of work.

Jyoti has a strong track record of developing a pipeline and translating this into revenue streams across strategy consulting and private equity clients.

She has a passion for innovation combined with an entrepreneurial spirit and a never-say-no attitude.

Kellie Noon

 Kellie Noon is the founder of Onno, a UK-based consultancy specialising in global communications and business. Kellie strongly believes in the importance of developing lasting connections through real understanding of local differences and genuine engagement.

A linguist and trainer who has worked with organisations across the globe, Kellie works on international business development which includes cross-cultural management and ‘International English’ training.

Kellie also works as an assessor for the Institute of Translation and Interpreting and regularly supports the charity RefuAid.

Ian King

 Ian King has been Business Presenter for Sky News since April 2014, during which time he has interviewed two-thirds of the FTSE-100’s chief executives, along with countless other leading figures from the world of business, finance and economics. Prior to that, he was Business & City Editor of The Times and, during 25 years as an award-winning financial journalist on national newspapers and television, has also worked for The Daily Telegraph, The Sun, The Guardian and The Mail on Sunday. Prior to becoming a financial journalist, Ian worked as a business analyst for the Midland Bank Group (now HSBC UK) in the City of London for three years.

Brought up in Bristol and in Devon, Ian has an honours degree in History from The University of Manchester and a postgraduate diploma in newspaper journalism from City, University of London. During his time at Manchester, he took a year out from his studies to serve as the elected Editor of Mancunion, the University of Manchester Students Union newspaper.

At this event we will be joined by Dr Emma Fitzgerald and Dr Jenny Rodriguez. Professor Fiona Devine, Head of Alliance MBS, will open the discussion.

Dr Emma Fitzgerald

Emma is a business leader with a passion for building great teams and bringing innovations to market to address the worlds big challenges.

Most recently she was CEO of Puma Energy focused on delivering affordable and sustainable energy solutions to emerging markets in Africa, Central America and Asia. Prior to this she ran gas, water and waste networks for National Grid and Severn Trent in the UK. She also spent many years running Downstream Retail, Lubricants and LPG businesses for Shell around the world. She has served on the boards of plc, privately owned and not for profit organizations in both an Executive and Non Executive Director capacity including Puma Energy, Severn Trent plc, Cookson Group plc, Alent plc, DCC plc & Windsor leadership Trust.

She is currently a Non-Executive director of UPM Kymmene, an innovative global paper & biomaterials business, Seplat Energy, an indigenous Nigerian Energy company which is dual listed on the London stock exchange and the Nigerian premium exchange, and Newmont Corporation, the recognised industry leader in the execution of principled environmental, societal and governance practices in gold mining. She is also an Expert Advisor for the World Economic Forum on acceleration of energy transition in developing markets and a Mentor on the climate workstream for the Creative Destruction Lab.

Emma holds a DPhil in Surface Chemistry from Balliol College, Oxford University and an MBA from Alliance Manchester Business School.

Facilitator: Dr Jenny Rodriguez

Jenny is Senior Lecturer in Employment Studies at the Human Resource Management, Employment Relations & Law Subject Area Group and member of the Work & Equalities Institute at Alliance Manchester Business School. Prior to joining Manchester, she worked at the Dept of HRM at the University of Strathclyde Business School and at Newcastle University Business School. Dr Rodriguez's research focuses on intersectional inequality in work and organisations, and the interplay between identity, work and regulation. She is particularly interested in the transnational experiences of skilled migrant women. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and an Academic Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

Dr Rodriguez is the Chair of the Equality and Diversity Committee at Alliance Manchester Business School. Between 2019 and 2021, she was Associate Head of Social Responsibility & Civic Engagement in the People, Management and Organizations (PMO) Division at Alliance Manchester Business School.

She is also involved in scholar activism as founding member of the Decolonizing Alliance, an international community committed to intellectual and practical collaboration, translation, active solidarity and resistance to tackle intersectional inequalities and neo-colonial power relations faced by people of colour in the Global South and the Global North.

The gender pay gap in the UK and elsewhere in Europe has remained stubbornly high. The EU is proposing a pay transparency directive to provide new impetus to ensuring equal pay for work of equal value. The UK introduced gender pay gap reporting measures in response to earlier EU recommendations to increase pay transparency; if the UK was still an EU member this proposal for wider pay transparency would be a hot issue in HR. Pay transparency measures are also being adopted outside the EU, for example in some US states, Iceland and Australia.

On International Women’s Day this session provides a timely opportunity to reflect on the effectiveness of UK gender pay reporting measures, the impact if the EU’s proposed new measures were adopted in the UK, and what else should be done to close the gender pay gap.

At this event, we will be joined by Professor Jill Rubery, Executive Director of the Work and Equalities Institute at Alliance MBS, Caitlin Schmid, PhD candidate, University of Manchester and Claire-Marie Boggiano, Director & Coach at Lurig Change & Development and an Alliance MBS MBA alumna.

Jill Rubery

Jill has worked at Manchester since 1989, first at the Manchester School of Management at UMIST and since 2004 in Alliance MBS. She previously worked at the Department of Applied Economics at Cambridge University. She is the Executive Director of the Work and Equalities Institute at Alliance MBS. She was previously Deputy Director of Alliance MBS (2007-2013) and head of the People, Management and Organisation Division (2004- 2009). In 2006 she was elected a fellow of the British Academy and an emeritus fellow of Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge.

Caitlin Schmid

Currently in her final year as a PhD candidate, Caitlin is part of the Gender, Work and Care research network and affiliated with the Work and Equalities Institute. She is researching the construction and policy uses of gender equality indices with a particular interest in measurements of unpaid work. She is also a Research Associate at the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at King's College London, where she previously collaborated on two research projects – one piloting a UK sub-national gender equality index and the other, funded by the UN Foundation, comparatively assessing the gender pay gap reporting regimes of six countries.

Facilitator: Claire-Marie Boggiano

Claire-Marie is a business change and development professional. She is a Chartered Engineer and Lecturer in Leadership at the University of Salford Business School. In 2002, Claire-Marie enrolled in an MBA at Alliance MBS and set up her own independent consultancy business, Lurig Ltd – specialising in the Change Management and People Development. She is an Ambassador for Women on Boards and sits on the steering committee of Queen Bee Coaching, which is a Pankhurst Trust service providing free coaching to women in leadership in Greater Manchester. She also hosts the successful monthly Women Leading in Business events series at Alliance MBS.

At this event we will be joined by Sola David-Borha, Chairman Stanbic IBTC Bank Plc, Jennifer Rose, Lecturer in Accounting and Finance at Alliance MBS, and Damaris Albarran, Chair of the Advisory Board, AMBS.

Sola David-Borha

Sola is the Chairman Stanbic IBTC Bank Plc. She is also a Non-Executive Director of Stanbic IBTC Holdings Plc, Stanbic Uganda Holdings Limited and Stanbic Bank Uganda Limited. She is an Independent Non-Executive Director of Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company.

Sola was the Chief Executive for Africa Regions in Standard Bank Group responsible for the Group’s 19 markets in Africa outside South Africa (2017 -2021). She is an Honorary Senior Member of the Chartered Institute of Bankers of Nigeria and was the winner of the CNBC African Woman of the Year Award 2016.

Jennifer Rose

Jenni Rose qualified as an Accountant with the ICAEW when working in Audit with KPMG in 2008. From this she went on to teach in the KPMG Learning and Development team and then on to professional accountancy teaching before joining the University of Manchester in 2015.

She is now a Senior Lecturer and passionate advocate of empowering independent connected learners. The main focus of her teaching is in auditing, financial reporting and financial statement analysis, as well as on the MBA at the University. She won the teaching excellence award University of Manchester Teacher of the Year in 2020 for her work as BSc Accounting Programme director and in sharing best practice in teaching excellence debriefs.

Facilitator: Damaris Alberran

Damaris retired from a 30-year career in global corporate banking in 2016. While working for two leading US banks, the Bank of Boston (now part of Bank of America) and the Bank of New York Mellon, she acquired a broad knowledge and experience of the financial markets, an understanding of corporate finance for companies at all stages of their growth and development and skills in Relationship Management, which she now enjoys sharing on some of the Business School's Executive Education programmes.

Since retiring, she has focused on working with charities as a volunteer, trustee and Honorary Treasurer. Damaris graduated from the full-time MBA programme at Alliance MBS in 1984 and became Chair of the School's Advisory Board in October 2018.

Businesses are central in enabling global transitions to Net-Zero carbon energy and land-use systems. Business firms will need to innovate and scale new technologies, goods and services, business models and markets that make this new, more sustainable world become a reality. In the process, business incentives, accountabilities, and legitimacy will also be transformed. Institutions matter and they evolve.

To meet the Net-Zero challenge, business organisations themselves are needing to change. In this lecture, Frans will review how the scope of business accountability has changed, what this means for notions of performance, how this influences practices of reporting and transparency, and how this feeds through to access to key resources, including capital and talent. Using some examples, Frans will conclude with some suggestions about how these linked business trends related to scope, performance, transparency and resources may unfold in future.

This annual Grigor McClelland lecture will be given by Professor Frans Berkhout, Professor of Environment, Society and Climate at King’s College London.

Frans’ presentation will be followed by a panel discussion. Joining Frans will be Professor Frank Geels, Professor Carly McLachlan, Director of Tyndall Manchester and Nkem Marian Igwe, Full-Time MBA Candidate. The discussion will be facilitated by Professor Andy McMeekin, Professor of Innovation at the Sustainable Consumption Institute.

This lecture series was introduced in our 50th Anniversary year in 2015 in honour of the School’s founding Director, Professor Grigor McClelland. During his twelve years as Director and Professor of Business Administration at Manchester Business School, Grigor shaped management and education for the next generation. He was a strong advocate of the principle that business cannot be divorced from society and that managers should be ethical and socially responsible.

Our previous guest speakers for this lecture series, include Co-op Group’s CEO Steve Murrells; Sir George Bain, former Chair of the Low Pay Commission which introduced the Minimum Wage in 1998; Craig Bennett, Chief Executive of Friends of the Earth; Torsten Bell, Director of the Resolution Foundation, Anna Dixon, Chief Executive of Ageing Better, Martin Wolf, Chief Economics Commentator at the Financial Times and Diane Coyle, Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. All have based the core themes of their lectures on this principle.

This month we hear from Delight Mapasure, CEO and Co-Founder at K'S WORS LTD.

Delight Mapasure is an award-winning entrepreneur who successfully created a six-figure food brand from her kitchen table to retail shelves The former Dragon’s Den participant co-founded K’s Wors Ltd - a multi-award winning eclectic range of South African Boerewors sausages.

Hosted by MBA alumna Claire-Marie Boggiano, Lurig Change & Development.

To avert the catastrophic impact of climate change and meet the targets of the Paris Agreement targets, we need to reduce carbon emissions by 50% this decade, a further 50% the next decade, and be net zero by 2050. However, achieving these targets will be no mean feat. Locking the world down in 2020 achieved only a reduction of about 5-7%. So how can we achieve a radical reduction in carbon emissions without destroying global economies?

And how will leaders respond to this challenge, given that decisions made this decade will determine how society and the planet we occupy will shape up for probably 1000s of years to come. We are the first generation to have the indisputable facts at our fingertips that our climate is changing, and the last generation that can do something about it.

The leadership responsibility is immense but are companies furnished with the right leadership skills? Companies have the choice now whether they will be on the right or the wrong side of the climate crisis. Which side they choose to be on will determine their future prosperity and will be existential for many.

The times where companies could address sustainability by promoting good news stories and implementing ‘less bad’ incremental strategies are over. They now need to drive sustainability into the heart of their organisations and recognise that it will be a key determinant of future value creation and risk and resilience strategies.

In this podcast, Stuart McLachlan will argue how sustainable performance drives value through the intersect of economic, environmental, and social dimensions and sees superior financial performance on the other side of meaningful purpose. Strategic connections between systems shifts, drivers of change, and geographic materiality with a deep understanding of how clients create value will become the ingredients of sustainable performance. Companies with strong commercial power, but poor sustainability, will be exposed to unacceptable risk. The most sustainable companies will discover sources of strategic advantage in their sustainable practices.

After setting out his vision of sustainability, Stuart will have a discussion with Professor Jonatan Pinkse about what it means for a business to become a leader in sustainable performance. Sarah George, senior reporter at sustainability trade title edie, will facilitate the discussion.

Sponsored by DWF, Vital Topics is Alliance MBS' series of prestigious business lectures, bringing powerful ideas and original thinking to audiences from the Manchester city-region and beyond.