Set in 11-acres of Regent’s Park, Regent’s University London brings together students from 140 different nationalities. We have an important organisational purpose (‘Developing Tomorrow’s Global Leaders’) and an amazing, global alumni network of founders and entrepreneurs, chief executives, social media influencers, royalty, actors, designers, politicians, senior leaders and board members of major family firms.
Together with my executive team and leaders across the University, we are developing a new ‘operating system’ for the organisation that’s more agile, more collaborative, more open, more data led. And that challenges us, ourselves, to live up to a more contemporary form of leadership in order to sustain and evolve this extraordinary ‘challenger’ brand.
One of our priority projects is the development of the Regent’s Curriculum Model that embodies the essence of a Regent’s education: future-facing, well-connected, cosmopolitan, entrepreneurial and personalised.
How did the initiative come about?
The idea for The Walpole Professorships grew out of conversations that Helen Brocklebank and I had been having about how to strengthen the British luxury talent pipeline. And it built on some of the valuable experience we’d developed in recent years with Michael Ward at Harrods.
We wanted to create a high-profile, prestigious initiative that honours some of luxury’s finest CEOs and MDs as the thought-leaders and game-changers that they are. What better way than to confer Visiting Professorial title on them via Walpole member organisation, Regent’s University London, and invite them to share their wealth of experience with the luxury leaders of tomorrow?
Why is it important?
Luxury, as much as any sector, is trying to plot a course through unprecedented levels of geo-political, environmental and technological change. Tomorrow’s luxury leaders need to be reconciled with this uncertainty and volatility, able to face its challenges and rise to its opportunities. To do this, they need to tap into the wisdom, insight and experience of today’s most influential leaders - themselves wrestling with pivotal moments in their own brands’ development.
What do you hope the programme achieves?
From the outset, Helen and I believed that the real value of this initiative would lie in its mutuality. The students, of course, will be hugely inspired by the professorial talks and some of them will get to participate in valuable, related activity – behind-the-scenes access, internship opportunities and so on. But the Visiting Professors (and their teams) will get access to the most cosmopolitan cohort of any UK university: our on-campus audience of fashion-forward, inter-cultural polyglots, NextGen luxury consumers and leaders.
