Martin Sandbrook,
I joined Bath Spa University in 2003 after a career as an accountant, a manager and a consultant.
My belief is that the managers and leaders of the future need to develop an integrating and systems-based ‘mindset’ and that our programmes at BSU, especially at post-graduate level, need to contribute to this. I am currently developing a new MBA, to start in 2010, which will have such thinking at its heart and searching for other ways to engage organizational managers in rethinking their approach to change.
These developments are based on an increasing realization that the ‘mechanistic’ metaphors we use in management, the heroic assumption that leaders and managers can make predictable and manageable interventions to change organizations, are not born out by our own experience. Organisations do not behave in the way that machines behave. Organisations are messy, complex, ever changing yet staying the same, with cultures that, far from being imposed by leaders, somehow emerge, or self-organise, from the complex interaction of their people, their products and their context. In this respect, the metaphors of biology and ecological systems seem closer to what we experience than such metaphors as ‘brain as computer’ or ‘organization as machine’.
Such thinking has profound implications for management, suggesting a move from ‘planned intervention’ to ‘try it and see’ approaches to change. It also has deep implications for the relationship of organisations to the much wider system within which we all exist. Concepts such as ‘sustainability’ also emerge from this ‘systemic’ view.
Meet some students:
Why I chose Bath Spa
I think the primary reason for choosing this...
Field trips
Environmental
Science is a particularly valuable...
Field Trip to Chew Valley Lake
This field trip consisted of a visit to Chew...
My courses
