Surrey Business School encourages its students to be enterprising and innovative — key skills for all types of graduate employment. We take pride in the high quality of our research and teaching, as well as the employability of our graduates.
We’ve all heard the doom-mongering research about how often small businesses fail — 35% within three years of starting up, 55% within five — but far less study has gone into explaining why they succeed.
Professor Mark Saunders and colleagues in the Surrey Business School set out to put this right. Funded by Kingston Smith — one of the UK's top 20 audit and chartered accountancy firms — the result is one of the largest surveys on the management of SMEs in the UK, focusing on what makes them successful.
With small businesses accounting for almost 14 million jobs across the UK, the study offers vital recommendations — for both policy makers and business owners — to improve the future of SMEs across the country.
In an ideal world, we’d all enjoy a perfect work-life balance. However, while we’ve all heard about — or even personally experienced — the negative consequences of an all-work-no-play lifestyle, might there also be an argument that our social lives can have a damaging effect on our happiness at work?
Dr Vurain Tabvuma, in conjunction with researchers at Kingston University, has found that major life events — such as marriage, or the birth of a first child — can have a detrimental effect on job satisfaction. The result is research that offers a new perspective on work-life balance, conflict, and enrichment.
Rapidly delivering more of what customers want is forcing many enterprise organizations to adopt agile practices in all areas of their business. For software-intensive businesses, the move to agile software development is already well underway.
The challenge they face is how to blend the flexibility of agile methods with the discipline required to manage any project to a successful conclusion. Analysing a framework used by IBM with many of its clients to help them achieve agility Professor Alan Brown has researched how to deliver measured improvements in large-scale software delivery enterprises.
His research highlights three key principles that allow agile practices to be used with confidence: steering using economic governance, measuring incremental improvements honestly, and empowering teams with disciplined agile delivery.
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Steve Pateman, Executive Director and Head of Banking at Santander UK, recently gave a lecture to members of the university community about current threats to the UK economy and the future of UK banking in general.
Talking at the Australian Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility’s Sixth Annual conference last month Professor David Bruce Allen, Dean of the Faculty of Business Economics and Law, urged businesses to demonstrate their commitment to CSR.
