www.impactexecutives.com +44 (0)20 7314 2011

THINK DIFFERENTLY AND GET AHEAD

LESSONS IN LEADERSHIP FROM THE US ELECTION

PROJECT MANAGEMENT: INTERIMS ANSWER THE CALL

thebusiness review

ISSUE 22

THINKING DIFFERENTLY IS the theme of this issue of The Business Review. Each article demonstrates how questioning received wisdom can put an individual, or an organisation, ahead of the competition. In the case of new US President Barack Obama, thinking differently not only allowed him to succeed, but also helped him overcome apparently insurmountable odds in order to do so.

As Harvard Business School Professor John Quelch says, for an inexperienced, single-term, African-American senator tagged with the most liberal voting record, to defeat the heir apparent in his own party and then go on to hold off the much-vaunted Republican machine, “is a remarkable achievement.”

THE SUBJECTS OF our ‘Big Ideas’ feature this month, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Malcolm Gladwell, also highlight the value in thinking differently. Both have earned fortunes and impressive reputations from their own ability to ‘think outside the box’. But in recent books, each shares insights on how breaking out of a herd mentality can help people make wiser and more informed decisions.

Taleb believes “the world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in,” and says it is our blindness to reality that allows us to be knocked off course by events such as the recent financial implosion, 9/11 or the dotcom bubble. Gladwell, meanwhile, argues that if we examined more carefully the elements that make an individual successful, we could create a more positive climate for success to flourish in.

In ‘Opinion’, Forum for the Future’s David Bent welcomes the demise of ‘CSR’ – an interesting thought from a representative of a sustainable development organisation. And our case study describes how the objectivity of one of our own interim executives helped the venerable Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust onto a more sustainable commercial footing.

But first of all, look across the page to find out why, at a time when every pound saved or made could spell the difference between success and failure, the skills of interim project and programme managers have never been in greater demand.

We hope that thinking differently will help you weather the storms of the year to come.

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Editorial Jane SimmsDesign Phil Shakespeare

The Business Review is a publication of Impact Executives,a division of Harvey Nash Plc

Impact Executives Ltd13 Bruton StreetLondon W1J 6QA+44 (0)20 7314 2011www.impactexecutives.com

©2009 Harvey Nash PlcAll rights reserved. Contents may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the written consent of the publishers

3 Project managementPROGRAMMED TO SUCCEEDWith cost savings and efficiencies at the top of corporate

agendas, the skills of interim project and programme managers

have never been in greater demand.

4 Big ideasGETTING TO KNOW THE UNKNOWABLEApparently unpredictable disasters and successes are more

predictable than we think, believe social psychologists Nassim

Nicholas Taleb and Malcolm Gladwell.

6 Big issuesLESSONS FROM AMERICAThe different approaches of the two candidates in the US

Presidential election offer valuable lessons for business leaders

in how to overcome apparently insurmountable odds.

8 Case studyMOVING TO A NEW BEATAn interim Business Development Director has helped put the

research output of the Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust

onto a more commercial and successful footing.

10 OpinionRECLAIMING THE FUTUREThe days of corporate social responsibility are numbered, and

the recession could hasten its demise, argues Forum for the

Future’s David Bent.

Christine de Largy Managing Director, Impact ExecutivesGlobal Interim Management

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ABOUT THIS PUBLICATION

IMPACT ExECUTIVES is a leading provider of interim managers to organisations of all sizes in the UK and around the world. With offices covering the UK, Continental Europe, Asia Pacific and Australia, Impact Executives is part of the global recruitment specialist Harvey Nash Group plc. Over the past 15 years it has helped more than 2000 organisations, including over two-thirds of FTSE-250 companies, to hire interim talent at short notice to help them manage periods of growth, manage projects including transformation and downsizing, or to replace key management.

ABOUT IMPACT ExECUTIVES

ISSUE 22

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operating officer until the operation is on its feet or stabilised again.”

This year Melvin expects more turnaround projects designed to increase efficiencies and reduce costs. “The skill sets required are the same, but the mood will be more sombre and the amount of money we have to do things will be less. But we often find the money from opportunities dormant within the business. Delivering a project or programme successfully is a very skilled job. The job of a professional project/programme manager like me is to make it look simple.”

And during the programme or project itself, one of the stiffest challenges is to get non-project functions – who are usually very busy doing other things – involved too. But, she says, once the project is up and running and has gained momentum, the organisation needs less input from the interim – and some organisations take back control of the progamme at this stage.

Fiona Melvin, another Impact Executives interim manager, says most of the projects and programmes she has managed in her career have been to do with acquisitions and turnarounds. “They typically involve large-scale complex change, last between six and nine months, and you act like a chief

INTERIM ExECUTIVES MAKE great project managers. Projects tend to be of a finite length, with a finite budget and specific objectives – making them ideal candidates for the short-term injection of expertise that interims bring. Interim executives also represent the dedicated resource that projects need to succeed: trying to get someone with a day-to-day job to manage an important project too can be a recipe for disaster.

And successful project management involves skilful upwards, downwards and sideways management – something that interim executives excel in. What’s more, interims work in a structured way, and are very task- and deadline-focused.

Such skills are in great demand. According to Christine de Largy,

Managing Director of Impact Executives: “Growing numbers of organisations are approaching us for interim professional project and programme managers, because they want to minimise the risk that their projects and programmes will fail at a time when every pound saved or made could spell the difference between survival and failure.”

Kiran Grewal, an Impact Executives interim manager, has been doing project/programme management for a range of different clients for over 20 years. She says that most in-house project/programme managers focus on the ‘hard’ aspects of the job – the timelines, budget control and progress reporting – at the cost of the equally important ‘softer’ aspects – the politics, communications and people management.

She recently completed a programme for internet company Yahoo, which involved relocating its European headquarters to Switzerland and covered a variety of sub-projects, including selecting and fitting out real estate, organisational design, defining HR packages, the physical move, all the legal aspects, back office process changes, and liaison with Swiss authorities.

The biggest challenge interim project/programme managers face, says Grewal, is getting the programme/project off the ground in the first place. “We are typically brought in when the project has run into trouble,” she says.

The next challenge is to get executive sponsorship and involvement. “You can’t rely on middle management to escalate the kind of decisions you need to make a project successful.”

Programmed to succeed

INTERIM EXECUTIVES ARE IN GROWING DEMAND FOR THEIR PROJECT AND PROGRAMME MANAGEMENT SKILLS

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PROJECTS VS PROGRAMMES

“The terminology tends to be used interchangeably, but, in fact, projects and programmes are two different things,” explains Grewal, “Projects tend to be clearly defined and quite short-term – typically between one and 12 months. Programmes are usually longer-term – up to three or five years – and they tend to evolve so that what you end up with may be quite different from what you started out thinking you needed. But because programmes are less rigid than projects, an important part of programme management is to manage its evolution. Programmes are also, typically, bigger than projects and may involve lots of different projects.”

Delivering a project or programme successfully is a very skilled job. The job of a professional like me is to make it look simple

AT THE LONDON SCHOOL of Economics in October, the Queen described the credit crunch as "awful" and asked a group of eminent economists the question that everyone wants the answer to: "Why did no one see it coming?"

One flustered economist apparently replied: "Someone was relying on somebody else, and everyone thought they were doing the right thing."

It was clearly an inadequate response, but one that would have come as no surprise to Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Indeed, Her Majesty might have been better off asking Taleb, because the trader-turned-author has emerged as the guru of the global financial meltdown.

Dubbed ‘the new sage of Wall Street’, Taleb’s recent book, The Black Swan: The impact of the highly improbable, is riding high in the bestseller lists and his theory of black swan events has become one of the most appealing guides to the crisis in market capitalism.

A ‘black swan’ was the medieval metaphor for something that could not exist. But when black swans were discovered in the 17th century, the term became a metaphor for a perceived impossibility.

In Taleb’s view, unpredictable and seemingly unusual ‘black swan’ events such as 9/11, the dotcom bubble and the current financial implosion, are more predictable than we think. But most people, he says, live in ‘Mediocristan’, a fake model of reality where no rare events occur, and not in ‘Extremistan’, the complex real world where unpredictable and devastating events are par for the course.

“Black swans are unexpected events

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TWO MODERN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGISTS, NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB AND MALCOLM GLADWELL, SUGGEST THAT APPARENTLY UNPREDICTABLE DISASTERS AND SUCCESSES ARE MORE PREDICTABLE THAN THEY MIGHT SEEM

Getting to know the unknowable

that end up controlling our lives, the world, the economy, history, everything,” he says. “They are rare, but their impact is monstrous. My main problem is that we

don’t know that these events play such a large role. Why are we blind to them?”

He continues: “The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in,” and accuses economists

and financial analysts of being the most deluded of all.

He explains: “Black Swan comes from the overestimation of our skills in mapping the world. But I was only able to express my idea after I started working in the City and in Wall Street. It seemed so obvious that people in the City didn’t know what was going on, yet they thought they did. I kept a tally of predictions and realised they can’t predict – but they somehow manage to convince themselves they can.”

The apparent unpredictability of recent events would have been less unpredictable had we had the right tools to understand them, continues Taleb. Just as a turkey has a false sense of security by being regularly fed and

TALEB AT A GLANCE

The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in

Born in 1960 into an influential Greek Orthodox family in LebanonGains MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in management science from the University of ParisHis first book, Fooled by Randomness, published in 2001, became a surprise hitHe is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University's Polytechnic Institute, and Visiting Professor of Marketing (Cognitive Science) at London Business School.He was previously the Dean’s Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the University of MassachusettsHe has held a number of senior financial jobs in firms including UBS, CSFB, Bankers Trust and BNP Paribas. The Black Swan was published in 2007

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watered in the run-up to Christmas or Thanksgiving, only to suffer ‘a revision of belief’ on the day it is slaughtered, so Mediocristan economists and financial analysts are reassured by computer models that don’t account for rare devastating events.

“We need new tools,” he says. “We will have to finance the losses [which he estimates to be over $1 trillion – more than was ever made in the history of banking] because of a huge misunderstanding.”

It’s important to understand just how much we will never understand, says Taleb, a view expounded in his first book, Fooled by Randomness, and which found its way into the famously gnomic pronouncement of then US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2002 that “There are things that we know we know….There are things that we know we don’t know…There are things we do not know we don’t know.”

Taleb’s credentials as the sage of our current predicament are reinforced by his prediction back in 2003 that US insurance giant Fannie Mae had underestimated the risk of a rise in interest rates that would destroy the value of its portfolios.

In an article in the New York Times he wrote: “The fact that they have not blown up in the past doesn’t mean that they’re not going to blow up in the future. The math is bogus.”

Fannie Mae was taken over by the US government in August 2008.

Taleb’s personal black swan came when his native Lebanon was engulfed by civil war in 1975. He spent several war years studying in the basement of the family home. The son of wealthy, highly educated Greek Orthodox parents, he received degrees at Wharton, Pennsylvania and the University of Paris

before becoming a Wall Street trader. Black Monday – 19th October 1987

– reinforced his belief in chance events. This sizeable black swan “had vastly more influence on my thought than every other event in history,” he says. Shorting the market made him nearly $40 million.

“You can take advantage of uncertainty if you know how to look it in the eye,” he concludes.

While Taleb talks about black swans to describe unlikely and unusual events, Malcolm Gladwell uses the term ‘outliers’ to describe things that lie outside normal

experience. In his new book, Outliers: The story of success, he examines people who are outliers – the kind of people, he explains “who are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a

[freezing day in Paris] in August.”The thesis he expounds in his book is

that the brilliance of outliers such as Bill Gates and the Beatles, for example, owes just as much to their circumstances as to their considerable natural gifts. Gates, for instance, had almost unique access as a schoolboy to a mainframe computer that the parents’ association of his local school invested in. The Beatles spent their early career in Hamburg clubs, where they devoted more time to pop music than any of their peers.

What’s more, believes Gladwell, genius – or even simple success – requires a lot of hard work – 10,000 hours of dedicated practice, by his calculation – before it can blossom, even in the most gifted individuals. Among the examples of the so-called 10,000-hour rule are the late-blooming painter Cézanne and the mathematician Andrew Wiles, who solved Fermat’s theorem in 1995.

“I think that we vastly underestimate the extent to which success happens because of things the individual has nothing to do with,” says Gladwell. “It’s remarkable how many patterns you can find in the lives of successful people, and circumstances, when you look closely.”

Gladwell believes that understanding that an individual’s success is very much a group project, depending not just on their own efforts, but also on the contributions of lots of different people, would give society much more control over who succeeds and how many people succeed.

Both Taleb and Gladwell offer lessons in how to understand things that may appear to defy understanding. As Donald Rumsfeld might have said, it’s about knowing that the unknowable is knowable and knowing how to know it.

GLADWELL AT A GLANCE

Born in 1963 in Hampshire, England, to an English mathematician and a Jamaican psychotherapist, later moving to CanadaGains degree in history from the University of TorontoJoins Washington Post in 1987, rising to become New York bureau chiefBecomes staff writer on the New Yorker, where he impresses with his unorthodox approach to diverse topicsIn 2000 writes The Tipping Point, which describes the ways in which epidemiology could be useful in understanding how ideas, trends and products spread through societyWrites Blink, which examines the power of instantaneous and instinctive decision-making

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You can take advantage of uncertainty if you know how to look it in the eye

a time when the populace was terminally aggrieved with the most unpopular president in US history, who had led them into an unpopular war and a severe financial crisis, Obama’s message of hope and ‘change we can believe in’ was deeply compelling.

But, as Quelch points out, “the emotional appeal was buttressed with solid and specific policy details.” As he says, the ability to combine emotional with functional benefits and the consistent positioning of both message and delivery, are core to all successful branding campaigns – whether product or corporate.

But though Obama quickly outsmarted him on the presentation front, McCain started out well, says Howard Belk, Co-President and Chief Creative Officer at Siegel and Gale in New York.

time and money to help the Obama campaign than for any previous presidential candidate. A large percentage of the funds came from first-time donors – many of them in traditionally hard-to-reach groups, such as youth and people with a criminal record.

His fundraising prowess was aided by his clear understanding of the power of communications media – particularly the internet – to engage voters in what has been dubbed ‘the first YouTube election’. By contrast, Republican candidate John McCain’s early admission that he didn’t use the internet put him at a severe disadvantage in what turned out to be the critical online battle.

“Obama’s campaign demonstrated that if you have a powerful message to get across, these enabling technologies allow you to communicate with tens of millions of people immediately and very effectively, says Steve Harty, Chairman of advertising agency BBH New York. “Many brands in the commercial world have not fully realised the power of this.”

And his message was very powerful, very consistent and very clear, and designed to appeal to all citizens, not just traditional or likely Democratic voters. At

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THE DIFFERENT APPROACHES OF BARACK OBAMA AND JOHN MCCAIN IN THE US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION CAMPAIGN PROVIDE IMPORTANT LESSONS FOR BUSINESS LEADERS

“WHEN THE BOOK is written on [the US presidential election], it should not be titled The Making of a President, but The Marketing of a President,” says Harvard Business School Professor John Quelch. “Barack Obama’s campaign is a case study in marketing excellence.”

As Quelch says, for an inexperienced, single-term, African-American senator tagged with the most liberal voting record, to defeat the heir apparent in his own party and then go on to hold off the much-vaunted Republican machine, “is a truly remarkable achievement.”

Obama’s achievement was a triumph of true marketing, in the sense that it was based on substance rather than spin. It demonstrated how carefully marshalling all the forces at your disposal can help you overcome apparently insurmountable odds. As such, it provides signal lessons for business leaders – particularly in the current economic downturn.

Obama’s personal charisma played a major role in his success. But he used this to good effect, deploying not just his tremendous public speaking skills in rallies and debates, but showing himself to be an excellent listener too. His demeanour was consistently positive and composed, while his compelling biography – his background and his evident closeness to his immediate and extended family – attracted the attention and empathy of voters.

He converted this empathy into tangible support – not least from the grass roots. More citizens volunteered

Lessons from America

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He explains: “McCain took his reputation for straight talking around the country on his ‘Straight Talk Express’ campaign bus. But when he started to fall behind in the polls and got swept up in the financial crisis, he started to get very reactive and slipped into a different communication mode.

"He switched to ‘attack politics’ in an attempt to distract people from the economy. But going ‘off brand’ lost him momentum and voter support."

McCain’s departure for Washington to supposedly help solve the sub-prime mortgage crisis was interpreted as a cynical attempt to rescue his own

reputation rather than the economy. By contrast, Obama’s thoughtful, calm and nuanced discussion about the meltdown reinforced perceptions about his ability to lead amid financial turbulence.

Obama also chose an excellent marketing and campaign team, and managed them well, choosing a non-controversial experienced senator, with complementary experience, as his running mate. But McCain assembled a smooth-running campaign team relatively late in the day, and his choice of the unknown and untested Sarah Palin as his number two proved to be another nail in his coffin.

Belk observes: “Joe Biden played a narrow and very focused role in the Obama ticket – foreign affairs and perhaps the working class. It was very clear who was leading and who was supporting. McCain’s appointment of Sarah Palin, on the other hand, looked like a smart move initially – she was young and she was a woman – but she became a bigger focus of media attention than McCain himself, which was confusing.”

Nevertheless, the appointment did put the Republicans in control of the news cycle – albeit temporarily.

“It created short-term interest, hype and buzz – the kind of ‘new news’ that brands thrive on,” says Kristian Sumners, a freelance creative director in New York.

Negative advertising – historically an accepted feature of US politics – also helped generate headlines. But as the campaign unfolded voters demonstrated a growing dislike of the tactic, a symptom, believes Harty, of an increasingly well-informed and savvy electorate: “US citizens are much more sophisticated consumers of politics now,” he says.

It might also reflect a desire for authenticity and integrity at a time when once-trusted and ‘safe’ institutions such as government and banks are proving to be fallible.

In any case, Obama’s skill in pre-empting and defusing criticisms should be a salutary lesson for any business leader who tries to keep their skeletons safely locked up in cupboards.

“He and his advisers managed the political chess board brilliantly,” says Quelch. “Early on he anticipated and defused negative criticisms by admitting to past indiscretions in his autobiography."

Obama has built a bond of trust with the American people that most business leaders can only aspire to forge with their customers. He now has to deliver on his promises. That, as even the best business leaders know, is the difficult bit. Some quotes from this article were taken, with permission, from Marketing magazine, 12th November 2008.

Obama harnessed the power of the internet to reach the grass roots of the electorate McCain admitted early on that he didn’t use the internet Lesson for business leaders: Embrace the channels available to you – including new media – to get your message across to a wide audienceObama delivered a powerful, clear and consistent message around the themes of hope and change McCain started off well with a straight-talking campaign, but switched to ‘attack politics’ in an attempt to distract people from the economy Lesson for business leaders: Hold true to your core values and message and maintain poise and equilibrium in the face of efforts to distract youObama delivered substance as well as style, buttressing the emotional appeal of his speeches with solid and specific policy details McCain’s attempts to help solve the sub-prime mortgage crisis was interpreted as a cynical attempt to rescue his own reputation rather than the economy Lesson for business leaders: Voters and consumers are increasingly well-informed and sophisticated, and look for integrity and authenticity from their leadersObama listened as well as talked, and made ordinary people feel they were important by suggesting they could contribute and participate McCain talked about championing the underdog, but switched the focus of his attention from voters to knocking the competition Lesson for business leaders: Listen to your consumers and focus on making your offering as good as it possibly can beObama chose and managed his team carefully, selecting a respected running mate who complemented his own strengths McCain made a late and maverick choice in Sarah Palin, who became the focus of media attention Lesson for business leaders: You need a strong team around you, but everyone needs to be clear who is leading and who is supporting.

OBAMA VS MCCAIN:THE LESSONS FOR BUSINESS

Barack Obama’s campaign is a case study in marketing excellence

John QuelchHarvard Business School Professor

Going ‘off brand’ lost McCain momentum and voter support

Howard Belk, Co-President and Chief Creative Officer at Siegel and Gale

US citizens are much more sophisticated consumers of politics now

Steve Harty, Chairman of advertising agency BBH

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Lambert and Professor Martin Cowie, Head of Research and Development (R&D) at the Trust, turned to Impact Executives for help. The agency fielded Ginette Camps-Walsh, who has deep knowledge and broad experience of medical research and marketing – plus an extensive network of contacts in the field as a result of her involvement with the medical marketing group of The Chartered Institute of Marketing. Camps-Walsh joined the Trust in July 2007 as Business Development Director for R&D.

She came into what Lambert admits was a difficult situation. “We received all this funding, but we had to prove very little to earn it,” he said. “Because the funding was always automatic, we had little understanding of the capacity and capability we had in the field of research, or the hunger of our clinicians to do it. So Ginette had to spend longer than perhaps any of us had anticipated taking

considerable challenge for the Trust,” admits Finance Director Mark Lambert. “The funding is being gradually reduced until 2009/2010, when it will disappear completely. So far we have managed to balance our budget through a combination of cost cutting and

additional government funding deriving from our new status as cardiovascular and respiratory biomedical research units. But we also have to earn our way out of trouble, and realised last year that an important way to do that was to significantly improve our revenue from commercial medical trials.”

ROYAL BROMPTON & HAREFIELD NHS TRUST IS SET TO QUADRUPLE ITS COMMERCIAL RESEARCH INCOME OVER THE NEXT FIVE YEARS, THANKS TO INTERIM BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR FOR R&D GINETTE CAMPS-WALSH

ROYAL BROMPTON & HAREFIELD (RBH) NHS Trust has a formidable reputation. A world leader in the treatment of heart and lung disease, it is also Europe’s foremost respiratory research centre. Its cardiac, cardiovascular and critical care teams are among the top three health research teams in Europe.

Every year the Government had granted the Trust research funding of nearly £29 million, which represents 14 per cent of its annual turnover. So it came of something of a challenge to be told in 2006 that this automatic funding would be completely withdrawn by 2009. Instead, the National Institute for Health Research, a new body set up by the Department of Health, will allocate research funding on an entirely different, per project, basis.

“Plugging this financial hole, as well as ensuring we sustain our reputation for research excellence, clearly poses a

Moving to a new beat

My approach was all about focusing on what the customer wants

enough of the right kind of patients.”She then began to assess what

commercial markets the Trust should be focusing on and developed a marketing plan to target them.

She explains: “I contacted all the major research organisations, as well as the big pharmaceutical and medical devices companies themselves, and we presented the Trust’s credentials to them. That in itself was a big step forward. We had these impressive facilities and expertise, but we had never really gone out and ‘sold’ them.

"These companies were also pleasantly surprised to be contacted by us and to be asked how we could help them. My approach was all about focusing on what the customer wants and how we could best deliver it to them.”

Camps-Walsh augmented this broad marketing activity with more direct matchmaking between clinicians who wanted to run particular trials and

Ginette was instrumental in showing us what a business-minded research organisation looks like

companies seeking research partners, an approach that is already bearing fruit.

The third strand to her assignment, which finished at the end of May 2008, was to create robust activity and income forecasts for the next five years.

“Ginette showed us that our commercial research income, which is currently running at about £1 million to £2 million a year, could rise to between £8 million and £9 million a year, provided we behave in the right way and do the right things," says Craig. "She showed us what a business-minded research organisation looks like and gave us confidence to exploit what are significant commercial opportunities.”

The Trust is creating a full-time commercial trials team in order to sustain the momentum Camps-Walsh created. As Lambert concludes: “This is a medium-to long-term game, and we are dedicated to continuing all the good work Ginette has done for us.”

Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust is a partnership of two specialist hospitals that are world-renowned for their expertise, standard of care and research success in the field of heart and lung disease. It carries out some of the most complicated surgery and offers some of the most sophisticated treatment available anywhere in the world. Every year it treats more than 90,000 outpatients and 26,000 inpatients from all over the UK and around the globe. On an annual basis staff perform over 3,000 angiograms/cardiac catheterisations, 1,800 thoracic surgery operations, 2,400 coronary angioplasties, 2,000 treatments for respiratory failure, and 1,200 heart bypass operations. The Trust also works on numerous research projects that bring benefits to patients in the form of new, more effective and efficient treatments for heart and lung disease. It generates medical advances that are taken up by the NHS and by health providers further afield. Its main partner is Imperial College, London.

THE ORGANISATION

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stock of the situation.”Robert Craig, Director of Planning

and Strategy at the Trust, admits: “Our research here was active and well regarded, but it was not well directed. We attracted and recruited bright young ‘academic’ clinicians and allowed them to develop their own interests and supported their academic aspirations, but it was all a bit random. Ginette quickly established that our record on recruiting patients to trials and on planning and delivering timely research outputs was poor.”

So though she was hired specifically to help grow commercial income, Camps-Walsh found herself helping to create an infrastructure that was better designed to attract research funding generally, including from government.

“For example,” she explains, “we were wasting time and money going for funding for trials that would never get off the ground because there weren’t

Ginette Camps-Walsh qualified as a biochemist, and her first job was in research in a company that is now part of GE Healthcare. She quickly gained postgraduate marketing and management qualifications, and progressed though a series of marketing and research jobs in big pharmaceutical companies including DuPont, Bristol Myers Squibb, Baxter Healthcare and Hoechst (now Sanofi Aventis). More recently, she ran the UK subsidiaries of two small pharmaceutical and medical device companies.

She also has extensive experience as a consultant and interim manager and has done major consultancy projects for clients including the Department of Health, St Helier Hospital and the London Clinic.

She has recently contributed to a White Paper on marketing in the NHS – The

Real NHS: The benefits of a marketing

approach – for The Chartered Institute of Marketing, where she chairs the medical marketing group.

THE INTERIM THE CLIENT

“I was responsible for plugging the gap in our finances caused by the loss of government funding, and I turned to Impact Executives as we already had an excellent relationship with their parent company Harvey Nash. Ginette really impressed us when we interviewed her. She had great experience, drive, enthusiasm and contacts.

We believed we needed an interim manager at this stage because although all the plans for growth were positive, we didn’t want to run the risk of hiring someone permanent only to find the opportunities weren’t actually there. What’s more, interim managers are very senior and experienced, so they can act quickly, cut through the politics and get things up and running for you very fast. The challenge then is to sustain the momentum.”Mark Lambert, Finance Director, Royal

Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust.

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CSR DIRECTORS HAVE HAD THEIR DAY, SAYS DAVID BENT ratcheted up to such a level of public awareness that companies who break promises will be punished by consumers or regulators at some point.

On the innovation side, there will be lots of opportunities during the recession to tap into the coincidence of interests between customers’ wish to rein in their spending and their desire to sustain their societal and environmental values.

What’s more, if a business has a strong balance sheet, recession is a good time to steal a march on competitors by investing in a strong growth platform when others are retreating. And there is a strong business case for making sustainability a strong growth platform.

For example, ten years ago Unilever realised that one-third of the raw materials it uses in its products are grown from agricultural sources. It set up a sustainable agriculture programme to secure its supply, a strategy that will stand it in good stead as our stock of finite resources diminishes and that has already won it advantage with retailers like Tesco and Wal-Mart.

But lots of organisations think too narrowly about sustainability. They often see it purely as climate change – an issue that is discussed widely, and whose effects on businesses and societies are easily understood.

But food shortages, the demand for more ‘stuff’ from growing and more prosperous populations, and the need to find renewable sources of energy and raw materials present both major challenges and massive opportunities for companies. And these challenges and opportunities don’t disappear in a recession. Indeed, when drawing in their horns most organisations will be more successful if they understand what sustainability means for them in hard, practical terms – and then embed it into core business strategy and the most important functions around the business.

Who should be driving this? Whoever’s responsibility it is to think about the future of the business – so the Chief Executive, the Chairman, and the Director of Strategy in particular. But every board director also needs to think about how it affects their particular area. I am currently working with the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales to determine the role Finance Directors should play in all this.

Companies will only be sustainable if sustainable thinking is embedded in the organisation. And once that happens, the CSR Director will become redundant.

considerations for companies. How companies take serious account of these factors will determine their long-term survival. Their sustainability is intrinsically linked to the sustainability of the planet’s resources and its people.

In the short term, of course, the focus for most organisations has shifted closer to home. It is inevitable and quite right that they should concentrate on surviving through what looks set to be a very difficult two or three years. Cutting back costs and investment is part of the survival strategy, and investment in sustainability will suffer along with other areas. You can’t contribute to a sustainable world if you go bust.

Yet the trick is not to mothball sustainable initiatives. Indeed, they may even help organisations survive the recession by helping with either extreme efficiency or extreme innovation.

For example, on the efficiency side, using less packaging or alternative sources of energy also helps keep costs down. And while consumers too will be focusing on their wallets, all the research shows that they don’t suddenly forget their values. Looking back, people’s awareness of environmental and societal problems kept rising after the recession in the early 1990s. The issues have since

THE FINANCIAL TIMES columnist Lucy Kellaway recently suggested in an article in The Economist that the recession will prompt businesses to send their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Directors on a “gap year, indefinitely”. That would be no bad thing – which might seem like a surprising admission from a representative of a sustainable development organisation.

Let me explain.CSR started out very well-intentioned.

But it has become divorced from the business, and confused with charity, philanthropy or ‘being nice’. In some cases it has also become an adjunct to the marketing department – and it is these quasi-marketing aspects of CSR that are likely to be slashed in the downturn, because they are seen as discretionary spend.

Much CSR has become too focused on what a business does with its profits. But what is more important is how companies make those profits in the first place. This is where things like the implications of climate change on the supply chain, emerging markets’ desire for poverty alleviation, emerging new markets for people at the bottom or the middle of the pyramid, and so on, become increasingly critical

Reclaiming the future

Impact Executives - the business review Issue 22

You can’t contribute to a sustainable world if you go bust

10

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