Our Mission

The Centre’s mission is to help managers make the most of the immense body of research and wisdom about how to succeed in work.

What we do

The Centre’s activities extend to research projects and support services for managers and students globally.

The first service is theheadsup.network.

The research work is focused on combining the wisdom of experienced managers with the expertise of business academics. We want to capture and share the knowledge about how to succeed in work that has been gained by those successful in business.

The Centre aims to support managers in accessing and putting into action the best of management, organisation and behavioural science and the wisdom of those experienced in industry, government and not-for-profit.

Why we started

Hamish Scott, founder of the Centre, in 2016:

There’s a lot of things that we know about what works in business. (And a lot we know about what doesn’t work!)
We have cases and research findings. We have thousands of hours learning from managers. We have careers’ worth of wisdom.

But only a fraction of it is accessed or brought to bear.

Most people are too busy to take time out. They don’t have the time to sort the proper learning from the growing mountains of content that have now become an online industry.

We need to help managers make the most of the knowledge that the world can offer. Take people straight to what they need.

And we need to look harder for the wisdom that we should be sharing.

I think it’s crazy that 27 year-old doctoral students have their esoteric conclusions published but the world doesn’t get to hear from a guy with 30 years of learning about how to cut costs in a spiralling industry.

We must help bring this knowledge to the wider management community. This is management research as valuable as any university paper.

An executive’s personal effectiveness, a nation’s productivity, a company’s goals… they all deserve the best thinking to be applied.

How do we get the best of management research, the best of what is known, into the hands of the people who will drive our economies?

We’re going to work on how we do that.

How we think

The Centre brings together a diverse group. But there are a few things that we all agree on:

  1. The doer is the hero. Turning the thinking into action is the point.
  2. Everyone deserves to know the best of what is known.
  3. It’s the dialogue that counts.
  4. Leader have better things to do than wade through the mountains of blah blah blah.
  5. We are passionate about helping the doers.

Who are we

The Centre draws on a network of Members from across the world.

Every Member does three things:

  1. We work in executive education as members of faculty or visiting faculty at top Business Schools. We work as professors, coaches, and tutors helping managers develop the knowledge and skills to tackle current business challenges and personal goals.
  2. We research and advance the thinking in our specialist fields, from business strategy to executive stress.
  3. We work in industry as advisors, fractional directors, non-executive directors and (some of us) business owners.

We try to bring the school to the workplace and bring the workplace to the school.