DESTROYED IN COURT
0460 TRIBUNAL INTRODUCTION CONTINUED
[The second part of my submission to the Tribunal]
3. The Open University Business School (OUBS) is a ‘faculty’ within the Open University (OU) as a whole. As such, it is largely autonomous; with decisions in theory taken by its school board (comprising all of its academics and academic related staff) and managed by the elected Dean. This admirable exercise in democracy worked well under the first Dean, Andrew Thomson. Subsequently, though, authority was increasingly centralised – initially by David Asch and then by Roland Kaye - under a steadily enlarging management team. The significant stresses that these moves to hierarchical governance caused, where this was especially damaging in terms of the OU’s own special culture and paradoxically was also against the trends developing in management more generally, are best documented in the OU’s own highly critical ‘Establishment Review’ of the School.
4. Within OUBS, I was first made responsible for managing (‘chairing’ in OUBS parlance) the small teams running two existing courses - P677, the main conventional marketing course in the existing Diploma Programme, and P671, the Diploma course on International Marketing - as well as being a writer and subject chair on the course team which integrated the previous Diploma material to create the foundation course for the MBA (B800). In 1989 I added on the management of the much larger (30 strong) team responsible for developing the new B885 (Challenge of the External Environment) elective course in the MBA programme which was soon to be launched.
5. This B885 course was to provide my main academic teaching workload for the next decade; though I continued to write for other courses, and from time to time also to chair them, across the range of OUBS programmes. B885 was subsequently highly commended by the HEFCE panel - which at that time rated OUBS teaching overall as excellent – and the course was also rated by students as one of the best (and, significantly, ‘best value’) courses on the MBA; despite being the lowest cost and hence the most ‘profitable’ course in that programme. It taught the ‘external environment’ in terms of Sociology, Technology, Economics and Politics; as well as the principles and practice of long range forecasting. For a decade, this being - due to its popularity - half as long again as its scheduled lifespan, it pioneered new material on subjects outside of the normal range of management teaching, along with the new teaching approaches needed to deliver these. Unlike most other OUBS courses it was regularly updated. As just one example, with 500-700 students per annum, it was the first OU course outside of technology to make extensive use of computer conferencing. It also led the world, outside of the US, in the teaching of sophisticated techniques such as scenario planning. It also was the initial basis for my internationally recognised academic research which led to more than 60 academic publications, many of which were in refereed international journals. These were the main output from more than a decade of research in marketing (15 papers) and especially - by the Futures Observatory research team I led – in long-range marketing and corporate planning (40 papers). Externally funded by a number of multinationals and supported by the EC, its output (based on input from more than 5,000 organisations) was internationally recognised by the wider community not just that of academics; and, as such, led to me advising a range of organisations, including the DTI, the European Commission (EC), UNCTAD and UNESCO.
6. On 1 April 1993 I was elected by its members to become Head of the ‘Centre for Strategy and Policy’; one of the five newly formed Centres within which the OUBS academics could choose to work – much like the subject departments in other universities. In this role, much like a department head elsewhere, I was the line manager for the half dozen academics in the Centre, as well as providing academic leadership in these subjects. I resigned this position, as from 31 December 1995, when I went on extended study leave and was no longer in a position to manage these academics on a regular basis.
7. For the first five years of OBS, in particular when – before the recruitment of the new professors (including Roland Kaye) - it was located off campus in Stony Stratford, the School was a much closer knit community than later; when it expanded to ten times the size. Indeed, it earlier operated almost as a family unit, with only David Asch failing to sign up to this culture. It was just 30 strong when its half dozen or so academics – myself included – wrote the whole of its phenomenally successful new MBA.
8. As such, it is important to note that my first formal stress complaint was not reported until five years after I joined. The intervening years, under Andrew Thompson, were some of the most enjoyable and productive of my whole career.
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