Category Archives: Business and Law

Olympic gold medallist shares the secrets of his success at Birkbeck’s Business Week

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This post was contributed by Guy Collender, Communications Manager, Birkbeck’s Department of External Relations.

Adrian Moorhouse MBE, Olympic gold medallist, speaking at Birkbeck's Business Week

Adrian Moorhouse MBE, Olympic gold medallist, speaking at Birkbeck’s Business Week

The phenomenal swimming achievements of Adrian Moorhouse MBE speak for themselves: world number one from 1986 to 1992 for 100m breaststroke, Olympic gold medal winner in 1988, and serial breaker of world records. He has also been incredibly successful in business. The management consultancy he co-founded, called Lane4, boasts 80 staff, works in 30 countries and has been recognised repeatedly by The Sunday Times as one of the best 100 small companies to work for. How did he manage to transfer his success from the pool to the boardroom? That intriguing question was the subject of the Alec Rodger Memorial Lecture, entitled What can business learn from sport?, which Moorhouse delivered on 24 June during Birkbeck’s Business Week.

Moorhouse emphasised the importance of applying sporting practices and insights from organisational psychology to create conditions for success. He explained how this was the philosophy of the University of California, where he trained after winning a sports scholarship at age 18. Often referring to the success of Team GB at the 2012 Olympics, he described how the athletes were assisted throughout in a way that is rarely the case for businesses. This approach helped Team GB to third position in the medal table. He said it is necessary to identify “critical performance moments” and then give people what they need when they need it. He also stressed practising under pressure, learning from failure and setting goals as part of talent development.

Moorhouse continued by focusing on goals, saying: “Sport motivates people well with goals. People [in business] don’t work hard enough on meaning.” He employed a goal framework to show how to divide the ultimate goal into manageable stepping stones en route to the overall prize, and how he had to meet a mind-boggling 400 key performance indicators on his way to winning gold in Seoul during his four-year Olympic campaign.

Building mutual trust within teams was highlighted as an essential component of success. He explained how leaders have to believe in people and work together on goals, and how individuals need to be “team-fit”.  He said: “My goal is to create an environment where people can be brilliant. My job is to release their talent.”

Aside from the role of the team, Moorhouse did refer to the personal resilience, self-esteem, self-belief, discipline and rigour required to succeed. He shared a headline from The Daily Telegraph, which declared “Moorhouse is a failure”, after he came fourth in the 1984 100m breaststroke final. At the next Olympics he was to prove the journalist wrong when he won gold.

Moorhouse did explain that not all sporting skills and approaches can be transferred to the world of business, but it is clear that his sporting background and “entrepreneurial nature” are enabling him to succeed.

Revealing the horrors of state violence at Law on Trial

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This post was contributed by Guy Collender, Communications Manager in Birkbeck’s Department of External Relations.

The severity and frequency of incidents of state violence, including deaths in police custody and the provocation of protestors by the authorities, are disturbing. These excesses need to be exposed and warrant discussion, and that is just what happened as part of this year’s series of Law on Trial lectures about scientific evidence. The graphic and shocking session, entitled ‘State violence under the microscope’, was held at Birkbeck on Thursday 19 June.

Dr Nadine El-Enany, Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck’s School of Law, began by charting the historical roots of state violence and the justifications used for it. She referred to the Peterloo massacre of 1819, when 11 people were killed and more than 500 were injured following a cavalry charge to break up a 60,000-strong meeting in Manchester about political reform (suffrage for all men). El-Enany explained how the doctrine of unlawful assembly developed in three trials following the massacre, how large crowds were assumed to be treacherous, and how public order offences, rather than high treason, came to be used to prosecute protestors.

She described how this assumption that crowds are an “inherent danger” continues today, and how this perception underpins the law as the state tries to depoliticise protest and maintain the status quo.

Referring to the protests in 2010 against rising tuition fees, El-Enany spoke about how the police practice of kettling – confining protestors to a limited area during a protest – proves counter-productive as it can lead to violence.  She said: “Heavy-handed policing has been shown to increase, rather than decrease, disorder.”

Dr Chris Cocking, from the University of Brighton, spoke about psychological theories of crowd behaviour and reiterated how police tactics can backfire. Aggressive actions, such as charges and kettling, treat the crowd as one group, and provoke the crowd to respond as one group. He said: “Indiscriminate public order tactics unite previously disparate crowds into opposing police action and create a self-fulfilling prophesy of escalating conflict.” Cocking described how disorder occurs, not because of violent intent, but because of a clash of legitimacy between two groups, namely the police and the crowd.

Harmit Athwal, of the Institute of Race Relations, spoke about research underway to investigate the deaths of 400 Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) people in police custody, prison and immigration detention. She referred to the importance of scientific evidence and independent post-mortems during inquests to challenge the official version of events and the initial views of pathologists in controversial cases. Athwal said: “Scientific evidence is important as it offers an alternative narrative to blaming the victim.”

Dr des Eddie Bruce Jones, Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck’s School of Law, continued by highlighting BME deaths in police custody in Germany, where there is no system of inquests. He focused on the horrific case of Oury Jalloh – a Sierra Leonean asylum seeker who burnt to death in a police cell in Dessau in 2005 while he was shackled to a mattress. No forensic fire examination was conducted, the right questions about how the fire started were not asked, and the lack of an inquest meant that there was no forum to discuss how the death occurred.

The shocking examples and frank exposition of state violence presented by the speakers generated many questions, highlighting once again the School of Law’s interest in social justice and debate.

Listen to the audio recordings of the speakers at the event.

Business Planning Workshop

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This post was contributed by Nick Eisner, an alumnus of Birkbeck’s Postgraduate Certificate in Journalism.

The submission deadline for the Santander Entrepreneurship Award is 7 March, (no excuse, no appeal). Top prize for the best postgraduate business plan is £20,000. The undergraduate top prize is £5,000.

As an introduction and preparation for the competition Birkbeck Enterprise Hub (BEH) hosted its Business Planning Workshop on Saturday 22 February between 10am and 4.30pm: six-plus concentrated hours on preparing a business plan – a map to show potential investors and others, including yourself, the budding entrepreneur, how you will take your idea from an ethereal notion in your head to a working business.

The workshop attracted a wide range of people with many imaginative ideas, including a new way of combining online and off-line shopping, improved communication over the internet, and a high-protein cereal for sports enthusiasts and weight trainers.

Not everyone was intending to submit a plan for this year’s awards, but everyone in the room had a vision and a sense of purpose. The workshop may have taken place on a sunny Saturday, but the buzz of energy and promise that pervaded room MAL415 was very different from a regular sleepy weekend atmosphere.

BEH’s resident entrepreneur Andrew Atter led the workshop and engaged his audience in an overview of the stages in preparing the business plan.

An air of competitive co-operation added further spice to the day. Attendees shared experiences of developing their ideas, while remaining wary of revealing too much.

The form that participants were asked to sign when they entered the room crystallised this balance of support, sharing, competition and discretion: participants had to agree not to abuse any information they gathered from each other during the workshop.

As well as Andrew’s PowerPoint presentation through the day, the session included group work among the participants and a presentation by one gallant volunteer of his business plan – or at least the parts of it that he felt safe in presenting to an audience at this point.
Afterwards he told me he found the experience a great exercise in presentation and a useful source of feedback from the group.

Breaks for coffee and lunch, which included the famous Birkbeck sandwich selection (my favourite is coronation chicken), gave participants the chance to discuss the wider aspects of entrepreneurship.

BEH executive director Ibrahim Maiga was optimistic about Britain’s entrepreneurial promise, which he saw as second only to that of the United States, but he was much less enthusiastic about the UK’s primary and secondary education.

He felt the UK could provide a good platform for research and development, but largely relies on foreigners for the skills to carry out that research, as well as fill the financial roles on which the country still relies so heavily for revenue.

Not only does the UK rely on visitors for these skills, but it’s unenlightened approach to immigration makes it even more difficult to attract the people it needs.

The UK’s stance on immigration may be a response to many of its people feeling threatened by competition for jobs from visitors, but that does not stop the policy from being a self-inflicted wound that the country’s economy can ill afford, especially at a time when that economy needs to diversify away from an overreliance on financial
services that themselves depend heavily on foreign institutions with UK bases.

Surely there is a better way to support people born in the UK: not to set up barriers to importing skills that the country needs, but to sustain an improvement of primary and secondary education so that more of those skills can come from UK citizens.

After lunch it was back to the workshop, which provided a lot for its participants to take in, and quite a gentle introduction to a development process that must grow increasingly competitive and challenging in subsequent stages.

After the official session, with the energy of true budding entrepreneurs, several participants stayed on to discuss ideas and opportunities further.

As well as the insights into business planning and development, perhaps one of the day’s most valuable offerings was the chance for participants to share a can-do sense of imaginative energy and possibility.

There are further details and dates of the Santander Entrepreneurship Award and other Birkbeck Enterprise Hub events on their website.

The work of Jane Bennet

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This post was contributed by Mayur Suresh, an Intern at the Birkbeck Institute of Social Research (BISR).

The BISR recently hosted a two-day event about the work of Jane Bennet (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore) organised by Lisa Baraitser (Birkbeck, University of London) and Michael O’Rourke (Independent Colleges, Dublin).

The workshop held on 5 October 2013 around the work of Jane Bennet, was filled with phrases like “object oriented ontology” (OOO for short), “new materialisms”, and “speculative realism”. As a person who has studied law, a discipline obsessed with language and meaning, and whose theoretical approaches in his PhD involves thinking about language and forms of life, all of this was new to me. The idea that material objects could be alive or actively participate in everyday life, seemed like a distant idea.

Yet this is precisely what Jane Bennet’s work argues: that matter has vitality. Maybe the first step is to move away from thinking about language as the threshold of human life. Humans always act within a larger assemblage of other (non-human) bodies. But more than that, things and objects seem to act upon us in a number of ways, and matter acquires a kind of life-force of its own. Actions are not only constituted through forms of human sociality, but by the material bodies in the assemblages that we are a part of.

The workshop took Jane Bennet’s work in several directions. Lisa Baraister’s presentation explored the ways in which mothers experienced the different objects that they encountered in a city: taking their baby buggies through the gates in Underground stations, or navigating busy sidewalks. While some navigated the city with ease, others struggled to find their way in the narrow pathways that the city afforded. In her narrative, the city emerges as a living sieve, which hoarded the various objects that it wanted to keep.

Nigel Clark’s presentation was on the question of time in geography. Geographers and geologists had usually understood rocks, and minerals and the other things that go to make up the earth as usually being inert, unless there was some event like an earthquake or a volcanic eruption. He wondered what would happen if we began to see that minerals and rocks are do not merely sit inertly in the earth, but act over many millennia. Another presentation titled “JB” by Michael O’Rourke explored the theoretical linkages between Judith Butler and Jane Bennet (available here).