2007 Thought Leadership Residential Sessions
This year's program includes a range of thought-provoking sessions from our faculty and leading industry professionals.
Board Careers - Rewards and Risks
Paul Geyer & Carey Cox - Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD)
Many senior executives see directorships as a natural career progression. Finding stimulating and rewarding board positions and establishing a successful director portfolio can be challenging. Director roles carry a degree of risk compounded by a limited understanding of director duties and responsibilities. This session will provide an overview of board opportunities, strategies for finding board roles, rewards of being a director and director duties and responsibilities.
Presented in conjunction with the AICD - the peak body for directors, offering director and senior officer level education, professional development, knowledge and information services, and representation of directors' interests to government and regulators.
Strategies For Acquiring Innovative Knowledge
Dr Kwanghui Lim
Innovation is becoming increasingly important for corporate success. This session explores strategies used by firms to acquire new knowledge. This includes knowledge from outside the firm, as well as across technological domains. Students will engage in role-play that simulates the corporate acquisition of a high-technology open source firm. Then, the instructor will present an overview of the latest management research in this area. Participants can expect to gain a better understanding of how to manage people and intellectual property when acquiring new knowledge, as well as the tensions that have to be balanced in managing internal and external knowledge resources.
Diagnosing and improving marketing strategy efficiency
Professor Susan Ellis
Whether an organisation is in a more mature and highly competitive environment or whether it is breaking new ground as a prospector, efficiency remains a key consideration in selecting and implementing a strategy.
Not surprisingly, your marketing strategy increases in efficiency the more it is aligned with your business strategy. In this session we will learn a theory-based method to diagnose both your business and your marketing strategy. We will then examine the degree of alignment between the two strategies and identify healthy pathways forward – toward an increase in alignment and thus toward increased efficiency in marketing strategy and marketing expenditures.
Developing Your People: The Key is Feedback
Professor Ian Williamson
Organisations invest a lot of time and money in providing training and development for their employees. However, perhaps the most valuable thing managers can do to develop their employees is provide effective feedback. Yet, in many organisations performance evaluations are often times seen as ineffective, a waste of time or unfair. In this session we will discuss some of the barriers managers face when providing constructive feedback to their employees. Furthermore, through the use of a role-play exercise participants will learn techniques for providing effective performance enhancing feedback.
Leadership and Sustainability
Program Director Richard Searle and Kate Vinot, General Manager Corporate Strategy, South East Water
Sustainability is a 21st century leadership challenge – to meet that challenge many of us will need to rethink how we conceive and exercise leadership.
It's not possible to divorce purpose from performance in the exercise of leadership. Brilliant managers brought us Enron, James Hardie and Anderson Accounting. Letting our public leaders divorce performance from purpose last century brought us the problems of fascism, genocide and the nuclear arms race – this century it brings us the even bigger challenge of global warming.
In this two-part session, Richard Searle will address the issue of sustainability as a leadership challenge. He will be followed by Kate Vinot, who will talk about real-life sustainability issues and projects she's been involved in throughout her extensive career, and some of the challenges she's faced - and overcome - along the way.
Friday Evening Dinner Speaker - Rachael Robertson
Rachael Robertson has recently returned to Australia after 12 months in the Antarctic, where she successfully led the 58th Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition to Davis Station. She is only the second female to ever lead a team at the Station.
Over Summer Rachael managed a team of 83 expeditioners involved in undertaking scientific research into climate change and global warming. The team also included trades people undertaking a works program and producing the station's water and electricity supplies and other support staff including pilots, chefs, radio operators and meteorology staff. Most of these people returned to Australia in March and 18 people remained behind to spend the long dark Winter in Antarctica. The role of Station Leader then becomes one of building teamwork and managing interpersonal relationships while ensuring the safety and morale of the team
After managing a highly complex operation with the added challenge of isolation and extreme risk to life, Rachael's talk will focus on the lessons she learnt from her most challenging leadership role to date.
