Soft Metrics and Hard Culture
I wrote last week about hard metrics and soft culture, which is a good description of how we need to think about PDRs and the personal management process. But today, let us look at this ...
Baobabs and Business
We hear so much criticism of business in the media it’s easy to forget just how important it is for society. Quite apart from manufacturing the products we want and need or providing services to ...
Hard Metrics and Soft Culture
Cranfield is in the process of introducing a new faculty contribution system as part of the performance development review process (PDR). As part of that discussion, yesterday we were talking about the metrics and how ...
Black Box Thinking, or Learning from Failure
We were just reflecting at the latest Round Table on Matthew Syed’s book “Black Box Thinking” (2015, John Murray Publishing, London) and in particular on learning from failure. So what I have done here is ...
Investment needed – but will it happen?
The Institute of Chartered Accountants’ (ICAEW) latest Business Confidence Monitor makes unhappy reading. One of the largest and most comprehensive quarterly reviews of UK business confidence, the report shows business confidence is now in negative ...
2017 graduation prize winners: Energy and Power, Environment and Agrifood, Water
Cranfield's Graduation Ceremony was held in June 2017. As part of the celebrations, Energy and Power, Environment and Agrifood, and Water held a prize winner's ceremony for their top students. The full listing of winners (plus some ...
Gorilla Management
This fine fellow lives in La Vallée des Singes (the Valley of the Apes) in Vienne, France, where Pippa and I spent a wonderful day visiting the different apes and monkeys. But his presence reminded ...
Bearing the load: open doors staff tour to the Structural Integrity Laboratory
This was my second staff tour, and I found it as fascinating as the first. Dr Ali Mehmanparast is the manager of the lab, which sits within the University’s Energy and Power theme. He joined ...
Owen Green’s balanced performance system
Owen Green’s obituary appeared last week in the Daily Telegraph. He was the Chief Executive of BTR and took the company from an obscure enterprise to one of the most successful organisations of his day. ...
Is it worth the risk?
Recent events, namely the awful Grenfell Tower fire and its aftermath, prompted me to think about risk. A common definition of risk is: “ a situation involving exposure to danger”. We all know that just ...