The Urwick Prize 2018...
This year’s winners of the Urwick Prize were presented with the Cup at the Company’s Education Supper on 25 April.
The Prize commemorates the life and work of Colonel Lyndall Urwick, who was a distinguished writer and thinker on the topic of management in the mid-20th century and the founder of Urwick Orr Management Consultants.
In 1969 the Urwick Foundation was set up to further management education and in 1999 the Foundation endowed the Company with the Lyndall Urwick Memorial Cup together with the Trust's residual funds.
The late Sir Alan Urwick, son of Lyndall Urwick presented the Cup personally at our annual Education Supper for many years thereafter.
The Prize is awarded for an outstanding recent piece of research relevant to management consultancy, published in the UK. The way that we select the winner is that a shortlist of eligible research papers is drawn up by a panel of academics, and those on the shortlist submit summaries of their research to the Company’s Assessment Panel.
This year’s winner is a research paper that addresses the tension generated between consultants and clients through their different perceptions of time.
We know that time is the consultants’ stock in trade. It can be traumatic for those entering the profession from an executive position to have to account for their time, often on the modern equivalent of a timesheet. But there is a disconnect with clients, who are not under the same strictures.
The winning research paper is titled ‘The Silent Politics of Temporal Work: A Case Study of a Management Consultancy Project to Redesign Public Health Care’ with lead authors Professors Gerry McGivern, Sue Dopson and Ewan Ferlie. All three were able to attend the Education Supper and be presented with the Cup by the Master.
For those who want to know more, Professor Gerry McGivern will be delivering the Urwick Lecture on September 13; more details will be given in due course.
Calvert Markham
Father of the Company