Globally fit leadership: four steps forward

Purpose: Businesses operate in a world facing a range of urgent global issues (UGIs). Unless an effective response is made in the near future, extremely damaging consequences are forecast. The purpose of this paper is to offer assistance to business leaders in balancing the short-term local pressures with the long-term global demands from these urgent issues. Design/methodology/approach: The paper offers proposals for four initial steps that can be considered by leaders for responding effectively to this global crisis. Findings: Four initial steps are proposed, and these steps are interconnected. The proposal includes a new conceptualisation of fitness and highlights the need for leadership fitness to responding effectively to this global crisis. Practical implications: The paper offers powerful reasons why business leaders have to engage more fully with global issues and proposes four pragmatic initial steps that will enable them to do this effectively. Social implications: The paper will encourage business leaders to engage more with resolving UGIs, which may ultimately save our planet. Originality/value: The paper provides an original and valuable contribution through the combination of the four initial steps that are proposed for moving towards a resolution of these UGIs

Developing school strategy: developing globally fit leaders

This paper focuses on businesses and the leaders who guide them. These businesses operate in a world facing a range of urgent local and global issues, and an effective response to these issues requires globally fit leadership. Four elements are highlighted as being crucial to developing such leadership: a contemporary mission, a global approach, a new paradigm of thought, and improved decision-making processes. The paper continues by arguing that business schools also need to respond to the urgent global issues that are currently being experienced. One of the key roles of a business school should be to lead in the development and promulgation of new ideas on leadership, but until now many have operated from the same outmoded paradigms as the businesses they are there to help. As such, they are part of the problem not the solution. If business schools are to continue to enjoy success and fulfil their future role, they too have to transform their strategy and processes to ensure they are ‘fit to lead’ in the future

The survey form of SCAN: the feasibility of using experienced lay survey interviewers to administer a semi-structured systematic clinical assessment of psychotic and non-psychotic disorders

Background. The success of large scale surveys depends on well designed questionnaires and the skills of lay interviewers. Discrepancies in prevalence rates between epidemiological surveys and poor agreement between survey interviewer and clinician diagnostic interviews are giving rise to increasing concern among researchers, public health planners and policy developers. New approaches to information collection are called for. The feasibility of training experienced survey interviewers in semi-structured, clinical, diagnostic interviewing has never been investigated systematically across the range of neurotic and psychotic disorders. Methods. Eight experienced survey interviewers from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) were selected and underwent extended training in a Survey Form of SCAN (SCAN-SF). Sixty-four adults, including a majority of psychiatric in-patients were assessed by ONS interviewers and reinterviewed within a week by SCAN-trained clinicians. Feedback was sought from interviewers and trainers. Results. Trainers found lay interviewers coped at least as well with psychotic as with neurotic symptoms. Concordance for any disorder was 0.74 (95% CI: 0.57 to 0.91); for any specific psychotic disorder 0.63 (0.40 to 0.86); for any specific neurotic disorder 0.63 (0.43 to 0.83). Sensitivity ranged from 0.6 to 0.9 and specificity from 0.8 to 0.9. There was no evidence of rater bias. Conclusions. These preliminary findings are very promising. However, before the SCAN-SF, administered by carefully trained lay interviewers, can be recommended in large scale surveys, further evaluations of its feasibility and reliability in the general population are needed