With power comes responsibility - Kim B Clark Fellowship at Said Business School

Some notes and reflections from my visit to Oxford for the launch event of the Kim B Clark Fellowship in Responsible Leadership at Saїd Business School, Oxford University on Saturday 7 September.

At this event Professor Tufano (Dean of Said Business School) welcomed four speakers to share their thoughts..

 - Kim B. Clark, in whose honour the Fellowship is named, President of Brigham Young University, Idaho, and formerly Dean, Harvard Business School.
- Clayton Christensen, Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School; Visiting Professor, Saïd Business School; the first recipient of the Kim B. Clark Fellowship.
- Kim S. Cameron, Professor of Management and Organisations, Ross School of Business.
- Charles Conn, Warden, Rhodes House, University of Oxford.


The talk was recorded and is available on the SBS YouTube Channel here

If you don't have a couple of hours free to watch the recording here are some of they key points I took away from it...

Clayton Christensen was the first speaker.  He encouraged that people be taught how to think and stressed the importance of theories. Often theories get a bad press with people more interested in taking action.  However, like it or not, our chosen course of action will be based on some belief that we hold on how things should work.  Equipping leaders with good theories and an understanding of what circumstances they would work in would help to improve the decisions that they take.

Next up we had Kim Cameron who started by looking at some dimension of "Responsible".  Could be in the sense of reliable, dependable, someone who follows through.  Could also be responsible for something, in charge of assets, or people.  Can also be about doing the right thing, creating goodness and this is the angle that he focused on with regard to responsible leadership.  Introduced idea of virtuousness and how there are some things that are globally agreed in humankind such as being kind rather than abusive,  better to be helpful than not.

I liked his idea of a "deviance continuum" - one one end we have negative abberant behaviour, in the middle we have normal behaviour and on the right positive deviance.  Organisations exist to reduce deviance - we organise ourselves to reduce chaotic aberrant behaviour.   In many contexts our focus is on reducing the negative abberance.  eg medical research into resolving medical problems versus how we could go from healthy to spectacular.  Responsible leaders are those that enrich life, they focus on the best of the human condition - ie virtuousness. At 40 mins through the video he discusses some examples of how responsible leadership can have positive business outcomes in terms of hard numbers as well as things like morale.


Charles Conn shared some interesting thoughts on Rhodes who had big ideas, big ideals, was greatly admired and had some very positive impacts.   Would not however be seen as a responsible leader.  Good ends we could agree with but means of achieving them were often less than positive.  For a responsible leader it's not just the ends that matter - it's the means as well.  He closed with a discussion of the clothing company Patagonia and their fanatical pursuit to be responsible and do no unnecessary harm.

Peter Tufano talked about 3 levels that relate to responsible leadership - Individual, Organisaton, Broader system.   We can get people sensitised to issues and may even get them to say they will take a particular course of action but often we fall short of our good intentions.  One question we need to reflect on then is how do you create an organisation that encourages more responsible behaviour versus a system that does the opposite.  Quoted Ignatius and his warning on the route from riches to honours to pride as a way to failure ... how often though might people view following this path instead as success?

The final speaker was Kim B Clark.  Listening to him it was clear why this fellowship is named in his honour. He is introduced around 1hr 15mins into the video - if you were to pick one person to listen to on the replay start with him.  He noted that "Leadership is always and everywhere a moral act" - every leader takes the life of others in their hands and will affect it though their actions.  Responsible leadership isn't just about the heart it's also about the mind, need to be able to motivate others, be decisive etc.  What we need in our leaders is a responsible heart and a powerful mind - tough minded but not hard hearted.

If you are interested in seeing what someone else took from the event I found this write up on the Deseret News website

Said Business School Venture Fund Final

Held at the SBS in Oxford on 6th June 2012 this was the 6th SBS Venture Fund final with 4 companies selected to pitch to a panel (Karl Peterson, Sir Victor Blank and Sir Philip Green) for investments up to around £150,000.

Over the previous 5 years the fund has invested around £750,000 in companies and four of them were scheduled to give quick updates on their progress.

First up we had MoBank which produces mCommerce platforms talking about their latest software which seems to be aimed at retailers looking to develop a mobile commerce capability.

Next was Cignifi - interesting idea this.  There are lots of people with phones but no bank accounts.  When it comes to offering loans to these people they have zero data to look at for conventional credit scoring so Cignifi has developed analytics based on the mobile phone usage records to determine a credit rating score.

Third to present was GreenPrint Technologies - focusing on solutions to measure manage and reduce printing costs in organisations.   One system looked like it would advise a user that there was a better printer option than the one they had selected and offer to reroute it for them.

The final company due to present to us was HiretheWorld a system for offering work out to tender over the web and engaging freelancers to complete it for you.  We saw a short video of how it all works and then the plan was that we would have an update presented via a web conference - sadly some buffering and delays on the link made this impossible.

The investment committee had narrowed down the many applications to a shortlist of 7 and those had then been further whittled down to the 4 companies who got to pitch on the evening.

Kinosis was first up.  This company was founded by a group of 4 surgeons and they are in the business of developing and marketing interactive education apps that utilises touch screen devices.  Their primary target audience are trainee surgeons.   Idea is that surgeons can use their iPad, or similar device, to practice surgical techniques and understand the mechanics and decision making required during an operation.

Then we had LabMinds - some companies you can immediately see and understand the market that they have been set up to serve.  I thought this was a good example of a company set up to address a problem that most people will be unaware of.   It seems that a lot of time is spent in labs preparing the chemical solutions needed to do the real work.  They have a machine that is intended to purify water and automate solution preparation thus saving time and money in the lab.  They hope to have their first machine installed in one of the Oxford labs before long but this did make it a very early stage for investment.

The Argentinian based online food ordering and delivery website Sinimanes.com was next.  There seemed to be a large market potential with many restaurants available who could be approached to sign up to the site and scope to grow beyond their initial focus on Buenos Aires.

Last to present was Oxford nanoSystems (surprisingly website is under construction) who want to improve the performance of heat transfer systems starting with boilers.  I think I heard them say that they wanted to make the surfaces in the heat transfer units "nano rough" and hence dramatically increase the surface area and performance.  usually the focus with a coating is to make it smooth so they would be utilising a process that was know but poor at creating smooth surfaces and hence not used much currently but could potentially suit their requirements.

At this point the investment panel retired to deliberate on their decisions and we were treated to some presentations from companies supported by the Oxford business X charity.  These companies are founded by secondary school pupils with a small loan from the charity.  Three of the companies came along and were truly inspiring.  BandIt was set up to produce and sell a series of coloured wrist bands that you could collect and when you had a complete set of all 7 possible ones you send them in and get a single multicoloured one instead.  The 7 bands relate to the 7 Olympic/Paralympic values which I now know are Respect, Determination, Courage, Inspiration, Friendship, Excellence, and Equality.  2Jevents.com was set up to help schools make better use of their facilities by making them available for commercial bookings when not being used by the school.  Teenage Dirt Bag was setup to make and sell a festival survival kit in a small bag.  Struck me as a great idea with potential well beyond the festival market that they are initially targeting.

The panel returned to the auditorium and provided their feedback.  They were interested in exploring a couple of the companies in more detail but didn't make any investment offers on the night.

After some closing remarks by the Dean of the school we were directed to the common room a fantastic BBQ that had been laid on and a chance to chat with other attendees at the event.

As ever with these things I had a good evening and learnt a lot through the presentations and listening to the panel and their questions.   As a keen watcher of Dragons Den it was interesting to see how the questions the panel asked fitted with what I expected them to ask - and generally it did.

Being a father of 2 daughters may make me more susceptible to noticing such things but I was struck that while there was a clear geographic mix of people presenting the 4 people giving updates on previous investments plus the 8 people presenting new ideas were all male.  When we had the presentations from the companies supported by Oxford X though, it was good to note that 4 of the 7 presenters were female.  Small numbers so could simply be an anomaly but did set me wondering where the role model female entrepreneurs are and why they weren't there trying to secure investment.