Original Thinking Podcast

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.

In this episode, Felicity talks about the evolution of behavioural insights from a phrase coined by a small government team in 2010 to a policy approach that touches the lives of millions of people around the world. She also discusses her current areas of focus and where behavioural insights might be used in the next 10 years.

This event was facilitated by Liz Richardson, Professor of Public Administration at the University of Manchester.

This month we hear from Amna Abdullatif, councillor for Ardwick, Central Manchester.

Amna is a community psychologist who has worked in the voluntary sector for over 15 years, previously leading the work on children and young people for the national domestic abuse charity Women's Aid and currently as assistant director for youth empowerment at the Anne Frank Trust. 

She completed her masters in community psychology and has her thesis 'The voices of women in the Arab Spring' published in the Journal of Social Science Education. She has presented her studies and work internationally including in Palestine, Lebanon, Estonia & New Zealand. She has also had a chapter published in The Anthology of Silence which explores cultures of silence around abuse. 

She was elected as a local Councillor representing the ward of Ardwick in Central Manchester in 2019 as the first visibly Muslim and Arab heritage woman to be elected in Manchester. 

In the summer of 2021, alongside two friends she launched a viral campaign to ban racists from football which was signed by over 1.2 million people and made national and international press as The Three Hijabis. She is currently working to set this up as an organisation that tackles racism and provides the tools to challenge it in our work places and communities.

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

Dr Mark Britnell, Vice Chair and Global Health Expert, KPMG UK, and award-winning author, delivers this year’s Teddy Chester lecture, Human: Solving the global workforce crisis in healthcare.

By 2030, the world will be short of 18 million health workers – a fifth of the total capacity to care. Mark draws on his work in 80 countries to offer solutions to this growing crisis and presents unique insights on what works, and what doesn’t.

Reframing the global workforce problem to one of health and national wealth, Mark invites us to refashion this wicked problem in new, adaptive ways in order to enhance productivity and prosperity. Harnessing technology, he asks us to reimagine new models of care and levels of workforce agility whilst always remembering that the kind heart of a human is the essence of care.

For 11 years, Mark was Global Head of Healthcare at KPMG International and Global Chair of Infrastructure, Government and Healthcare for 3 years. He is one of the foremost global experts on healthcare systems and has a pioneering and inspiring global vision for health in both the developed and developing world. Mark has dedicated his entire professional life to healthcare and has led organisations at local, regional, national and global levels –provider and payer, public and private. Over the past 11 years, he has worked in over 80 countries on circa. 345 occasions, gaining a unique first-hand experience.

This annual lecture marks the contribution of Teddy Chester, who was the first professor of social administration at the University of Manchester. From his appointment in the early 1950s, to his retirement in the 1970s he was an influential pioneer in management development, using evidence and research with policy makers, and working with clinical leaders. He was involved in founding and leading the NHS Graduate Training Scheme, and in founding Manchester Business School.

Mark will be joined by Charlotte Refsum, Global Healthcare Executive at KPMG, and the event will be facilitated by Naomi Chambers, Professor of Health Management at Alliance Manchester Business School.

This month we will hear from Jennie Johnson MBE, CEO and co-founder, My First Five Years Limited.

Authentically passionate about improved outcomes for every child, Jennie’s most recent eureka moment in January 2021 led her to founding My First Five Years Ltd, a ground-breaking App to support and empower parents and provide expert knowledge to guide their child(ren) through the unique journey of their first five years.

Formerly Founder and CEO of the multi-award winning Kids Allowed, Jennie is renowned for being down to earth and incredibly honest about the highs and lows of juggling motherhood and running award winning businesses. Awarded an MBE for services to Apprenticeships in 2016, she was the first female to be awarded CEO of the Year in 2017 and Businesswoman of the Year in 2019.

More details about My First Five Years can be found at https://www.mffy.com/

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

This event will be hosted by Anthony Rafferty, Professor of Employment Studies and Managing Director of the Work and Equalities Institute at Alliance MBS.

The people management case for workplace equality, diversity and inclusion is often made in terms of ethical or social responsibility reasons, or the benefits to the bottom line of a ‘business case.’ In this Original Thinking lecture, Anthony will examine evidence for an argument traversing both perspectives: That workplace discrimination leads to an under-utilisation of skill and human potential that can be harmful to the individual, society but also business performance and productivity.

Evidence will be presented from across 30 European countries showing that people who report workplace discrimination across a range of protected characteristics (sex, age, ethnicity, religion, disability or sexual orientation) are more likely to report having skills that they do not fully utilise in their job. For some, discrimination also appears to be linked to under-skilling or inadequate training. Potential explanations will also be discussed, with specific attention given to how discrimination may affect the quality of line manager relationships. Anthony will also consider implications for leadership and broader people management practice.

This event will be facilitated by Professor Jill Rubery, Executive Director of the Work and Equalities Institute at Alliance Manchester Business School

This month we will hear from Kathleen Harrison, Associate Director, Jacobs. With over 20 years’ experience in the construction industry, Kathleen is an Associate Director with Jacobs working as a Framework Manager delivering projects for a local authority in North West England. Having worked in a male dominated environment for her entire career, she is passionate about promoting gender equality, inclusion and STEM, and over the last 5 years she has become an advocate for positive mental health in the workplace.

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