Clive Holtham
Bayes Business School, City, University of London
Biography
Professor of Information Management at Bayes Business School, City, University of since 1988. His background is in accounting and technology, latterly with active development of arts-based engagement in management studies. He has led large EU and UK funded projects on technology, knowledge and management education. Director of the Bayes Learning Laboratory since 2003, this has involved many initiatives and collaborations in educational innovation, including reflective journaling for leadership, learning by wandering around (the dérive), and novel learning spaces: physical, virtual and imaginative. His interest in roleplay simulations began with paper-based, which has evolved through VLE- based into generative AI based simulations. With colleague Martin Rich, in 2018 Clive won a “most innovative pedagogy of the year” award from the International Management of Organisational Behaviour Teaching Society for the dérive. He is co-founder of the Centre for Creativity for Professional Practice at City, which created the unique multi-disciplinary Masters in Innovation, Creativity and Leadership. The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists is the City of London’s 100th Livery company, and Clive is a founding liveryman and was a member of the Court. He is author of a large number of publications, and lectures, broadcasts and consults in the UK and internationally.
Sessions
Learning about management education from Stafford Beer
Stafford Beer spent substantial parts of his working life engaged in close connections with universities and their academic staff, as well as with independent researchers and thinkers. At the same time, he was deeply sceptical about the ability of institutions, not least universities, to undertake the radical changes he advocated to align the management of major public and private institutions with the interests of individuals, societies and the well-being of the planet. His detailed study on the organisation of Manchester Business School in 1970 (Beer, 1970), not surprisingly, focused on moving to reorganising its management around the principles of the VSM. Although teaching and learning is barely touched upon, the study does begin with a valuable emphasis that the value of management education is not to be found in league tables, but in how far alumni have actually contributed as managers to real world improvements as a result of their studies. The societal problems Beer identified over 50 years ago, if anything, have significantly worsened. Yet universities and professions were never likely to be willing or able to unthink their entrenched habits. This Festschrift chapter builds on over three decades of management education experiences based on explicit development of innovative teaching and learning methods. A wide variety of management educators have explicitly drawn directly and successfully on the work of Beer in their own teaching and learning innovations. (Adams,1993; Liber, 2004; Ward & Mayrhofer, 2015) . In our own case, he provided more of a continuous underpinning. Since 2022 our work has focused on the implications of generative AI for business education, and have increasingly found value in Beer's own innovative thinking since the 1960s relating to knowledge, technology, cognition and learning, in particular via Designing Freedom (Beer, 1974).