Talent Management in the current climate Brewing up ... - Ashridge

A day in the life of
Nick Ceasar
8
It’s 8am and I am on my bicycle,
flying over Hampstead Heath,
drinking the fresh air and pedalling
as fast as my smart-casual attire will
allow. It’s been two months since
I started at Ashridge and I have
been missing like crazy my cycle to
work. I only realise how important
my daily ride was now it’s gone and
still haven’t quite managed to find
an equivalent substitute. I vow to
myself to win more London-based
clients, and pedal on.
I am part of the Sustainability
Practice at Ashridge Consulting.
Ashridge has a strong reputation
in this area already, particularly
in research and education, and
part of my job is to support the
consulting effort. One way of doing
this is to start to introduce some
of my networks from the field to
colleagues at Ashridge who show
an interest. Today’s focus is to
explore what we can learn from the
discipline of design: in particular,
the way designers think in order to
inform management practice in the
sustainable context. This activity
is in response to a request from
Hugh, a colleague at Ashridge,
who is committed to finding a
European equivalent of the great
Bill McDonough, architect, designer
and bio-neer.
Rob Holdway bowls though the
door of the RSA’s tiny Gerard Bar
clutching a pack of super-strength
Lemsip. He denies its man-flu and
suggests that combining coffee
and Lemsip will see him right. I
suggest this combination was not
‘designed’ to be used this way but
he ignores my snide advice and
sure enough he is shortly firing on
all cylinders.
Best known as the presenter of
Channel 4’s reality show, Dumped,
Rob is a product designer by trade,
previously a research fellow at the
Royal College of Art and a founder
of the highly successful ecoconsultancy
Giraffe Innovations.
He has the high energy and
conversational rhythm of a classic
entrepreneur and is proud of what
he has achieved. He darts from
subject to subject, ranging from the
construction of the WEEE (Waste
Electrical and Electronic Equipment)
sculpture that he directed for the
Eden Project, to the unsustainable
choices companies are being
forced to make due to the prices
for recycled materials dropping
through the floor in the current
economy. Having worked with Rob
in the past, though, I know he is
more than just an entrepreneurial
shaper and is also a true completer-
finisher, so I feel happy engaging
with his comfortable banter.
Hugh has joined us now and
is keen to pull the conversation
back from technical detail and to
focus on the bigger questions.
What can we take from design
as a discipline and designer
thinking to help us to inform the
way businesses think about their
context and relationships with
wider environment and society?
The power of design is becoming a
hot topic in the wider sustainability
arena too, with recognition that
as much as 80% of the negative
impact from products or services
results from decisions made at the
design stage. More broadly, there is
much to be gleaned from applying
a design mindset and philosophy
to wider business issues, from
being more intuitive to the continual
questioning of the status quo.
Rob is quick to point out,
though, that actually many
designers are neither following nor
interested in following the path of
Bill McDonough and are often more
interested in pure aesthetic. Take
Philippe Starck’s ‘Juicy Salif’ lemon
squeezer for example: it’s a musthave
on the kitchen windowsill but
if you want to squeeze a lemon....
We acknowledge that we are going