An audience of students and faculty members attended the first SPS Strategy Club event at the University of Huddersfield Business School on 5 December. The audience also included Professor Christopher Cowton, Dean of the Business School.
John Anchor, Head of the department of Strategy and Marketing, introduced Kim Warren, teaching Fellow at London Business School and creator of the Strategy Dynamics Approach, and Richard Stephenson, a highly experienced strategy practitioner. They presented a similar talk to one recently delivered at St Andrews Business School, titled ‘Where was strategy in the crisis?’, exploring the broken relationship between strategy and finance and the urgent need to fix this. They also focused on the interdependency between business functions, the need to break down non-reciprocally operating information silos, and the importance of joined-up thinking.
Feedback from both students and staff has been positive, says Anchor. “The students enjoyed the use of scenario planning by the presenters. For them, this helped to bridge the gap between their classroom experience and the application of strategy tools and techniques in the business world. Academic colleagues were also particularly interested in this aspect.”
University of Huddersfield Business School have been a keen supporter of the SPS Strategy Clubs initiative from the start, and more events will follow early in 2012. Future events will also be open to SPS members and local business people.
Anchor is very positive about the event and the SPS Strategy Club Initiative. “We have been corporate members of SPS for a number of years. I am also a Fellow. Strategy is a core element of both the undergraduate and postgraduate curriculum and is therefore of considerable importance to both students and staff. I welcome the initiatives by SPS to professionalise strategy and to make it more like other professional bodies representing functional areas.”