UCLA Chair in Business and Society, global leader on strategy

Afternoon Master Class:
‘Strategic Diagnosis and Actions’ (November 28, 2.30-5.30pm)
Presentation:
Keys to Good Strategy in Volatile Times (November 30, 1.30pm)

Richard Rumelt is the Harry and Elsa Kunin Professor of Business & Society at UCLA , a graduate school of business and management. He was voted to be one of the “Top 50 Business Thinkers” in the world (rank 20 in 2011) by the Thinkers50 program, sponsored by the Harvard Business Review and McGraw Hill. His teaching, research and consulting focus on competitive strategy, the nature of competitive advantage, industry dynamics and general management.

He is the author of Good Strategy/Bad Strategy–The Difference and Why It Matters. This book was chosen as one of six finalists for the 2011 Financial Times & Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. He is also a co-author of Fundamental Issues in Strategy–A Research Agenda and the author of Strategy, Structure, and Economic Performance.

He has been a consultant to numerous firms, non-profit organizations, the Department of Defense and several governments. He earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley. He studied decision sciences and corporate strategy at the Harvard Business School, receiving his doctorate in 1972.

He was on the faculty of the Harvard Business School, with two of those years spent on assignment in Tehran to found the Harvard-sponsored Iran Center for Management Studies. In 1976 he joined the UCLA faculty. During 1992-96 he was on long-term leave from UCLA, serving on the faculty at INSEAD, France. At INSEAD, he headed the Corporate Renewal Initiative, a research/intervention center devoted to the study and practice of corporate transformation.

His keynote will introduce the concepts of “good” and “bad” strategy and explain the logic underlying each.

• “Bad Strategy” is long on goals and visions and short on presenting a coherent set of actions for actually solving the fundamental problems facing an organization.
• “Good Strategy” flows from an honest diagnosis of the situation and from a focus on overcoming a critical challenge. Couples problem-solving policies to proximate objectives which the organization can actually accomplish.

President, Society for Knowledge Economics; Non Executive Director, Telstra, Medibank and David Jones

Presentation:
Wicked Conversations!…… that drive alignment and innovation (November 30, 1.30pm)

Steve is the founding President of the Society for Knowledge Economics (SKE), a not for profit think tank established in 2005.

The SKE encourages new and better practices in the leadership and management of human and other intangible resources that create economic and social value in knowledge based and globally connected economies. Steve has more than thirty years’ experience in the Information Technology and on line Media industry and has lived and worked in Australia the USA and Asia.

From January 2007 to September 2008 Steve led Worldwide Sales and International Operations for Microsoft Corporation’s Online Services Group (OSG). He was responsible for the organization’s international business in more than 30 countries around the world. Steve was Vice President of Microsoft in Australia and New Zealand from 2003 to January 2007.  Between 1998 and 2002, Steve was Chief Executive Officer of ninemsn, the online joint venture between Microsoft and Australian media industry leader Publishing and Broadcasting Limited.

Other roles Steve has held include, Vice President and Managing Director of Apple Computer Asia Pacific (1996 to 1998), Managing Director of Apple Computer Australia (1994 to 1995) and14 years with IBM Australia in a number of sales, marketing and general management positions. The Australian Financial Review has twice included Steve in the top five listing of the most influential members of the Australian technology industry. Steve was appointed a non-executive Director of Telstra in September 2009 and a non-executive Director of Medibank in October 2011. Steve holds a degree in Civil Engineering (with Honors) from the University of New South Wales.

Managing Partner McKinsey & Company

Presentation:
Love, fear and high performance (November 30, 1.30pm)

Michael Rennie has 25 years’ experience at the leading edge of management innovation and for many years has been the Global leader of McKinsey’s Organisation Behaviour practice, which covers organisation performance including innovation.

He is known as an innovator inside McKinsey, for founding radical approaches to organisation performance which holistically integrate the deeply personal dimensions of awareness and meaning with the external performance drivers of structure, process and measurement.

Michael has honors degrees in law & economics, studied languages & history in Switzerland and has a Master’s degree in Arts from Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar.