Staff Achievements
The School of Management is committed to developing high quality teaching, research and community engagement that reflects our ideal location at the heart of New Zealand government and business – in Tourism Management, Māori Business, Management Studies and Human Resource Management.
The School of Management provides a creative and inspiring learning environment for its students and staff. Some recent School of Management staff profiles are given below:
On this page:
- Jim Sheffield
- Stephen Blumenfeld
- Kala Retna
- Dr Todd Bridgman
- Dr Mondher Sahli
- Prof Stephen Cummings
- Dr Christian Schott
Jim Sheffield
Victoria team wins national business case competition
A team from Victoria Business School (VBS) took out the top spot at a national business case competition in Auckland with a compelling pitch on how to restructure a loss-making manufacturer.Tom Mathews, Nigel Salmons, Ben Land Maycock and Tim Russell travelled to Auckland on April 20th to compete with universities around the country at the first of a year-long series of business case competitions run by the Student Development Society (SDS).
Each armed with expertise from the full spectrum of VBS subjects, the team was locked in a guarded room in Auckland University of Technology’s Business School with two laptops and given five hours to prepare a case. During this time they could not access the web or their supporters—no cell phones or other communication devices were allowed in.The group had to quickly absorb 24 pages of briefing materials, which outlined the difficult choices faced by Opel, a loss-making auto manufacturer jointly owned by General Motors, and the US and German governments. Their choices included liquidation, divestment, and restructuring to meet either the European or Chinese markets.
Their coach, Dr Jim Sheffield from the School of Management, says the students worked exceptionally well together.
“Although I wasn’t in the room, the team reported that they’d each come to the same conclusion—to restructure Opel for the European market—so they could quickly work on the details that matched their expertise.”
They prepared a sharply etched board-level presentation that identified the impact of restructuring on stakeholders and how implementation would be approached. They then presented it to a panel of four judges, the other teams, coaches and members of the public.
“Their presentation combined admirable inter-personal skills, powerful communication and compelling analysis. It was a formidable display that that wilted the opposition. The judges needed no time to identify the winning team,” says Dr Sheffield.
The next round of the competition begins in mid-May.
Caption information: L to R: Tom Mathews (BCA Economics and BA Maths and Philosophy), Nigel Salmons (BCA Management and Marketing and LLB), Jim Sheffield (Coach), Ben Land Maycock (LLB.hons and BA International Relations and Political Studies) and Tim Russell (BCA Finance and International Business and LLB)
Stephen Blumenfeld
Dr Stephen Blumenfeld, Director of the Industrial Relations Centre and Senior Lecturer in HRIR , has been in demand from the media during this period of high profile industrial disputes. Stephen has provided an independent perspective on the Ports of Auckland dispute, in particular examining the employer’s desire for increased productivity against their employment relations strategy. Stephen’s specialty is collective bargaining and the union’s role in the workplace so he has been able to apply his extensive knowledge of the research in this area to the current situation. The IRC’s database of collective employment agreements has also been able provided valuable information on the current employment conditions across all the ports in New Zealand and has enabled Stephen to provide informed comment on the current dispute. Below link is Dr Stephen Blumenfeld interview on "Breakfast News" Tuesday 6th March 2012.
View interview on TVNZ's Breakfast
Kala Retna
In extending our on-going successes in teaching and learning, this year VMS celebrates the success of Dr Kala Retna in receiving a Victoria University Teaching Excellence Award.
Kala has strong passion for teaching. She believes that every student has inner ability and potential to learn. Her role as a teacher and facilitator has inspired and motivated students at different levels. They have described her as not only a teacher but a person who pays considerable attention to the development of their individual growth as students. Her approach to teaching is scholarly and research-based. She draws on innovative practices, case studies and powerful stories to facilitate the integration of complex management concepts and theories and discusses their implication for practice. Kala places great importance on the teacher-student relationship. Her enthusiasm for teaching inspires students and supports them on their learning journey.
School of Management has had a great deal of success with this award over the past few years. Last year, Dr Paul McDonald (Management) and Dr Christian Schott (Tourism) also won Victoria University Teaching Excellence Awards.
Todd Bridgman
Todd Bridgman’s case on the controversy surrounding the filming of The Hobbit in New Zealand was selected as a finalist in the Dark Side Case Competition at the 2011 Academy of Management Conference in San Antonio.
The case, ‘The Battle for Middle Earth: New Zealand’s Bid to Save the Hobbit’, co-authored with Dr Colm McLaughlin from University College Dublin, prompts students to consider the relative power of multinational corporations versus nation states. It also examines the industrial relations issues surrounding the filming of The Hobbit, which focus on the status of actors as independent contractors versus employees. Now in its eighth year, the Dark Side Case Competition is designed to encourage and acknowledge case writing that addresses the dark side of contemporary capitalism.
Todd won the Dark Side Case Competition at the 2009 Academy of Management Conference in Chicago with his case study entitled The dark side of light-handed regulation: The death of Folole Muliaga. Both cases feature in his course MGMT 202 Organisational Behaviour.
Mondher Sahli
Congratulations to Sylvain Petit, Jean-Jacques Nowak and Mondher Sahli for their paper "Intra-Industry Trade and Vertical Differentiation in Tourism Services", which was judged by a panel of IATE council members (excluding authors of full papers) as the best full paper submitted to and presented at the 2011 IATE conference (4-7th July 2011, Bournemouth University, UK ). Mondher has been re-elected Secretary-General of the International Association for Tourism Economics (IATE) for a second term (2011-2013). The IATE secretariat is located at Victoria Management School since 2010. You can visit IATE website: International Association for Tourism Economics.
(From left to right: Mondher Sahli, Jean-Jacques Nowak and Sylvain Petit).
Professor Stephen Cummings
Get The Answers: Creativity and design must fit with strategy
Prof Stephen Cummings, Professor of Strategy at Victoria University and co-author of Creative Strategy: Reconnecting Business and Innovation and The Strategy Pathfinder, says new and innovative practices may well be best developed by a firm's own staff. A growing awareness in New Zealand is that creativity and design are key factors in having a successful business but are not the only components. All the proper processes must be integrated as well.
How can creativity and design add value in a sustained way?
The key is to see creativity as a strategic process.It's easy to single out innovative things like the iPad, but that product isn't what makes Apple successful across the long term - their success is because of a process, and innovation is just one part of an integrated process for creative strategy. For example, we're starting to get results from a study by Victoria Management School and Victoria's School of Design on the relationship between Australasian companies that have won design awards and their financial performance.
We can't see any.
This suggests that creative design, in and of itself, is not a panacea - for a design to add sustained value it must connect with an organisation's existing strategy, be led to market effectively and reflect or lead to an organisational process that generates further creativity. In Creative Strategy, we found that organisations that created sustained value had clearly integrated processes of innovation, entrepreneurship, leadership and organisation.
What case studies are you aware of where this kind of strategic creativity has turned a business around?
At Air New Zealand, I like the way CEO Rob Fyfe encouraged employees to help him simplify the company's strategy by drawing it, and now you can see tangible examples of Air New Zealand's strategic approach in recent innovations: new kiosks, innovative seating and bio-fuels.
This simplification contributes to people actually understanding the company's strategy and subsequently being able to help contribute to creating future strategies. A lesser known example is what Shaun Coffey's team have done at Industrial Research. Their "What's Your Problem New Zealand?" competition is one of the most strategic creative processes I've seen in the past 10 years. We also look at less conventional organisational leaders in "Creative Strategy", such as Arsenal football manager Arsene Wenger and designer Trelise Cooper. What these cases share is that their leaders operate from "the middle". They find ways of getting involved with their people, figuring out that they are a great source of unique creative strategies for the future.
How can a business rediscover that creative energy it had at its inception?
Creative strategies generally start from recognising a failing in the market. But as companies grow, systems emerge that discourage focusing on failings.
One of the most effective approaches for sparking creative strategies in any organisation is to talk frankly about "worst practice": where did we (or other companies) stuff up, what do we learn from that and what are we going to do differently? While encouraging discussion about worst as opposed to best practice may seem counter-intuitive, it's not if you recall that the things that lead you to adapt and develop are more likely to be failures than successes. Encourage your people to nominate and sponsor promising practices within your organisation or to develop potential "next practices" that would leap-frog current notions of best practice.
Is it necessary to have external help to tap that creativity in your business?
It can be helpful, but it's not necessary. If you can first find ways of helping employees understand your organisation's strategy, and then develop processes that enable them to create strategies that add to this, then it's likely that the best creative strategy consultants for your organisation to engage already work there. By Gill South New Zealand Herald, July, 2011
Christian Schott
Outstanding Presentation Award
Dr Christian Schott from Victoria Management School’s Tourism Management Group received an ‘Outstanding Presentation Award’ at the 2011 Business Enterprise for Sustainable Tourism Education Network Conference recently. The conference, hosted by Temple University in Philadelphia this year, is the most established global conference dedicated to sustainable tourism.
Dr Schott’s presentation, entitled 'Education as a Visitor Management Technique in Remote Protected Areas', critically examined the role of education as an effective management technique based on research conducted in the remote Sub-Antarctic Island of South Georgia.