inbusiness issue 16

Employee engagementBuilding loyalty around the globe

Follow the orders, follow the moneyTracking market flows to predict growth

Giving business a leg upHow Cass helps new entrepreneurs

banksDo the

need watching?Can supervision put a stopto excessive risk taking?

Issue 16

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InBusiness Issue 16 Winter / Spring 2012

Contents 24The innovation superhighwayCass research reveals fundamental shortcomings in the way some firms approach innovation.

28Corporate profile BNY Mellon EMEA CEO Michael Cole-Fontayn explains why traditional banking values hold true.

32Development highlightsFundraising and campaign news from across Cass Business School.

33Opinion pieceProfessor Vincent-Wayne Mitchell argues that advertising spend should rise during a recession.

34Opinion pieceCompanies should measure their employees' output, not just hours sat at a desk, advises Alison Maitland.

04Snapshots News and events from around Cass in the second half of 2011.

06Let's get engaged!How companies can generate high levels of employee engagement to get the best from their staff.

10Bridging the Gulf Home working initiatives could help women enter the workforce and boost Arab economies.

18Go with the flowResearch shows that tracking stock market order flows can predict economic growth areas.

20A leg up for new businessCass's Centre for Entrepreneurship is nurturing Britain's next business success stories.

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Cass Business School In2002,CityUniversity’sBusinessSchoolwasrenamedSirJohnCassBusinessSchoolfollowingagenerousdonationtowardsthedevelopmentofitsnewbuildinginBunhillRow.TheSchool’snameisusuallyabbreviatedtoCassBusinessSchool.

Sir John Cass’s Foundation SirJohnCass’sFoundationhassupportededucationinLondonsincethe18thcenturyandtakesitsnamefromitsfounder,SirJohnCass,whoestablishedaschoolinAldgatein1710.BornintheCityofLondonin1661,SirJohnservedasanMPfortheCityandwasknightedin1713.

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InBusiness | Issue 16

14Do the banks need watching?Is regulation the key to keeping banks in check?

IMAGE BY GETTY IMAGES

COVER IMAGE BY GETTY IMAGES

Snapshots


04 | News and events Sharing the debate

Cass Business School regularly organises and hosts fora to share new ideas, expert knowledge and vision – and to stimulate informed and challenging debate. Here is a brief glimpse of what business, political and academic leaders are thinking and saying, plus the latest news from Cass.

October 2011

Spotlight on the Vickers report into banking reformThe Association of Corporate Treasurers (ACT) debated proposals for banking reform at Cass. John Grout, Policy and Technical Director of the ACT, chaired the forum entitled 'Spotlight on the Vickers report – the real-world effect'.

The panel comprised Eric Anstee, Chief Executive of City of London Group; Dr Peter Hahn, Lecturer in Finance at Cass; Greg Thwaites, of the Independent Commission on Banking; and Lord Myners, the former City minister.

Dr Hahn said that the report was too retrospective and overlooked key issues; Lord Myners said that its recommendations did little to address the moral issues that brought about the financial crisis.

www.cass.city.ac.uk/vickersreport

July 2011

Cass and Dubai's Hawkamah strike governance dealCass signed a memorandum of understanding with Hawkamah, the Institute for Corporate Governance in Dubai. The agreement was signed at the Dubai International Financial Centre by Hawkamah’s Executive Director, Dr Nasser Saidi, and Cass’s Regional Director, Middle East and North Africa, Ehsan Razavizadeh.

Cass and Hawkamah will collaborate to raise awareness of corporate governance through the joint hosting of workshops, seminars and networking events. The two organisations will also conduct research into corporate governance in the Middle East, with Hawkamah supporting the work of Cass students with, for example, their dissertations. www.cass.city.ac.uk/hawkamah

July 2011

Paul Volcker lambasts ring-fencing proposalsPaul Volcker, the former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, attacked Britain’s plans to ring-fence retail banking operations. Delivering the annual Mais Lecture at Cass, he told students, alumni and City professionals that “critical details are lacking” in the proposals put forward by the Government’s Independent Commission on Banking. They failed to address the crucial question of how to cope with future financial failures.

Mr Volcker also said he was concerned by attempts to “resist new regulatory discipline for fear of impairing the markets”. He has given his name in the US to the Volcker Rule after campaigning to prohibit deposit-taking institutions from risky activities such as proprietary trading, private equity and hedge fund investment. www.cass.city.ac.uk/maislecture2011

October 2011

Outspoken teacher asks: Is British education broken?In the Sir John Cass's Foundation Lecture Katharine Birbalsingh, one of Britain’s most outspoken teachers, said that teaching facts or lists that relied on memory skills in schools was now considered “old-fashioned” and “boring”.

In her lecture, 'Is the British education system broken?', she claimed that children were being left ignorant of facts as progressive education methods failed to teach them the most basic knowledge. She said: “In the last 30 years, the concept of teaching knowledge has nearly disappeared.”

Miss Birbalsingh made headlines at the 2010 Conservative Party conference with a damning speech on the state of England’s schools.

www.cass.city.ac.uk/casslecture2011HawkamahDirectorNickNadalwithCassRegionalDirectorEhsanRazavizadeh

KatharineBirbalsinghexaminedthestateofBritisheducationintheSirJohnCass'sFoundationLecture

FormerFederalReserveChairmanPaulVolcker

Cass Knowledge Access research for business www.cassknowledge.com

Cass Talks Hear our experts’ views www.cass.city.ac.uk/casstalks


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With a panel comprising Bob Swarup, a Partner at Pension Corporation; Daniel Capocci, Senior Investment Manager at Architas Multi-Management; and Simon Leslie, a Hedge Fund Investment Consultant at Cambridge Associates, the discussion covered fees, management, diversification, yields and how funds of funds needed to adapt to survive.

Dr Motson said: “I think we can conclude that funds of funds are by no means dead. However it is certainly not business as usual. Funds of hedge funds have had to adapt in order to survive and those that have not adapted will struggle. Most likely there is a bright future for the hedge fund industry – it just isn’t the one that people foresaw prior to the recent crisis.”

Cass is the first business school in the UK and one of four in the world to form an academic partnership with the CAIA, sponsor of the only globally recognised professional certification in alternative investments.

www.cass.city.ac.uk/caia

The Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA) Association held its first joint event with Cass following the signing of an academic partnership in June 2011.

The event, led by Dr Nick Motson, Lecturer in Finance at Cass, studied the fact that despite total assets managed by single-manager hedge funds reaching new highs in the first half of 2011, the assets managed by funds of hedge funds were almost 20% below their peak of $800 billion in 2007.

November 2011

Cass consultancy service launchedCass Consulting, a research and consultancy service, was launched to provide credible, tailored and independent insight into business problems and to offer recommendations from academic consultants with relevant industry experience. Areas of expertise include financial and professional services, business management and the third sector.

Cass has already completed successful projects for businesses such as UBS, Microsoft, Barclays Wealth, BNY Mellon, Deutsche Bank, Swiss Reinsurance and Ernst & Young and for government. In many cases this has led to ongoing collaboration. Cass also collaborates with regulatory bodies such as the Financial Services Authority, the Bank of England and the

“There is a future for funds of hedge funds -- it just isn't the one people foresaw prior to the recent crisis.”

Dr Nick Motson, Lecturer in Finance, Cass

International Monetary Fund. Dr Christina Makris, Cass

Consulting’s Business Development Manager, says: “Research at Cass is focused on applying knowledge for a practical purpose. By taking theoretical, academic research and applying it to real-world contexts, Cass Consulting can provide innovative and insightful solutions.”

Cass Consulting is showcased on the newly redesigned Cass Knowledge – Research for business website (www.cassknowledge.com), which gives businesses access to specialist academic knowledge in a usable format, helping them to make informed and real-world decisions. All research papers can be searched by topic, industry or author.

www.cassknowledge.com

November 2011

Future of funds of hedge funds debated at first Cass and CAIA partnership event

ThenewCassKnowledgewebsitegivesbusinessesaccesstothelatestCassacademicresearch

Leadingplayersinpensionandhedgefundmanagementdiscussedthefutureforfundsoffunds

Cass events Register for forthcoming events www.cass.city.ac.uk/events

Cass in the news Keep updated with news from Cass www.twitter.com/cassinthenews

Cass connection Stay connected with Cass www.facebook.com/cassofficial

06 | Feature Employee engagement


I f your workforce is passionate about your organisation, committed, motivated, happy and aligned with corporate

objectives and values – in short, engaged – it’s pretty clear you have an edge.

Companies with highly engaged employees have almost four times the earnings-per-share growth rate of similar firms with lower levels of engagement, according to market research by Gallup.

Hay Group, the human resources consultancy, claims that highly engaged employees can improve business performance by up to 30%. Fully engaged employees are 2.5 times more likely to exceed performance expectations than “disengaged” colleagues.

With statistics like these being bandied about, directors across the globe are saying, “We’ll have some of what they’re having.”

As many companies downsize, or at least tighten their belts, keeping employees energised and focused is

a real challenge, however thankful they may be still to have a job.

Building loyaltyIn countries such as India and China the challenge is equal but opposite. There the problem is staff retention – because in booming markets, where skills are in short supply, there are many opportunities for employees to earn more money and to develop elsewhere. Learning how to engage employees and build loyalty to the organisation is crucial to hanging on to the staff who will create a company's future success.

So does staff engagement mean the same thing in these very different business contexts? And if not, what are the implications for multinational organisations?

These questions were behind research commissioned by the Society of Human Resource Management Foundation in the US from a team of academics including Veronica Hope-Hailey, Professor of Strategic Human

Resource Management at Cass Business School, and Dr Elaine Farndale, Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Resource Studies at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

A Study of the Link between Performance Management and Employee Engagement in Western Multinational Corporations Operating across India and China looked at four companies headquartered in either Britain or the Netherlands which also had operations in India and China.

Although the companies had different histories and structures, what the Human Resources departments meant when they talked about “engagement” seemed to be very similar. This was true, too, in the different countries in which they were represented. Interviewees all used words such as passion, commitment, motivation, happiness and alignment with the organisation’s objectives and values.

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Staff who like their work and want to stay are a prized asset. So how can a company generate a high level of engagement?

Caroline Scotter Mainprize looks at recent research.

Let's get engaged!

IMAGES BY JAMES LINCOLN

08 | Feature Employee engagement

Faster growthAkzoNobel is a Dutch multinational producing paints, finishes and specialty chemicals. An HR Manager at AkzoNobel in China said: “Employee engagement is an internal force of the company. If employees have engagement, they can build the internal power of the company and work as a team. They can push the company to grow in the same direction and it will grow faster.”

Of course it is possible for people to be passionate, committed and motivated but apply these qualities only to their own job or their own team. They are engaged, but with what? This was a problem for AkzoNobel in India, which grew rapidly after acquiring ICI’s Indian operations in 2008.

“People connected most strongly with the individual brands for which they worked, such as Dulux,” says Professor Hope-Hailey. “AkzoNobel wanted to shift loyalty to the company as a whole, which would improve their flexibility.”

Both the companies studied in China faced the problem of skills shortages. So if they had people with the relevant skills, they wanted to hang on to them. They needed to tie people emotionally to the company, so they would not be easily tempted away by the offer of a higher salary or better benefits and training.

One problem that the research team identified was that none of the measures of engagement currently used delved into these distinctions. “They all used standard surveys. These are obviously useful for benchmarking purposes, but they are not necessarily focused enough,” says Dr Farndale. “There is quite a lot about general happiness, for example. But given that there are these different types or dimensions of engagement, it is essential to be clear about what types are being measured, and which of these are important for the company.”

Sense of familyThe study also highlighted crucial cultural differences in the ways that line managers connected with their subordinates. This would inevitably have an effect on employee engagement.

Simon Hardaker, Director of Employee Communications for GKN,

one of the companies studied, says: “In our experience what people in India, and to a similar extent in China, still have is a very strong sense of family. This is reflected in a typically paternal management style. Within the hierarchy this means that relationships may appear to be more like a parent and child than the peer-to-peer relationships common in Europe – but it also implies a sense of responsibility on both sides.”

These familial relationships between managers and subordinates mean that often employees are working for individual people rather than for the organisation – which means they are more likely to be job-engaged or role-engaged.

“Understanding these cultural differences is very important when it comes to interpreting results of the employee engagement survey,” says Simon Hardaker. “Questions which relate to staying with the organisation, for example, become very important when you’re looking at role-engaged locations. Knowing that means you can adapt your engagement strategy on a regional basis.”

Learning responsesThere were cultural differences, too, in how employees responded to surveys used to measure engagement. Typically, the Chinese culture is more modest: employees asked to rate their feelings on a scale of one to ten would not at first use marks at the extreme ends of the scale. Over time, though, they learned what responses were considered appropriate – they would learn how to do the surveys and the engagement scores would improve.

An immediate response to this is that it cannot be desirable. If people are “learning” responses, are they just telling management what they want to hear? To a certain extent, yes, but Dr Farndale says that in the context of engagement this is actually a good thing: “If they are adopting the same behaviours as colleagues in the rest of the organisation, it signals that they are more engaged: they are more aligned with how things are done at that company.”

So how do you induce a level of engagement in which people overcome their natural cultural bias

assumed to be down to the line manager to improve employee engagement. However, Dr Farndale says: “The interesting thing is that in none of the companies we studied did anyone make the connection between the performance management system and the employee engagement survey.”

Three of the companies involved in the study had standard corporate performance management systems in place, usually with a semi-annual review. These were used to determine budget allocations and individual pay awards, and sought to strike a balance between reaching targets and developing employees. An HR Director for GKN in Britain and China said: “Performance management in its rawest form of getting someone to work harder... it’s about having the skills to be more effective.”

and change their behaviour to mirror that within the corporate culture?

It was clear from everyone interviewed for the study that the line manager was the key figure in employee engagement. One Business Manager at AkzoNobel in India said: “For all employees, their immediate boss or supervisor is like the company.” Line managers form a link with corporate HR, but, even more importantly, because they are interacting daily with employees, they are very influential in modelling and rewarding desired behaviour.

Performance managementThe line manager is also the key figure in performance management – the person who conducts appraisals, makes recommendations and implements the performance management system. It is also


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Of course, in its rawest form, engagement might also be said to be about getting people to work harder, just as both engagement and performance management are about aligning with corporate objectives. But in all four companies, the performance management and employee engagement processes were conducted in parallel:

“Both systems were run by HR; both had line managers as lynchpins; but they were seen as two entirely separate activities,” says Professor Hope-Hailey.

In all the companies and cultures studied, performance management enhanced engagement when the process was seen to be leading to outcomes that were valued by the employee. This did not just mean pay rises or bonuses (though these also had their place), but

included measures such as training and development, job rotation and increased autonomy.

Target settingThe study also shows that being involved in target setting encourages employees to have positive feelings about their job and the organisation as a whole. The concept of the line manager and subordinate jointly discussing objectives is a central characteristic of most Western-originated performance management systems. But in the Chinese and Indian cultures it can be more difficult. Employees believe in a strong hierarchy and are more willing to take instruction from their line managers. So managers may find that it is effective to allow themselves some cultural leeway in the application of these standard systems.

“Employee engagement is still a fairly new concept, and though there is a broad consensus on what it means, there is still relatively little understanding of how best to measure it and what drives it,” said Professor Hope-Hailey. “This is particularly the case in multinational companies, which are operating across different business and employment contexts, as well as across different cultures.”

Source: A Study of the Link between Performance Management and Employee Engagement in Western Multinational Corporations Operating across India and China, by Professor Veronica Hope-Hailey, Professor of Strategic Human Resource Management at Cass; Dr Elaine Farndale, Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Resource Studies at Tilburg University; Dr Clare Kelliher, Reader in Work and Organisation at Cranfield School of Management; and Marc van Veldhoven, Professor of Work, Health and Well-Being at Tilburg University, funded by the Society for Human Resource Management Foundation.

Caroline Scotter Mainprize is a writer on management issues. She can be contacted at [email protected]

For more information on the research, contact [email protected]


Engagement criteria

The four dimensions of engagement identified by the studyDo you love your job? Do you spring out of bed each morning, filled with enthusiasm for performing your daily tasks?

If the answer is yes, it sounds as if you are engaged, but in a way that Professor Hope-Hailey, Dr Farndale et al have defined as job state engagement. Loving your job does not necessarily have any bearing on how well you do it and you may not feel the same way about the organisation as a whole.

If your passion is for the organisation, on the other hand, you are likely to be an example of organisation state engagement. You make a great ambassador for spreading the corporate brand.

These two types of “state” engagement are about how you feel. The two other dimensions of engagement concern behaviour: whether you are willing to go the extra mile and put in extra effort to complete the work.

Job behavioural engagement is about taking the initiative in your daily work and looking for development opportunities. Organisation behavioural engagement is about being proactive and coming up with suggestions about how to improve things at work.

Arguably, behavioural engagement may be more beneficial to firms from a productivity perspective, although anyone whose engagement is based on their job alone may be seen as at risk of being attracted elsewhere.

State engagement should not be dismissed as merely creating a pleasant environment for people to work in: all flourishing organisations need to ensure they have cheerleaders internally and ambassadors externally.

"If employees have engagement they can build the internal power of the company and work as a team."

10 | Feature Gulf workforce


Only months after graduating, Fatima is working on her employer’s major sponsorship

programme. The 26-year-old Emirati, who gained a bachelor’s degree in Marketing in Dubai in 2011, now plans to get a master’s degree. But she wasn’t always this ambitious.

“Before, I didn’t think about work. I thought work was for men and women raised families, but seeing other women working, it encouraged me,” she says. “Now I like to work, even after marriage.”

Her decision to work is not based on financial considerations. “When you are at home, you’re doing nothing and I would lose my confidence,” says Fatima, who did not want her last name to be used.

The transformation of Fatima’s opinion about the role of women in the jobs market is encouraging for the nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) as each seeks ways to reduce its dependency on oil

and natural gas and increase the participation of its nationals to make it less reliant on expatriate workers. Moreover, the GCC nations are eager to get returns on their significant investment in educating women.

Underused resourceThe GCC countries – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – have made great strides in educating women. A recent study, Maximising GCC Women’s Employment and Economic Contribution by British and Gulf academics, including Chris Rowley, Professor of Human Resource Management at Cass, found that in many GCC countries women university graduates outnumber men. In conservative Saudi Arabia, which has many social and legal restrictions on women such as banning them from driving, the female literacy rate and the percentage of women who hold university degrees are high.

Over half of university students in the Gulf Cooperation Council are women, yet female participation in the workforce stands at less than 20%...

Ryan Koorosh reports. ...Why?

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IMAGE BY ISTOCK

12 | Feature Gulf workforce

In the more liberal UAE and Qatar they are higher still.

In fact, more women than men have degrees. And the weighting is likely to remain in their favour as women comprise 60% of university students across all GCC nations.

However, the success in bridging the gender gap in education is not reflected in the workforce. The study found that women comprise only 19.2% – fewer than one in five – of the workforce in the GCC economies. This means that the countries are underusing a significant resource that could otherwise contribute greatly to their ambitions.

“The economic and social prosperity of the GCC depends on fully utilising the skills and contribution of all citizens, including women,” says the study, which was commissioned by Oxford Strategic Consulting (OSC).

Identity and cultureThe GCC has within it some of the richest nations in the world. According to the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) league table of countries by gross domestic product (nominal) per capita, Qatar’s GDP figure in 2010 was $74,901 per person, and the UAE’s was $57,884, putting them in third and fifth places respectively. Only 20 countries had a higher GDP per capita than Kuwait (Britain was 22nd); and Saudi Arabia came in 39th. Using the IMF’s list of countries assessed by purchasing power parity, Qatar was number one.

The authors of the study believe GCC nations can further grow their economies by providing opportunities for educated women to work from home. This, they believe, would counter objections based on religious beliefs and tradition.

“There is currently a [wide] availability of highly educated, skilled women across the GCC willing to enter the labour market, and large-scale home working initiatives could increase participation whilst maintaining national identity and culture,” says the study.

The authors believe that such arrangements could add two million qualified women to the workforce, increasing it by at least 12%. Women, they say, could contribute up to 30% to the combined GDP.

Improved efficiencyEbtihaj M. Al-Tuwaijri, who advocates women’s empowerment through the Women’s Cultural and Social Society in Kuwait, says increasing opportunities for women to work from home would allow them to be more efficient. “This allows people to work on their own schedule and cater to family. In fact, this leaves them more time to produce quality work,” she says.

The study argues that the Gulf nations’ modern infrastructure can accommodate many women working from home. It says: “[They] have achieved substantial advancements in communication technology, with the use of telephones and internet constantly increasing. This provides a fertile platform for home working initiatives to be a great success.”

The GCC is not a monolithic entity; a wide gap exists between the countries in their legal structures and social attitudes. Generally, the UAE and Bahrain are more open, Saudi Arabia and Oman more restricted. It is because of Saudi Arabia’s constraints that some Saudis, especially women, relocate to other GCC jurisdictions.

One of them is Badia Asaad. Ms Asaad moved first her publishing business and then her family’s furniture manufacturing business to the UAE from Saudi Arabia because of bureaucratic, social and legal restrictions there.

Preferential treatmentShe says: “In Saudi Arabia, if I have to go to a government office, I have to go to the women’s section, and often, because the most essential work is done in the men’s section, I have to go back with a man.

“In my country women can’t work [as easily]. What happens when I have to go back to the office to finish work? I need to have a driver. If one isn’t there, I can’t finish the work. So there are a lot of hassles for women.”

Moreover, she says, in the UAE women typically get preferential treatment, such as getting through bureaucratic processes more quickly, whereas in Saudi Arabia the reverse is often the case.

“I always wear the traditional Gulf dress – the abaya. In UAE


of the UAE may object to their wives pursuing a career. “I am OK with my wife working but I know some men here in Al Ain who think it’s shameful,” Mr AlHarthi says.

Nevertheless, the desire to care for children and family is given as the main reason why many women do not enter the GCC workforce. The authors of the study believe expanding opportunities to work from home would overcome this objection for many.

They say that having staff working from home would be beneficial for employers: it could help to attract and retain talent, cut overheads and allow employees to enjoy a better work/life balance.

A 2009 survey in the UK, for instance, found that workers collectively spend 4.6 million hours a day commuting. In the GCC area this problem is compounded because nationals often prefer to live

offices, because of it, I am respected and I go ahead of men. In Saudi Arabia, I have to cover my face, wait in a separate room and wait to be processed by a woman official.”

This attitude is reflected in the OSC survey. It found that about 20% of respondents across all GCC countries mentioned a husband’s objections as a barrier to women seeking employment. However, in Saudi Arabia, more than half – 60% – said their husbands would object.

Children and familyBut even in the UAE it is not unusual for a married woman to attend a job interview with her husband or ask her husband to speak to management if an issue arises.

Abdulllah AlHarthi, an Emirati engineer from Al Ain, the second largest city in Abu Dhabi, about 120km (75 miles) south of Dubai, says that some men in remote parts

"The economic and social prosperity of the GCC depends on fully utilising the skills and contribution of all citizens, including women."

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at this stage, employers lack the infrastructure and management skills to implement home working. The authors propose that states establish an intermediary company that would hire and train women to provide services from home. They also suggest that employers need to recruit trainers who are experienced in managing remote workers.

Ms Asaad says that changing attitudes is the most important element in bringing more women into the workforce, and that this is already happening in Saudi Arabia.

“In the last 15 to 20 years women have become more active,” she says. “About 20 years ago, banks didn’t have women [staff] but today you see them in Saudi banks. So change is coming, but very gradually.”

Economic securityProfessor Rowley says that if more professional women were in the workforce in the GCC area, it would change the cultural barriers that now exist but “only partly and long-term, as cultures, by their nature, are long held and slow moving.”

Expanding participation in the workforce would provide GCC nations with economic security and sustainability, the study says, because it would address the labour imbalance where expatriates make up 58% of the workforce, and as much as 87% in the UAE and Qatar.

“These figures indicate that GCC economies are heavily reliant on expatriate labour and this is detrimental in the long term and cannot ensure sustainable economic development. GCC governments have the opportunity and the means to change this and reclaim control over their economies by establishing a new trend of home working which will bring qualified females into senior and professional roles.”

Source: The Oxford Strategic Consulting report was compiled by Professor Chris Rowley, Director of the Centre for Research in Asian Management at Cass; and Professor William Scott-Jackson, Bashar Kariem, Andrew Porteous and Amira Harb of OSC.

Ryan Koorosh is a freelance writer. He can be contacted at [email protected]


Cass MBA in Dubai

Delivering in DubaiIf numbers tell a story, the Executive MBA programme that Cass launched in Dubai in 2007 speaks volumes.

The Cass Business School’s fifth Executive MBA (EMBA) course in Dubai enrolled 61 students in 2011, a jump of almost 75% since the first class. The current cohort includes 19 women from countries including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE.

Students follow the same discipline as their peers in London and finish the programme in two years. Once a month, Dubai’s EMBA students, who are drawn from across the Middle East and North Africa as well as places as far away as Singapore, Poland, Kazakhstan, Britain, Azerbaijan and the US, gather in Dubai and attend eight hours of classes a day for four days – Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

The Dubai programme offers specialisations in general management and leadership, entrepreneurship, conventional finance, Islamic finance, and energy, making it a global magnet for professionals.

The programme is delivered in collaboration with the Dubai

International Financial Centre (DIFC).

“When we started market research in 2003 to launch the programme, we reached the conclusion with the DIFC and Government of Dubai that it should offer Islamic finance and energy concentrations in addition to general management and leadership,” said Ehsan Razavizadeh, Dubai-based Cass Regional Director for the MENA region.

The programme’s flexibility and the opportunity it provides for networking directly and indirectly helps women who want to pursue education while raising a family and then work from home.

“If you are a homemaker with small children, this programme is ideal because it requires only a long weekend per month to attend the workshops,” Mr Razavizadeh said. “Moreover, it is not distance-learning – it brings people together from all round the world and it’s a great opportunity to network.”


outside city centres. While access to inexpensive labour allows many to hire drivers, the study found that distance from work presents a problem: in remote regions, many women would find it impossible to work. The report noted: “Many of the countries are trying to develop these regions to improve employment, but it is a slow process.”

Management skillsThe study acknowledges that GCC initiatives have allowed many women to establish small businesses and prosper, mainly selling hand-crafted goods or in catering services. The authors, however, hope GCC states can now extend opportunities to the large pool of highly educated professional women. Helplines, human resources, IT support and market research are areas in which women could work from home.

The study acknowledges that,

Financial institutions need sanctions, not just legislation, to

dissuade them from taking chances too far. Brooke Masters reports.

14 | Feature Banking regulation



Do thebanks

need watching?

T he financial crisis has made it abundantly clear that banks are not self-regulating institutions.

Left to themselves, they took on too much risk and failed to protect themselves from unexpected events. The taxpayer had to rescue everything from AIG and Citigroup to Royal Bank of Scotland and politicians promised they would change the laws and the culture to make sure it never happened again.

Now governments are struggling to work out the best way to keep their promises. Even the smartest and best-paid regulators could not examine and second guess every bank decision. Not only would the cost be prohibitive but the time involved could well kill off financial innovation. Bankers would have to be forced or persuaded to do it themselves.

So politicians have rushed to pass laws such as the Dodd-Frank financial reform act in the United States and the pending Financial Services Bill in Britain. Regulators and central bankers, meanwhile, have stepped up their efforts to audit and challenge banks as part of their regular supervision process. Some have also begun coming down harder on the violations they find with higher fines and more public sanctions. But no one is quite sure what will work best.

That is where research by Dr Manthos Delis, Senior Lecturer in Banking at Cass, and Panagiotis Staikouras, Assistant Professor of Law in the Department of Banking and Financial Management at the University of Piraeus, comes in. They looked at regulatory staffing levels as well as the frequency of inspections, audits and enforcement activity in 17 countries from 1998 to 2008 to see whether any of it had an impact on the amount of risk being run by the banking system in each country.

Actions, not wordsEssentially they were trying to answer the question: what is more important for curbing risk – adopting new laws and policies or regulators who are willing to confront and punish banks? Their study, Supervisory Effectiveness and Bank Risk, which was published in the Review of

Finance, the official journal of the European Finance Association, concludes that actions speak louder than words.

In countries where regulators conducted regular audits and frequently imposed sanctions when they uncovered bad or imprudent behaviour, banks ran fewer risks than those in countries where public sanctions were less common.

The authors also found that simply passing laws requiring specific behaviour did not have the same effect. Enforcement was an essential element.

The authors used databases of regulatory activity in each country and compared them with the level of risk in the banking system. They found that as supervisory activity went up, risk went down.

They measured risk in two different ways: they took the percentage of non-performing loans as an indicator of the credit risks the banks were running; and they divided each bank’s profits and equity capital by the variance in its reported profits over several years. The bigger and more volatile the profits, the more likely it was that the bank was running large and unpredictable risks.

On-site inspectionsBanks should be more tightly supervised,” says Dr Delis. “The most effective way to supervise is through audits and sanctions. There is a difference between laws on the books and sanctions and audits.”

The study found that the more sanctions a country imposed, the less its banks were at risk. By contrast, the authors could not show that on-site inspections had a similar effect. If inspections do curb risk, the relationship is not a straight line.

Higher capital requirements tended to cut bank risk as well, the authors found, but the effect was concentrated in banks operating close to the minimum allowed levels. “A credible threat of supervisory intervention appears to be the underlying driving force behind the disciplinary effect of capital requirements,” the paper says.

Dr Delis believes the work points the way forward for regulators seeking to prevent the next financial crisis.

| 15


16 | Feature Banking regulation


“Our findings suggest that regulators should place more resources into auditing and, where needed, sanctioning banks for faulty behaviour, than [into] formal rules and regulations,” he says.

“If anything, the new regulatory umbrella should probably be more focused not on further raising capital requirements, but on enhancing the transparency in the banking system and perhaps on separating types of banking.”

Stricter supervisionEnforcement actions did not have to relate directly to risk or to a bank’s safety and soundness to have an effect. “If there is another type of action, there is a spill over to bank risk because the bankers can see there are sanctions [when rules are violated],” Dr Delis said.

Policymakers say that improving the standards of supervision worldwide is critical to their efforts to contain the risks inherent in global banks.

The Financial Stability Board (FSB), made up of supervisors and central bankers from the largest financial centres as well as representatives of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, recently put forward a series of reforms aimed at 29 “global systemically important financial institutions” or G-Sifis. Most of the attention has focused on the provisions requiring these banks to hold extra capital and write plans to help regulators stabilise or wind them down in case of trouble. But global regulators have been adamant that stricter supervision by international colleges of regulators is a critical part of the package.

“Effective and efficient colleges are important, not only for consolidated supervision on the microprudential level but also for the promotion of financial stability,” the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision wrote in a paper last year.

Insider tradingBoth the FSB and the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) have been working to promulgate standards for supervisors and to make it easier for enforcement divisions to work

together across national lines to punish wrongdoing. Over time, IOSCO information sharing should lead to increased enforcement on issues such as insider trading and misleading the markets.

Some national regulators clearly share Dr Delis’s view that more enforcement is good for stability.

Canadian authorities have argued for years that their willingness to take specific action against risky bank behaviour was a key reason why their institutions survived the 2008 crisis relatively unscathed.

In Britain, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) has gone even farther and has shifted over the past couple of years from “light touch” to a far more intrusive approach with an active enforcement arm. The Government is considering even more radical changes as it drafts legislation to break up the FSA and may well give the planned new regulators enhanced powers to ban products and order changes to bank business models when it tables the Bill.

The study also found evidence that the average number of supervisors per bank fell, as did the frequency of supervisory visits, in the years leading up to the financial crisis. The drop-off coincided with a

sharp increase in risk at some institutions and – as some governments learned – dangerously little preparation for the possibility that volatility could rise.

No cut-backsDr Delis believes that history provides a warning: governments seeking to maintain financial stability should not cut back on enforcement during good times, lest they remove a key part of the framework that keeps banks in line.

“All in all, efficient audits and enforcement actions seem to work as the best motive for banks to improve their own financial soundness,” he said. “It is probably a good thing to sanction banks if you see the risk skyrocketing.”

Source: Supervisory Effectiveness and Bank Risk, by Dr Manthos Delis, Senior Lecturer in Banking at Cass; and Panagiotis Staikouras, Assistant Professor of Law in the Department of Banking and Financial Management at the University of Piraeus.

Brooke Masters is the Chief Regulation Correspondent at the Financial Times. She can be contacted at [email protected]

The FSA has abandoned its "light touch" approach to banking scrutiny IMAGE BY GETTY IMAGES

Conference on Trust and Values

Action, not legislationThe report from the Lord Mayor’s Conference on Trust and Values in the City in November 2011 echoed the findings of Dr Delis’s research.

Professor Paul Palmer, Associate Dean for Ethics, Sustainability and Engagement at Cass, led the team that conducted the City Business Voters Survey for the conference. The survey was a comparative study of a wide range of organisations across the City. It examined perceptions of ethical behaviour and whether there was a need for greater regulation.

Professor Palmer says: “More regulation is not regarded by professionals as the solution to unethical practice. Instead there is a need for fair implementation of existing regulation.”

Looking at the banks that failed and needed support during the financial crisis, the report observed that it was those under regulation that failed. Hedge funds, for example, which are famous for their lack of regulation, did not.

So how can the current rules be fairly implemented? Professor Palmer cites the perception of the City as unethical as a result of a lack of punishment when best practice codes are broken. A lack of clarity over best practice muddies the ethical waters and, as a result, punishment and sanctions against wrongdoers are seen as a rarity.

“The City reflects wider society, where the majority are confident in the ethics of their working lives, but a small number sometimes feel pressured to compromise their standards. There is a clear desire for managers to take action against unethical behaviour and for professional bodies to sanction members if they stray off the right path. Ethics and standards are issues for leaders, not regulators.”

For the summary report from the Lord Mayor’s Conference on Trust and Values, go to www.cass.city.ac.uk/ckreport

www.cassknowledge.com

At Cass we believe that the real purpose of research lies in its real-world application, which is why our consultants all have extensive hands- on experience in their chosen fields.

Cass Consulting offers an unrivalled portfolio of expertise, services and solutions to enable you to grow and strengthen your business whether on a domestic or global scale. What sets us apart is being able to call on a range of insights and provide bespoke independent advice for any challenges you may face.

To find out more about how Cass Consulting can help you, contact Dr Christina Makris at [email protected], call on +44 (0)20 7040 3273 or visit www.cassknowledge.com

Cass Consulting

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Go with the flow

18 | Feature Stock market flows


A share portfolio mimicking stock sales in different market sectors could outperform an S&P tracker by 40%, research suggests. Steve Johnson reports.

ILLUSTRATION BY WILL BENTON-DIGGINS

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Go with the flow

| 19


ahead of downturns in the economy. “It’s clear that this approach would have reduced your IT exposure before the dotcom crash in 2000-01,” says Professor Beber.

The fact that such a portfolio can beat the market might not come as a surprise to some, even though the extent of the outperformance can be eyebrow-raising. The orderflow approach has some similarities with momentum trading, which involves buying a basket of stocks that have risen in value in the previous time period, and taking short positions on stocks that have fallen in value.

Research has shown that this, too, tends to produce market-beating returns, although it remains a mystery why such a simplistic strategy should succeed in contravention of the efficient-market hypothesis, which asserts that consistently beating the market given the information available at the time of the investment is not possible.

Paul Marsh, emeritus Professor of Finance at London Business School, who has studied the phenomenon, admits: “It’s puzzling. You shouldn’t be able to make money that easily just by ranking stocks in order.”

Predicting price changesHowever, Professors Beber, Brandt and Kavajecz appear to demonstrate that their approach is better than momentum strategies.

One might expect changes in orderflow to result in identical changes in stock prices, given that the level of trade in a market sector determines share prices. However, the research suggests that this mechanism is less than perfect, with an increase in net demand for a given sector not necessarily producing a similar rise in prices.

Crucially, the trio’s work suggests that orderflow data carries more “information” than price fluctuations. That is, it is better able to predict future economic and market movements. For instance, by using orderflow data it is possible to forecast the level of an economic indicator three months in advance twice as well as by extrapolating from the current level of the

indicator. The study established this by applying the data to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s National Activity Index. In contrast, analysing the sector returns improved forecasting ability by only 2%, the paper found.

“Most theories would assume that whatever we see in the orderflow shows up immediately in the returns. In reality I think it’s very different,” says Professor Beber.

“It’s very difficult to pin down the specific reasons why flows are much more informative, but it’s clear from our data that they are. Therefore there must be some sort of friction that prevents all the information that is in the orders showing up in the returns.”

Using orderflow also allows the observer to concentrate purely on larger buy and sell orders. The team found that focusing on trades of more than $250,000 – likely to be placed by more sophisticated institutional investors – improved the forecasting power of the data.

Hidden tradingSo are any investors already using such a trading strategy? Investment banks with strong market-making arms would already have access to their own slice of orderflow data and, ahead of the implementation of the Volcker Rule in the US, still maintain proprietary trading desks that would be well placed to take advantage of this information.

Professor Beber believes some banks probably have put two and two together. “I know that investment banks are looking at flows to identify particular trading patterns,” he says.

The New York Stock Exchange

makes orderflow information, in the shape of its so-called consolidated tape, available publicly for fees ranging from $1 a month for private investors to $2,000 a month for computer-based quantitative trading houses that plug the entire data feed into their systems to search for patterns. Its main electronic tape has 2.84 million subscribers.

However it is possible that the power of the orderflow book might be waning, even as more investors wake up to its forecasting power. The emergence of off-exchange trading venues, such as “dark pools”, allows institutional investors more scope to hide their trades and also means the overall data flow is more fragmented.

Also, more institutions are using algorithms to split trades into a series of smaller deals, meaning they would not show up in datasets that rely on identifying trades by larger market participants. Professor Beber admits that the ability to spot institutional trades from large orders was stronger in the first half of the study than in the second.

However, given the strong outperformance identified by the study, a modest weakening of the model’s predictive powers should not prove fatal. In a world where traders scramble to profit from the tiniest possible arbitrage opportunity, potential double-digit returns are not to be sniffed at.

Steve Johnson is Deputy Editor of FTfm at the Financial Times. He can be contacted at [email protected]

For more information on the research, contact [email protected]

B uilding an investment portfolio that can consistently beat a leading stock market index by 40%

– with superior risk and return calculations thrown in for good measure – is the Holy Grail for investors. But it could be relatively straightforward to create, if three academics are correct.

Alessandro Beber, Professor of Finance at Cass, Michael Brandt, Professor of Finance at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University in North Carolina and Kenneth Kavajecz, Professor of Finance at the Wisconsin School of Business, reveal their secrets in a paper entitled What Does Equity Sector Orderflow Tell Us About the Economy?

As the title suggests, the trio concentrated their research on orderflow data, the collective buy and sell orders sent by brokers to dealers, to determine whether it could predict the future strength of the economy, and thus the performance of equity and bond markets.

Their number crunching suggested it had “striking economic implications”. They found that a portfolio that mimicked orderflow, constructed by over or underweighting market sectors depending on the signals from orderflow data, would have turned $100 invested in the US stock market in 1993 into $350 by 2005, comfortably outstripping the $250 that would have been achieved by a portfolio passively following the S&P 500 index.

Pre-empting downturnsMoreover, the orderflow-based portfolio, measured against the market, would have exhibited a lower standard deviation (a measure of the risk associated with price fluctuations) and a significantly higher Sharpe ratio (a measure of risk-adjusted returns from an investment strategy – the higher the Sharpe ratio, the higher the returns).

Further, the portfolio would be relatively defensive, underweighting cyclical sectors such as information technology, materials and industrials

"It's puzzling. You shouldn't be

able to make money that easily just

by ranking stocks in order."

20 | Feature Encouraging entrepreneurs

Novice entrepreneurs need help to get an idea up and running. Richard Tyler looks at a £10 million Cass initiative that brings together money, potential and guidance.


ILLUSTRATION BY SHAUN [email protected]

A leg up for new business

| 21


companies at the moment. One is Accutrainee, launched in September 2011 by Susan Cooper, a Cass Executive MBA graduate from the class of 2010. She took the Centre’s New Venture Creation Programme, which is run by Julie Logan, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Cass, and Nick Badman.

The programme, now in its third year, runs for a week each June and aims to help budding entrepreneurs develop ideas that can grow into substantial businesses, spotting any pitfalls along the way and offering advice on investment deals and shareholder agreements.

Attending the programme makes would-be entrepreneurs eligible to apply to the Cass Entrepreneurship Fund. Also eligible are Cass alumni and established business owners who have attended the Better Business Programme, a development programme run by Your Business Your Future, in association with Cass.

Trainee lawyersSusan Cooper, 37, was a banking lawyer with Hogan Lovells, one of the City’s largest firms, but was keen to explore legal outsourcing. Tough times and increased competition mean law firms have been reluctant to take on a lot of trainees when they do not have a clear idea how many newly qualified solicitors they will need in two years’ time. In recent years there has been a 23% reduction in the number of trainees taken on.

Outsourcing low-value legal work overseas has compounded the problem as this is the work typically done in-house by trainees.

Accutrainee employs aspiring

solicitors then places trainees with firms for agreed periods. The trainees get the experience and the secondments allow firms to cut costs and manage graduate recruitment. Small practices that cannot provide the breadth of training required will now be able to pool their resources and take on trainees as a group.

Accutrainee structures the training and pays the trainees’ wages and benefits, which are above the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) recommended salary levels. It also guarantees to pay salaries even if its trainees are not on secondment.

Susan Cooper is signing up law firms, establishing what their trainee requirements will be and then matching these to her intake. She expects some of her trainees to be in work in the spring. Olswang, the London-based international law firm, is the first to say publicly that it supports the idea.

Cooper says: “Once people understand what the model is trying to do we get fantastic feedback. It’s a traditional industry and I have no doubt things will take time, but the model is designed to work alongside a firm’s existing graduate recruitment processes as well as stand alone.”

Reputation analysisAnother industry facing significant change is financial services, and in particular banks. Bob Diamond, the Chief Executive of Barclays, said in the BBC Today programme’s inaugural annual business lecture in November 2011 that the first task was to restore public confidence. Trust, responsibility and citizenship were all themes that banks had to address.

C ass’s Centre for Entrepreneurship deploys a three-pronged approach: funding for promising new

companies sits alongside incubation support and programmes on new venture creation and management development.

Five new ventures launched by Cass alumni have already received investment from the £10 million fund, which was created in July 2009 with a bequest by Peter Cullum, a Cass alumnus who founded the City insurance group Towergate.

It is this breadth of activity that Nick Badman, Chairman of the Centre and former Head of UK Buyouts for the private equity firm 3i, believes places Cass in a strong position. Where else, he asks, can you receive mentoring from leading entrepreneurs, have access to investment and affordable office space, and hear from the likes of Professor Cliff Oswick, Head of the Faculty of Management at Cass, at tailored Sunday evening lectures?

“A lot of academics in a lot of places would not do that,” says Badman, offering it as an example of how the academic and venture capital worlds can work together for the benefit of entrepreneurs.

Spotting pitfallsThe Centre’s incubation space at Cass is a good way for the investment team to get to know the Cass alumni and assess their potential, without immediately handing over any cash. So far seven companies have taken space – located on the edge of the City – before moving on.

The office space is home to two

22 | Feature Encouraging entrepreneurs

Nick Badman has also considered how the Centre can back individuals who have entrepreneurial flair, but have not yet come up with the right idea. It may lead to the development of a matching service: placing alumni with clear potential in charge of existing businesses that require new ideas and energy at the top.

“One of the things we are thinking about is whether we should be encouraging those people to buy into businesses,” he says. “It’s a possible evolution of the fund.”

Owners of established businesses can sign up to the Better Business Programme run through a partnership between the Centre and Your Business Your Future. Led by Gerard Burke, Senior Visiting Fellow at Cass, Your Business Your Future runs development programmes for owner managers who want to take their business to the next level.

Tristram Mayhew, founder of the tree-top adventure playgrounds firm Go Ape, took part in such a programme.

Passionate amateursThe Go Ape centres offer zip wires and aerial bridges, ladders, walkways and tunnels strung from tree to tree in forest locations. Mayhew says: “We started off as amateurs with a passion to do our own thing. With luck and hard work

we managed to get up and going. We got to the end of the start-up phase in the first four years.”

He adds: “I look back and think that was when we grew up as a business. From being what you could call enthusiastic amateurs it gave us the first of the tool kit to go on, and challenged us.”

Mayhew also realised the value of setting ambitious targets. “In 2006 we set ourselves the target of doing 30 courses by 2010. We now have 33,” he says. “I can say that was down to the challenge we got on the programme. It was a significant investment but worth every penny.”

Badman says the Centre for Entrepreneurship will build its reputation from the experience of entrepreneurs who use its services, such as Cooper, Lopez-Valenzuela and Mayhew. He is in no doubt that “if we combine the education and development programme side of this with money, we will create fundamentally better businesses.”

Richard Tyler is Enterprise Editor at the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph. He can be contacted at [email protected]

For more information on the Centre for Entrepreneurship, contact Jane Reoch, Investment Manager, at [email protected]

It must have been music to the ears of Alberto Lopez-Valenzuela, a Cass Executive MBA alumnus and the founder of Alva, a corporate reputation analysis business.

Alva has graduated from the Centre’s incubation space to its own offices and now employs 15. It has secured £675,000 of investment, £375,000 of it from the Cass Entrepreneurship Fund. Backers include Andrew Vickerman, the former Head of Corporate Affairs at the global miner Rio Tinto, who is now Chairman of Alva.

Boardroom recruitsThe company has also recruited Mark Rigby, the Head of Corporate Affairs at Sainsbury’s, and Alan Schofield, an adviser to John Prescott when he was Deputy Prime Minister, as non-executive directors.

Lopez-Valenzuela says: “We help companies understand reputation. We tell them what it is, why they have it and how their reputation affects their business. We are bringing clarity around the knowledge of reputation. Companies have struggled with finding a statistical way to analyse their reputation.”

Alva’s algorithms mine online sources to assess sentiment and the company combines these findings with other data such as public polls and financial results. The operation has impressed more than a dozen FTSE 250 companies which have become clients.

Lopez-Valenzuela, who has a background in economic analysis and media, says the idea is to help companies to articulate their reputation and create “reputation custodians” across their operations, who will act when decisions are made that will have a negative impact on reputation.

Targeting clientsAlva has adopted a high-profile approach to attracting clients. It creates publicly displayed indices that track the changing reputations of the target companies. It created a live index on Utility Week’s website and now has most of the big six utility companies as clients.

“We have to be bold, brave. But we are also very confident about our methodology,” says Lopez-Valenzuela.

That confidence has in part come from the supportive environment in which Alva has been nurtured.

Lopez-Valenzuela says: “The support of Cass has been absolutely critical and crucial – 2009 was a difficult time to attract investment, but from an early stage Cass was very interested. We submitted our plan in September and by the beginning of November we received the term sheet. And once we had that stamp from Cass, that they had done the due diligence, it gave a lot of confidence to other angel investors.

“Since the launch of Alva we have had regular contact with Peter [Cullum] and the Dean [Richard Gillingwater]. Peter is someone to look up to. He is very shrewd but also very fair. He said to focus on three things: making money, doing good and having fun.”

Business flairLopez-Valenzuela said other budding entrepreneurs keen to engage with the Centre should make sure they have done their research. “You could make the mistake of thinking it is a university with a committee [of academics] asking fairly esoteric questions,” he says.

“But no, it’s done by people who have been venture capitalists and by people who have been brought in specifically for their experience.”


Go Ape founder Tristram Mayhew believes the Better Business Programme helped his firm grow

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24 | Feature Putting innovation into practice


IMAGES BY CHRIS GUY

INNOVATION

| 25


“The role of the top level leader and senior leadership team is pivotal,” says Dr Davies. “If they aren’t on board and focused around the need for innovation, any attempts at major innovation and change will fail.”

Alarming attitudesThe research was based on interviews with chief executives and top-level leadership teams in the financial and professional services sector, particularly in the City. It reveals some interesting, and possibly alarming attitudes to innovation.

For a start, those questioned had a comparatively narrow view of the need for change. The researchers developed a “palette” of six different types of innovation integral to an organisation’s success. These were:

• Offering – new products and services• Markets – moving into new customer markets• Distribution• Process – redesigned organisational processes and structure• Management – new management principles and practices• Customer experience – innovating around the way that the customer interacts with the company.

“Innovate or die” is the tenet that underpins most businesses these days. The corporate

history books are littered with examples of companies that failed to keep pace with changes in their markets. Whole industries can be wiped out in a matter of months. In the late 1800s, the buggy whip business vanished almost overnight following the invention of the car.

The majority of cases are less dramatic: most businesses that fail to innovate gently wither away or are snapped up by other firms. Surprisingly, given the importance of innovation, recent research reveals fundamental shortcomings in the way some firms approach it.

“If you don’t innovate as an organisation, if you don’t change, you’re going to stagnate,” says Dr Robert Davies, Senior Visiting Fellow at Cass and co-author of Innovation: Mapping the Role of the Corporate Leader, a survey commissioned by the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII) and Cass.

Innovation may take place at all levels of an organisation, but creating a culture of innovation starts at the top. Taking this as a given, the researchers focused on the leader as a catalyst for innovation in an organisation.

Companies that don’t innovate stagnate. But Cass research suggests that many are not equipped to keep pace with developments in their markets, reports Steve Coomber.

IMAGES BY CHRIS GUY

The innovationsuperhighway

“A lot of the organisations spent a fair amount of time thinking about skill-based barriers and cultural barriers. But when asked what action they would take, they talked about instigating innovation by making structural changes.”

A three-step process to help companies to integrate strategic innovation emerged from the research. Dr Davies says: “The first thing is to get a clear mandate for innovation and determine the corporate strategic reasons for innovation. Next, identify drivers, barriers, enablers and outcomes. Finally, map your leadership style and the leadership team’s mindset to fit the kinds of barriers you need to overcome.”

Leadership responseIn the study Dr Davies describes four ways to change, depending on the barriers that need to be overcome: adaptation, evolution, reconstruction and revolution.

Each requires a specific leadership response. The least dramatic changes – adaptation, evolution and reconstruction – require leaders to be participative and, with evolutionary change, educational. Revolutionary change requires a less fashionable directive and coercive leadership mindset.

Finally, given the current state of strategic innovation in

26 | Feature Putting innovation into practice

“The interviewees generally had difficulty describing the full range of innovation types, and thought predominantly in terms of product and process innovation,” says Dr Davies.

Lost knowledgeThis is significant, he says, because during the recession a change has emerged in the way organisations compete. Previously the primary driving force was the creation of shareholder value. Now it has become clear that other stakeholder needs must be considered.

Dr Davies and his team also discovered that many organisations failed to make a connection between strategic planning and innovation. They often had a business plan, a budget, a balanced scorecard and various strategic tools, but no explicit innovation plan. For example, there was no process to move from thinking about innovation to actually innovating.

“If you’re going to be really good at innovating and change, one of the first things you have to do is articulate or communicate the case,” says Dr Davies.

Many of the business leaders surveyed fear that the organisations they work for may have lost the ability to innovate and grow organically. In recent years there has been a focus on growth through mergers and acquisitions and, during the recession, improving the bottom line through cost cutting rather than innovation. In addition, cost cutting and de-layering have removed a level of middle management and, with it, important knowledge and experience linked to innovation.

Reading the signalsThe research revealed that 45% of the interviewees were unable to identify more than three reasons why their organisation should innovate. In general there was a sense that organisations were poor at detecting those changes in the external world that signalled the need to innovate.

“Equally, when thinking about overcoming barriers to innovation, interviewees tended to focus too much on changes to internal organisational structures rather than competency, skills and culturally based solutions,” says Dr Davies.


Working together

A broader view on innovation: AllianzGIAfter a series of acquisitions, Allianz Global Investors (AGI) was a fragmented group of autonomous companies. Research revealed that while AGI had gained market share, it was perceived as having unclear positioning against competitors, being structurally complex and, in all, a difficult place to get things done. One employee summed this up by saying: “I can’t belong to something which has no identity.”

In 2006 AGI launched Performance Plus, a raft of initiatives designed to retain a degree of autonomy for the component parts while introducing an overarching culture that would bind them together.

Initiatives included:• Educational workshops for 600 client-facing staff to help develop new working relationships across historically separate areas • A social diversity initiative for employees• New performance metrics covering performance, “explainability”, sustainability, empathy and trust• Client satisfaction benchmarking• Employee feedback surveys.

The approach worked. AGI US’s retail business has improved its market ranking from fifth to fourth biggest. And better cross-business collaboration resulted in the asset management side of the business combining with life assurance to create innovative retirement plans for employees.

“If you’re going to develop a more effective competitive strategy, you’ve got to think more broadly about innovation, not just about offerings or products, but about marketing, distribution, client experiences and most importantly the relationship between the organisation and its employees,” says Cass's Dr Robert Davies.

many organisations, as revealed by the research, it is important that someone takes the role of challenging existing thinking. That may well be someone from outside the organisation.

“These organisations need to think about innovation in a more strategic and comprehensive way, and then be sure both to implement that strategy and to support it with the appropriate leadership styles. A good place to start might be to consider alternative scenarios for the post recession landscape. This could provide the material for an effective mandate to kick-start the innovation process,” says Dr Davies.

Source: Innovation: Mapping the Role of the Corporate Leader, commissioned by the Chartered Insurance Institute and Cass. Research team members: Dr Robert Davies, leader of the Cass team; Nick Marson, leader of the CII team; Dr Chris Storey, Reader in Marketing at Cass; Andy Couchman, Chartered Insurance Practitioner; Sally Sanderson, a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development; Niala Butt, Chartered Insurer; Mark Towers, Chartered Insurer.

Steve Coomber is a freelance business writer. He can be contacted at [email protected]

To be a good innovator, the first thing you have to do is communicate the case for change.

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28 | Corporate profile

IMAGES BY NEIL BRIDGE


to bank onA banker

Michael Cole-Fontayn, EMEA Chief Executive at BNY Mellon, is proud to be seen as steady and a little old-fashioned. He, and his bank, are in it for the long term, says Stefan Stern.

| 29


It takes courage to out yourself as a banker these days. They seem to have joined journalists, estate agents and politicians at

the lower end of the reputation league table. But, undaunted, Michael Cole-Fontayn, Chairman in Europe, the Middle East and Africa of BNY Mellon and Chief Executive of its depositary receipts business, is not afraid to use the “b” word.

“We show up as a bank, so we’re a bank,” he says, with commendable clarity. BNY Mellon is, as Cole-Fontayn explains, an agent not a principal – in other words, it deals on behalf of clients rather than engaging in so-called casino

banking, or proprietary trading. It also has a rare AAA rating. But these are relatively subtle distinctions that tend to get drowned out in “bash the banker” conversations.

Examine Cole-Fontayn’s career, however, and you will see a side to banking that is not about reckless risk-taking and excessive behaviour. Indeed, after an hour in his company you tend to think that if only there were more bankers like him there would be very little to worry about.

His 27-year career spans all the key moments in the transformation of the City. His thoughts about what banking should and shouldn’t be, therefore, carry weight.

Cole-Fontayn says. “We hold fast to that approach now: we don’t do things we can’t understand.” That is how you keep your AAA rating.

In 2007 Bank of New York merged with Mellon Financial Corporation to form BNY Mellon, a successful deal studied in some depth by Professor Scott Moeller, Director of the Mergers & Acquisitions Research Centre at Cass Business School.

Rolling MBAThe bank's relationship with Cass stretches over ten years and has involved internships and extensive graduate and continuing professional education, as well as a stream of MBAs. “I was a graduate trainee myself at the start of my career, and I have great admiration for the quality of people we get to see from Cass,” Cole-Fontayn says.

BNY Mellon is now a respected

name in global finance and a significant player in investment management through businesses such as its London-based subsidiary, Newton. It is a trusted counter-party offering a range of investor and custodial services.

So no reckless gambling, no underwriting, no extravagant corporate finance advisory work or over-ambitious securities trading. BNY Mellon is an unashamedly old-school servant-banker, here for the long term. This is business the way it used to be.

“My 27 years here have been a kind of rolling MBA,” the Chairman says.

Stefan Stern is Director of Strategy at Edelman and also Visiting Professor of Management Practice at Cass. He can be contacted at [email protected]

Fast decisions“Corporate managements were very creative,” Cole-Fontayn says. “Everyone had a plan, everyone was open to new ideas. There was very quick decision making.”

Through this period Bank of New York grew rapidly. In 1992 it had 400 employees in Europe; by 2000 (when Cole-Fontayn returned from Hong Kong) there were 4,000. And, crucially, the bank’s conservative approach to risk protected it from the volatility in financial markets at the start of the new millennium.

In the frothy, “new economy” markets of the late 1990s up to 2001, gurus declared that the old rules of risk and reward had been fundamentally altered. Bank of New York took a rather different view. “We were turning down deals at this time because we couldn’t understand how the credit risk had been calculated,”

30 | Corporate profile

Big bangHe joined the Bank of New York in London in 1984. It was a smallish but well-known name in financial circles. He was promptly sent to New York for a year’s training in finance that involved learning the essentials of lending, accounting and much else. He was back in London for the major changes brought about by the Big Bang – the end of the City’s closed shop in 1986 and the arrival of powerful overseas players, in particular American and Japanese institutions.

These were also the Thatcher years of privatisations – huge flotations of state-owned assets such as British Gas, British Telecom and the electricity and water industries. The internationalisation of finance was growing, too, and “depositary receipts” (simply put, a way of holding shares in a foreign company) were a key element. Bank of New York was at the heart of the action.

Between 1993 and 2000 Cole-Fontayn was in Hong Kong, running Bank of New York’s Issuer Services Group. This involved getting to know the emerging new stars of Chinese and southeast Asian business in the run-up to Britain's “handover” of Hong Kong to China in 1997.

The intricacies of Chinese business took some mastering. There were H shares, N shares and B shares to get to grips with. But what was clearly inspiring was the sense that a new business giant was emerging in the East.

BNY Mellon's Michael Cole-Fontayn in conversation with Cass Visiting Professor Stefan Stern


“We've turned down deals because we couldn't understand how the risk had been calculated... We hold fast to that approach: we don't do things we can't understand.”

experts in sugar and biofuels

Czarnikow is well regarded internationalcommodity house that has been trading in globalcommodity markets since 1861.

This year Czarnikow is celebrating one hundred and fifty yearsof providing services to growers, millers, refiners, beetproducers, traders, merchants, and industrial consumers ofsugar. The success of the business has been built uponmarket knowledge, confidentiality, reliability and independence.

Czarnikow has grown from an exclusive focus on sugar, toworking with other core commodities such as biofuels, ethanoland biomass, while developing a dedicated corporate financeteam which leverages Czarnikowʼs global network andknowledge base in order to create growth and developmentopportunities for companies in the sugar and biofuels spaces.

Czarnikow puts ethical standards at the heart of all its workand commitments, taking pride in the quality of service itdelivers to all parts of the physical supply chain.

For more information please visit www.czarnikow.com

Celebrating 150 yearsin commodities

32 | Development highlights

the winner, Caroline Duong, was announced. Ms Duong is an MSc Investment Management student. The award covers her full tuition fees and includes an internship. Two runners up also received £5,000 each towards fees.

Highlight

Campaigns The Haberman Campaign for Actuarial Science was initiated in 2010 to pay tribute to Professor Steven Haberman. The aim is to raise £1 million to create a scholarships programme at Cass, to strengthen research at doctoral and post-doctoral levels, to support academics and to attract additional first-class lecturers into the Faculty of Actuarial Science and Insurance. So far alumni have donated almost £100,000.

Highlight

Scholarships With tuition fees rising this year from £3,325 to £9,000, funding for scholarships will become more vital than ever. One donor has committed to funding two scholarships for three years for BSc students. If you, too, wish to make a difference to the

life of a student, contact the Cass Development Office on +44 (0)20 7040 5220.

Former students, family and colleagues have raised £16,180 in support of a scholarship in memory of Professor Shelagh Heffernan. This lasting scholarship will ensure Professor Heffernan continues to make an impact on the lives of students. The first recipient is Trang Nguyen, a BSc Banking & International Finance student. She said: “Professor Heffernan was a wonderful teacher and this scholarship makes a tremendous difference to me and my family.”

Highlight

Legacy givingYou can help Cass to grow its reputation as an international business school and contribute to its long-term financial security through our Legacy Giving Programme by leaving a gift to the School in your will. Your legacy, however large or small, will make a big difference. Cass has charitable status and therefore pays no tax on bequests, which are also deducted from the value of the estate before tax liability on the estate is calculated. For more information, contact Namita Sharma on +44 (0)20 7040 8674.

Highlight

Alumni Relations More than 130 Cass alumni from across Europe gathered in Monaco last September for a reception hosted by the easyJet founder Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou at the Stelios Philanthropic Foundation, which supports education, entrepreneurship and the environment. Sir Stelios, who studied for an MSc in Shipping, Trade & Finance at Cass, said: “Cass represents a significant part of my philanthropic activities. The Stelios Scholarships awarded at Cass every year through the Stelios Philanthropic Foundation help to ensure that these exceptional scholars have a chance to make a difference themselves. I am delighted to have been able to host this event and hopefully inspire others to give back as well.”

Cass Alumni Relations is focusing on strengthening links with alumni based in Africa, and accompanied Kenyan-born Michael Bear – then Lord Mayor of London and Chancellor of City University London – on his visit to Kenya and Nigeria in September 2011 to meet alumni there. Networking events were held in both countries.

Highlight

Alumni Online Community The Cass Alumni Online Community is a forum for students and alumni to keep up relationships and forge new ones, create and update a personal page, sign up for events and reunions and take advantage of memberships and services. The Alumni Online Community has almost 10,000 members and hopes to increase that to 12,000 by summer 2012.

For more information on alumni services and benefits, visit www.cass.city.ac.uk/alumni

For more information on supporting Cass students or to find out more about corporate sponsorship, visit www.cass.city.ac.uk/development

Highlight

Corporate partnerships BNY Mellon and Cass worked in collaboration to produce a white paper titled Outcome Orientated Investing for Retirement from the Defined Contribution Scheme Member’s Perspective. It was written by David Calfo, Head of Defined Contribution Strategy at BNY Mellon, Andrew Clare, Professor of Asset Management at Cass, and Dr Douglas Wright, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Actuarial Science and Insurance at Cass. The bank has renewed its corporate partnership with Cass for a fifth consecutive year and the partnership continues to go from strength to strength.

Santander, a Senior Corporate Partner, awarded five £10,000 postgraduate scholarships once again this year and held a reception for scholars at its Moorgate branch in the City of London. Luis Juste, Director of Santander Universities, was present with colleagues from Santander Universities and from Cass.

The inaugural Threadneedle Investment Award attracted applications from all over the world. The three finalists were invited to a lunch in Threadneedle’s London head office with senior executives from investment management where

At Cass, students, academics and industry experts, business leaders and politicians enrich each other’s thinking. Our dialogue with business shapes the structure and content of our education, training, research and consultancy. Since 2005, the External Relations & Development Office at Cass has worked with alumni and organisations to create opportunities to sponsor research and provide scholarships and to facilitate mutually beneficial partnerships.


ThreadneedleInvestmentAwardwinnerCarolineDuong(centre)withfinalistsYi-HuaChenandIngridMorante,RichardGillingwater,DeanofCassBusinessSchool(left)andThreadneedleCIOMarkBurgess(right)

Opinion piece | 33

Companies should increase advertising in times of austerity, not cut back, argues Vincent-Wayne Mitchell, Professor of Consumer Marketing at Cass.

When money’s tight – spend more


on call-to-action and point of sale rather than on the long-term building of the brand.

Finally, market share is most up for grabs in a recession when competitors are too hard pressed to defend their position vigorously.

At company level, four factors can indicate that investment in marketing during a recession will be profitable:• The company already has a strong emphasis on marketing• There is an entrepreneurial and innovative culture within the company• The company has slack resources (a pool of resources in excess of the minimum necessary to produce a given level of output)• The company has the strategic flexibility to rapidly adapt resources to changing circumstances.

At brand level, there should be more marketing money invested when:• The brand can be positioned as a value brand, such as Asda-Walmart• The company can launch a value sub-brand, for example Fairfield Inns by Marriott – a franchised chain of lower-cost hotels for customers who simply want a bed for the night with fewer other amenities• The brand can seemingly demonstrate an economic advantage to paying more for perceived quality.

In times of austerity one of the first cuts a company makes is to the marketing budget. Logic suggests that reducing

advertising makes sense because consumers have less disposable income and will not be spending.

Contrary to this presumption, virtually all studies demonstrate that advertising spend is strongly related to business performance and this is true in all economic climates, from the prosperous to the austere. Annual growth in shareholder value for companies that do not tie ad spend to the business cycle is 1.3% higher than in companies that do. So why is this?Firms can achieve a greater share of the total advertising voice as other companies cut back on marketing spend. Advertising increases both the salience of the product to consumers and the perceived quality of the brand since the adverts remind them of the brand value. And counter-cyclical advertising in particular sends a reassuring signal of confidence to concerned consumers and entices customers to switch from weaker rivals.

Since customers are less loyal and more opportunistic in austere times, increased marketing spend attracts trial purchasers, and is needed because the cost of retaining customers increases. In addition, the focus of marketing spend is

For example, Fairy Liquid claims to pay by doing more with less. The premium value of the brand can remain unchanged but it can appeal to the austerity customer.

Entrepreneurial marketing Companies looking to innovate in times of recession could look towards their marketing activity as an area to be developed, not reduced. While arguments such as “we just don’t have the money” and “media costs reduce in a recession” will always have resonance in a downturn, truly entrepreneurial marketers should be able to justify budgets in any environment.

The argument “if everyone is cutting back we won’t be hurt” is valid only if the assumption is true. Firms capitalising on the opportunity to increase their market share as competitors cut back will inevitably maintain a higher market share when the economy picks up again. Studies suggest that there is strong evidence that cutting back on advertising can hurt sales both during and after a recession. Perhaps, when times are tough, the best method of defence is attack. Vincent-Wayne Mitchell can be contacted at [email protected] For more commentary and analysis by Cass experts, go to www.cass.city.ac.uk/casstalks


The traditional working day belongs in the age of industry, not technology, says Alison Maitland. It’s time for managers to grasp the benefits of a new approach.

Clocking into the21st century

Results not hoursPeople are measured and rewarded for the hours they put in, rather than the results they produce. They often need permission to go to the dentist or attend their children’s school play during the day. Those who put in long hours are seen as hard-working and dedicated, while those who work flexibly (even if they are super-efficient) can find they are stigmatised as “lacking commitment”.

I recently came across two examples of this absurdity: in one case, a woman lawyer was told by her boss that she had to go into the office every Saturday, even when there was no work to be done, just to be there. In the other, a senior manager refused to allow anyone to work from home on the grounds that they must be skiving.

These are wasteful attitudes. The managers in our survey overwhelmingly agree that new ways of working would benefit their businesses and that people are more productive if they are given autonomy over their working patterns.

Tackling such entrenched attitudes involves a change in corporate culture. It requires managers to understand that it is in the company’s best interests to trust people to work in the way that works best for them.

We must turn convention on its

When Gap, the San Francisco-based chain of High Street clothes shops, faced high staff

turnover in one of its departments, it tried offering flexible working arrangements in the hope that it would stem the tide. It had little effect. So it adopted a radically new approach, abandoning entirely the expectation that people had to be at their desks in the office and measuring them instead on their output. Within six months the staff turnover rate had halved.

More conventional flexible working practices, such as flexible start and finish times and nine-day fortnights, really only tinker at the edges of a model of work that goes back nearly 200 years to the rule by factory clock of the Industrial Revolution.

Today, communications technology enables us to do much of our work anywhere, anytime. In a survey of 366 Cass alumni and other international managers for our book Future Work, a majority agreed that their organisations were not adapting fast enough to new ways of working.

Rather than using mobile technology to transform work and make people’s lives more manageable, companies have pasted it on top of the old model of work, extending the working day even further.

head and assume that all jobs can be flexible, restricting this only when there are logical constraints on time and place for particular tasks or activities.

Higher productivityThese changes have to come from the top of the organisation as a business strategy, not as a human resources programme. Most flexible working options are HR-driven and are seen primarily as an employee benefit. Managers often regard them as a cost and an imposition. As a result, many employees fear that their careers will suffer if they request flexibility and they hold back from doing so.

Many companies have not yet grasped the full business benefits of transforming work. Our research shows that these include higher productivity, lower costs, faster access to new markets, better customer service and more initiative and discretionary effort from employees.

Why would any competitive business want to turn down such opportunities?

Alison Maitland is a Senior Visiting Fellow at Cass and co-author with Peter Thomson of Future Work: How Businesses Can Adapt and Thrive in the New World of Work (Palgrave Macmillan, published 7 October 2011).

34 | Opinion piece



bnymellon.com/careers

©2011 The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation.

We are an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer.

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