Professor Stephan Henneberg is Head of the Department of Marketing, and Director of the Business Ecosystems Research Group.
His research interests are mainly in business marketing, supply chain management, and business strategy.
Professor Henneberg held senior positions at A.T. Kearney and McKinsey & Co before returning to academia. He spoke to us about his experience of teaching Marketing and Management, and how he sees students develop during their time at Queen Mary.
It’s really good when students ask questions – these are important even for academics, as they can help us to clarify our thoughts. The worst lectures, for both academics and students, are when the academic has their own agenda and goes through their slides, but there’s nothing coming back from the students – nothing challenging. For example, a challenge could be a question like “how does that apply to a practical example? Is it always relevant?” Or a theoretic, conceptual question: “I don’t understand how that relates to this theory, or derives from that theory”.
Academics are also very happy to have left-field questions sometimes – if it’s too much of a detour, they can tell the student to come back after class to discuss it. And it’s not just the questions that students ask academics – it’s the questions that they ask each other. Undergraduates often still feel that they have to go via the academic in interactions; if another student makes a comment, they don’t feel that they can comment back, so they wait for the academic to respond first. What I enjoy most is when the students have a discussion among themselves, and my job as the academic is to act as moderator. When that happens, you know that reflection is clearly happening in the students’ minds, which is what we want to achieve.
It can’t be otherwise, because we’re a research-intensive university, therefore what we do is research-led – but it’s also practice-led. Not many academics have both research and management experience; I have both – I was a partner at McKinsey – so I can bring academic as well as practical experience to the table. So, although our curriculum is research-led, in some cases it’s also led by an understanding of the challenges of the practice. I think bringing those together is very helpful for students and provides the learning experience that they need.
I think that in the first two or three years of their studies, students really grow up and become professionals. They learn to have a professional attitude – that is, knowing what’s expected of them, how to deliver things on time, and pulling their weight in group work. But they also learn more general skills, like interpersonal interactions: how to work together professionally with someone that you may not know, or even like, when you have a joint task that you have to deliver.
They also learn analytic, reflective skills – questioning things in an appropriate manner and looking at them from different perspectives. They’re not just being a sponge that takes in knowledge, they’re doing something with that knowledge – in the best sense, creating their own knowledge about how the world works. I think that’s what students take away from their studies, in addition to the very specific concepts, tools and theories that they learn as part of their degree.
Hopefully, they come in as virtually children and they leave as professional adults. I would say I could see them in a business or organisation, be it for-profit or non-profit; in a charity or a multinational conglomerate. They work and they achieve, for themselves and for others in society – something for which they were not equipped at the beginning of their studies.