Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog

Dear all,

because of the Bank Holiday in the UK yesterday, May’s newsletter is actually coming to you in June. The conflagration of technology, work practices, rolling onslaught of data from many different sources and perceived mantra always to be “doing more and more with less and less” is so much a theme in the World’s stricken economies at the moment Most, if not all, Henley MBAs will not only be familiar with the pressure always to be on-tap, but will (I suspect) also be struggling to come to terms with finding the right balance between what pays the bills and what paying the bills allows you to do. We talk a lot about “work-life balance”, a rather odd phrase really; why would the alternative to work be life?

Nevertheless, the temptation to work on this newsletter and other Henley matters over the holiday weekend was certainly there, and I’m probably not the only one in the Henley food chain who had to force themselves not to be looking at e-mails or reading minutes of internal meetings (or any one of the hundreds of at-work activities that seem to follow us around these days) in my time off.

I’ve reflected in these newsletters in the past on more than one occasion that one of the benefits of choosing Henley either as a place of study or as a place of work is its ability (should one need it) to instil a tranquillity or afford a space to, well, just take one’s time and, if one is brave enough, switch off the mobile, fold down the laptop and just watch the river (and your own thoughts) gently flowing by. It is still an ambition of mine one day to start something akin to the Italian Slow Food Movement, but this time call it the Slow Learning Movement, though it is perhaps reassuring that it appears to be taking a very long time to get off the ground. I have big plans for it (perhaps post PhD), however.

Henley on LinkedIn

I’m glad to see that numbers are still steadily growing, and I wanted to let you know that a new subgroup has been formed – the “Henley subgroup on Energy”, the aim of which is to link energy professionals who have shared the Henley experience. The link to the group is here: http://www.linkedin.com/e/vgh/3072488/, but please remember that you need to join the main group first, and in order to do that your profile should be fully up-to-date.

Several of you have also pointed out that there appear to be a great number of Henley Management College or Henley Business School alumni /special interest groups on LinkedIn, and it’s not always clear whether a group is “official” or not. Since LinkedIn cannot know and doesn’t discriminate in the formation of groups and subgroups, there is probably no easy way around this. However, the Henley Business School main group has the University of Reading Henley logo, my name as owner and in excess of 5,100 members, so should be easy to spot.

Research corner

No entries in Research corner for this month, but please remember if you do have a survey that you want tested or you are looking for any other kind of assistance in your research for your dissertation or Management Challenge projects, I’m more than happy to advertise those here.

Family day

The annual Family Day event at Henley, which in the past has run on a Saturday, this year is scheduled for Sunday July 4^th, and details can be found here http://www.henley.reading.ac.uk/alumni/Events/hbs-040710-event.aspx

Who’s who

In order to support the MBA programme delivery, a review of the structure of the MBA administration teams within the School of Management has been taking place over the last few months.  Below are the key changes which might affect you in your dealings with Henley: 

• Marcia Doughty heads up our MBA operational delivery and is now “Programme Operations Manager”. The MBA Programme Administrators work in two teams each led by a Programme Coordinator, who reports to Marcia. 
•  The Flexible Programmes team is responsible for the day-to-day administration of our Henley Based and liaison among International MBAs and will be led by Susan Parr. Susan Parr also becomes a dedicated contact for our Denmark, Sweden and Finland partners.
• Responsibilities within the Flexible MBA team are now as follows:

Charlotte Ordish –  Hong Kong, HB36, 39, 42 & 45 (due to start in Sept 10)

Natalie Swadling – New Zealand, HB35, 38, 41 & 44

Sue Thomas –      Germany (Munich), HB34, 37

Deb Burdett – Ireland, Malta, South Africa, Trinidad, Greece/Cyprus

Susan Parr  will retain admin support for HB40 & HB43. 

• At Greenlands the role of the two MBA Programme Managers (Alison Llewellyn – Taught, Kathy Jarvis – Flexible) is to support the Programme Directors in the longer term planning, scheduling, resource management and progression tracking of the programmes. 
• Outside the UK, the excellent support teams that you deal with directly in your own country remain unchanged.

 About the Dean search, which I mentioned last month, I can confirm that the University has now identified and offered the position to one preferred candidate, and that final negotiations (which necessarily preclude the possibility of announcing a name at the moment) are well underway.

New Homepage

Many of you will already have noticed that the Henley Business School homepage has undergone a facelift, which is part of a bigger projects to reinvigorate Henley’s website. The link to access HenleyConnect is now at the very top of the page, so this new position might take a little bit of getting used to.

New intake – old intakes

Next week we will be welcoming a new intake on the flexible MBA at Henley, HB44, which will contain also this year’s International Stream cohort. At the moment it’s looking pretty good that we will exceed our target of 60 new members, and this will be the last group that we admit in the current academic year. We’re already looking ahead to 2010-11, which will be an interesting year for Henley because we will be into our third full period as a merged unit of the University and therefore should be able to begin to judge some of the impact each entity has had on the other.

Finally, quite a number of you close to the end of available time for your MBA studies will have received a separate e-mail from me in May regarding important points to remember in order to cross the finishing line with your degree. The e-mails were sent via Kathy Jarvis, MBA Programme Manager, and I’d like to thank all of those who responded — an overwhelming postbag which may take us some time to get through.

June’s newsletter will, I promise, get to you before the end of the month. Good luck to anybody sitting an exam this week, and to anybody intrigued by the idea of Slow Learning I look forward to a leisurely debate on the subject in the months and years to come.

Chris Dalton

Programme Director