David Spencer is the head of marketing for Old Speckled Hen at Greene King, Britain's leading pub retailer and brewer.  He joins Stephen Willson to explore how marketing philosophy and practices inform middle management action. David discusses the challenges of gaining a deep understanding of customer behaviour in a context that is evolving both in terms of points of purchase and consumption. This subsequently raises the issues of how such insights are suffused into the organisation to ensure that customer desires are fulfilled in the best possible way ..read more

Richard Morgan is the chief operating officer of LKQ Euro Car Parts, a national supplier to independent garages.  He joins Stephen Willson to explore the issues of managing over 250 branches in order to be able to deliver the most common parts within 20 minute time slots. He discusses the role of central and regional management in stock control and developing local community engagement and expertise in the face of a changing market ..read more

Liz Herridge is the Director of Network Claims and Transformation at National Highways, the public sector organisation responsible for the strategic road network.  She joins Stephen Willson to explore the middle management issues within reconfiguring the  claims workflow processes. Liz addresses the challenges of establishing a consistent information gathering system to improve national system throughput despite regions have diverse and potentially conflicting objectives. The issues within the transformation journey include work re-allocation, stimulating team support and motivati ..read more

In this episode Stephen Willson questions the intuitive presumption that achieving the best overall outcome is attained by maximising results within boundaries. The executive contributions illustrate unintended damaging behaviours that can occur across boundaries. These boundaries include between territories, business functions, alternative customer offerings and over period ends. Stephen then explores the importance of aligning all business units and functions with the  overall organisational purpose and provides examples of tactical, structural and cultural  ways to manage boundar ..read more

Jim DeWaele is the European president of the Keller Group, a global geotechnical specialist building contractor.  He joins Stephen Willson to explore the middle management issues of working in the high risk arena of building foundations in uncertain ground conditions. A local approach is described  that addresses the national challenges of different contractual arrangements, material costs and familiarity with alternative techniques. He discusses the requirements of organisation design to provide rapid access to distributed expertise across the network of 190 branches when unexpect ..read more

Justin King CBE was the chief executive of Sainsbury's plc, the UK's second largest grocery chain. He joined the organisation and engineered the corporate turnaround from 14 years of losing market share  to 9 successive years of profit growth. He joins Stephen Willson to explore the issues underlying the decline and how they were addressed. This included changing from being centrally led to empowering the front line on the basis that the only place that customers are served is in the stores. This required fundamental changes in the top management lineup but illuminatingly no more than no ..read more

Tony Taylor is the managing director of Gibbs and Dandy, a unit of Saint-Gobain, the French multi-national building materials organisation. He joins Stephen Willson to explore the issues of working on two fronts in a distribution business. The first being making multiple small internal operational improvements to prove their worth to their parent organisation. Secondly to access resources and manage boundaries with parallel distribution businesses and internal material manufacturing units ..read more

Asha Devi is associate director at Ove Arup the company most famous for being the architect of the Sydney Opera House. She joins Stephen Willson to explore the issues of designing customers' office space for collaboration and the satisfaction of multiple stakeholders in a changing world.  This has particular significance in enabling middle managers to work effectively across their organisations. The same spotlight is then shone on the design of Arup's own professional services offices ..read more

Jason Smith is the Managing Director of Artex, a leading distributor of construction products. He joins Stephen Willson to explore the development challenges faced by middle managers in different phases of their career progression.  ..read more

Anthony Tattum is the Chief Executive of Big Cat creative agency. He joins Stephen Willson and discusses how Big Cat works with organisations to align their customer-facing and delivery-focused middle management tiers in an environment where customer needs are changing rapidly. More details of Big Cat are available at their recently rebranded website: https://bigcatagency.com/  ..read more