Dr Billy Wu

19 July 2017

Decarbonising transport and the electric grid has been a long sought after aspiration of many nations in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reliance on oil and gas. Transport alone contributes to around 14% of the 49 GtCO2eq produced globally as estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Catalysed by this, electric vehicles (EVs) have in recent years emerged as a potential solution and as of 2015 1.3 million EVs were in use globally, representing a 67% average growth rate since 2012. Yet despite this rapid growth, EV sales still only make up a small proportion of the 90 million vehicles which are annually produced. Whilst commercialisation of EVs continues to grow, this is accompanied by a plethora of market analysis showing aggressive forecasted growth rates which attracts new investors and start-up companies alike. However, since Sony released the first lithium-ion battery in 1991 there have been many false dawns for the EV revolution, in part due to the misalignment between technology development and media hype. So, the question is: what is it that actually holds back innovations in EVs and specifically the battery which is at the heart of the vehicle?

A lithium-ion battery is made up of 2 main components (though there are others): the anode and the cathode which are the negative and positive halves of the battery respectively. The modern day lithium-ion battery was first demonstrated by Professor John Goodenough, who in 1979 championed the lithium cobalt oxide cathode material. Later in 1980, Professor Rachid Yazami demonstrated the graphite anode which was the other half of puzzle. Together, these innovations allowed Sony and Asahi Kasei to commercialise the technology in 1991. This origin story highlights one of the key challenges with the commercialisation of lithium-ion battery technology; innovations have a long incubation period to validate performance.

To appreciate this, the Joint Centre for Energy Storage Research in the US has defined a range of battery technology readiness levels (BTRL). At BTRL1 there is a material breakthrough. BTRL2 is then to figure out how these materials can be synthesized repeatedly. This can take upto 1-2 years. From there, BTRL3 is to take the material and make a small battery and validate it’s performance which can take 2-5 years. Once confident, BTRL4 then scales up this proof-of-concept cell and again validates its performance which is another 2-5 years. Finally, once validated, at BTRL5-6, material scale up is performed and battery packs are made for vehicles for real world testing. This can take upto 5-10 years. Therefore, full commercialisation can take anywhere from 10-22 years.

Despite these challenges, companies and governments are investing significant amounts into research and development of battery technologies. Globally: Samsung SDI, LG Chem, Panasonic and BYD are amongst the largest battery producers. Panasonic in particular are the key partners of Tesla and their gigafactory. Whilst there are also many smaller start-up companies, a key challenge is the high cost (often >$100M) in commercialising battery technology and the long incubation period before profitability is realised. Companies such as Samsung, LG Chem and Panasonic are able to absorb significant R&D costs however, this has been the failure point of many start-ups.

A notable example is A123 which was a spin-out from MIT who pioneered the lithium iron phosphate chemistry. Whilst, the core innovation was scientifically sound, they filed for bankruptcy in 2012 having being founded in 2001. The Chinese company, BYD, which was founded in 2002, also uses the same lithium iron phosphate chemistry however is currently the largest EV producer. This is in part due to the $435M subsidies BYD has received from the Chinese government. Many of China’s internal combustion engine vehicles do not currently meet emission standards to be sold in western markets and therefore China sees EVs as a means of increasing their automotive market penetration.

Noting that Professor John Goodenough’s original battery work was done in the University of Oxford, the UK has not managed to retain the value of this breakthrough significantly. To this end, the UK government have recently announced via the industrial strategy fund £246M for the Faraday Challenge to address the need to stimulate fundamental and applied research in batteries.

Whilst, the immediate focus is on decarbonising transport we must also not forget that the overall objective is carbonisation of the whole system. Analysis has shown that in heavily coal powered electrical grids, converting all vehicles in that region can actually cause more CO2 to be emitted as this merely shifts the problem. Thus, decarbonisation of the grid is also needed. Whilst, many have suggested lithium-ion batteries to also be the solution, the challenge of scale and safety become an issue. Therefore, for large scale and long duration storage needed to ingrate wind and solar, grid operators are turning to technologies such as redox flow batteries, thermal storage and compressed air storage.

Despite all uncertainties highlighted in this article, one thing is certain. Decarbonisation of transport and the grid is needed in order to avoid irreversible damage to the environment. Skeikh Yamani, the former Saudi oil minister summarised this elegantly by saying “The Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil”.

Dr. Billy Wu is a lecturer at Imperial College London in the Dyson School of Design Engineering where he works on additive manufacturing (3D printing) and electrochemical devices.

For the 5th event in the Imperial Business in the City series David Miles, Professor of Financial Economics at Imperial College Business School, discussed his recent research on the future of Real Estate – specifically on whether we can expect house prices to continue to rise.

David took the audience through historical, current and future context, influences and impact on houses relative to incomes and the implications they have for home ownership. Further details of David’s research and his conclusions can be read on IB Knowledge.

On concluding his talk David was confronted with a tsunami of questions from the audience all wanting to discuss and understand the variables that will potentially affect future house prices. For example:

How might Russian oligarchs influence the price of property, especially in the ‘super-heated’ South East?

What part will construction companies play in supply and demand for property?

What if more people commute to the dense employment areas from further afield?

David agreed that the variables were many and all potentially significant.  What he left us with was the prospect of a perfect storm of factors such as – a rising population, static incomes, construction techniques being unable to counterbalance high base land prices, people being unwilling to make a significant shift in spending habits from consumer goods to housing, and transport infrastructure that would be unable to improve enough to move commuters from further out from the crowded South East.

Dr Jayanie Kodituwakku

The lack of confidence relates to a lack of self-esteem and the perception of how others see us. I find it is an increasing issue I hear from Business Leaders across all levels in an organisation. Who doesn’t feel a lack of confidence at one point in our life? And for some there is a more consistent version of this.

When we feel a lack, we don’t think so well about ourselves. This can produce an adverse impact on your performance including:

• Not producing the results that are expected from you and your team not matter the circumstance
• Stepping back from giving your valid expertise and experience
• Unfocussed decision making
• Poor Leadership
• Playing small across the board!

THE BIG MYTH

The old way of thinking about self-esteem and confidence is that you either have it or you don’t.

Most of us are bought up to think that if you don’t have confidence we have to work hard to develop it. However, everyone has these feelings of a lack of confidence, they come and go. But we can begin to falsely believe that if we have these feelings a lot, it is a characteristic that will always stick. We may label ourselves ‘I am not a confident person’ or ‘I have no confidence’.

We are born with confidence. It is the nature of who we are. If you observe children, they have an abundance of confidence. The other day I heard my nephew, who is 6 years old declare ‘I am a genius’ with such belief in himself, he just knew it. He had learnt how to count up in a sequence of 5’s to 100.

‘What if everything you’ve ever thought about where confidence comes from is simply not true?’

When we fall deeply into the present there is no feeling of a ‘lack of confidence’ or insecurity.

Confidence does not come from our upbringing, genetics, our environment, the people we socialise with or anything outside of us. But we may buy into the myth that surrounds confidence because no one tells us anything different.

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Dr Jayanie Kodituwakku is a former PricewaterhouseCoopers Management Consultant, Coach and Innovator. She works with individuals, teams and organisations to reveal the unexpected keys to Insight; the ultimate leverage point for creating a thriving business and life. To learn more about Jayanie’s ‘Leadership Immersion Experience’ please click here.

In today’s NHS, complex and challenged as it is, the importance of management  skills cannot be overstated. All senior clinicians run teams, manage resources and set strategy for their service and need to do so effectively. At the same time the public worry – and sometimes get angry – about ‘managers’ taking too much of the precious resource.

Faced with these challenges and an extremely busy environment, one NHS Foundation Trust decided that its senior staff needed practical means to develop management skills appropriate to them and so the CNWL Management Fundamentals Programme was developed and is now in its fourth year.

Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust (CNWL) is one of the largest trusts in the UK, with almost 7000 staff. It provides Mental Health and Community Health Services to a number of boroughs in North West London and in Milton Keynes and specialist services – sexual health, addictions, eating disorders and prisons across a wide geography in London, Surrey and Kent.

The CNWL Management Fundamentals Programme equips senior clinicians at the trust with the leadership skills required for their managerial roles.

Programme Director and Chair of CNWL, Professor Dot Griffiths comments, “The advantage is that we can make it very focused on our Trust and the challenges specific to us.”

The programme is continually revised so it remains relevant in the fluid terrain of the NHS. This year, it was built around the five core challenges that the Trust faces: the landscape it operates in; finance; service quality; the workforce, and leadership – with modules focusing on each of them.

The Programme invites delegates to explore these challenges from the perspective of the Trust and of their Team. It uses a variety of speakers from health and other arenas like successful schools and national think tanks, as well as Executive Directors and specialists at the trust. Held away from the Trust, usually at the University, it uses a variety of teaching methods.

In speaking about the first module, one delegate noted, “it is a particularly beneficial course as topics were directly related, and could be applied to, practice within CNWL. It was also coordinated in such a way that facilitated networking with colleagues across departments that we would not necessarily have the opportunity to meet otherwise.”

At its core, the programme gives clinicians time outside their extremely busy working lives  to reflect on and develop their skills with their peers.

Dr Simon Edwards was a physician in HIV when he started the programme. He is now the Clinical Director for Sexual Health and HIV Services and the Trust-wide Clinical Lead for Quality Improvement:

Dr Cornelius Kelly, Programme Director and Medical Director of CNWL, said, “when we started four years ago we focused on (medical) Consultants but two years ago we opened up entry to all senior clinicians (doctors, nurses, psychologists, therapists, pharmacists) and this has undoubtedly added strength; the programme now more closely resembles the reality of the NHS and the challenges faced by its diverse leaders and managers. We give the participants a number of tools to look objectively at themselves, their team and service; we ask them to consider what changes might be made to deliver high quality, effective and efficient care to informed patients and carers in the twenty first century. We focus on measurable outcomes rather than inputs, taking examples from other high performing public services facing similar challenges. The feedback has been very good and we are seeing a positive impact on service delivery.”

The Programmes is organised into four two-day Blocks, each a month apart.  Each Block has a theme based around the challenges, and each Block is designed to test the delegates personally.

Participants contribute back to the Trust through Team and Personal Action Plans, and through a substantial Quality Improvement Project. They apply their learning from the programme to their particular service. Past examples have generated huge savings from changing pathology requirements,  the development of dementia screening in prisons, and exploring commercial opportunities for certain types of psychosocial training.

Dr Deirdre Bonner, a Consultant in Old Age Psychiatry, attended the programme in 2015. At the time, Deirdre was running a pilot in women’s prisons, screening the over 50s prison population for dementia.

Deirdre explained, “the prison population is aging and many prisoners have the biological characteristics of people fifteen years older than themselves. In the pilot we found a prevalence of dementia significantly higher than in the general population and a large number of the population had risk factors which would place them at risk of vascular dementia in the future.”

Dr Bonner developed a proposal to improve the diagnosis of dementia in prisons, providing appropriate support to prisoners, and dementia training to staff to enable appropriate release planning. She presented her business proposal at a conference chaired by the Head of Health and Justice Commissioner for NHS England South and received a positive response

Delegates begin their projects early in the programme, and continue to work on them with support from a coach for six months.

In the four years it has been running the Programme has developed a great reputation in the Trust.

26 October 2017

Conscious Leadership Notes – How to Be a Resilient Leader in the Face of Chaos

Dr Jayanie Kodituwakku PhD

At the end of our performance year we may be asked the following questions:

• How well did you perform this past year?
• What did you contribute to your team’s performance?
• How have you made an impact in this company?

Resilience impacts our performance at an individual, team and firm level. If we don’t see where it evades us, we tend to perform at the same level we always have. Can we consider there is a level beyond what we currently experience?

When things get tough

There is much literature out there on what resilience is. To simplify this, let’s say resilience is our ability to bounce back when presented with a challenging situation. It allows us to continue to perform at a high level.

Depending on who you are, you may have encountered tough situations which could be on a daily basis in the work place or every now and then. Rather than being able to bounce back we may do the following:

• Overwhelm ensues
• Get anxious about our work
• Start blaming our leaders or management
• Point the finger at people we work with, it’s their fault!
• Stress takes over
• Performance at work may drop

I remember once working for a firm where two colleagues were on a ‘performance improvement plan’ – a PIP. They lost their ability to rebound and then it got worse as they started to believe they were not good enough.

Even if we are seemingly performing well at work, something may have to give way in other aspects of our life.

Ignorance is not bliss

‘Be Resilient’ we hear. Life would seem to be much better if we were resilient. So ‘how do I do that?’. When looking at the ‘how’ we gravitate towards a self-development book, a positive affirmation, yoga, a course, mindfulness or some sort of technique. These can help to a certain degree but in all my years working with leaders in organisations I’ve never seen tools or techniques create the sustained impact on resilience desired by an individual. Especially in circumstances when a curve ball is thrown.

We may also be in the misunderstanding that resilience is a ‘quality that may develop over time’ and needs to somehow be acquired through experiential learning or knowledge gained from ‘wise people’.  This is simply not true.

If we look at resilience from a different viewpoint, we can see how to reveal it, than acquire it.

Let’s do this

Firstly not all leaders, this is inclusive of anyone that is making decisions, may have an awareness they could do with some help in the resilience department. It just becomes normal for us to struggle, we get by and cope.

The first thing is to notice when you’re feeling tense, anxious, worried, focus is off or if there’s something you can’t quite put my finger on but know it doesn’t feel right. We can then begin to see the nature of thought and how our experience is being created.

When you wake up to the fact that your feelings are created by a thought-generated perceptual reality, it opens you up to a new way of experiencing the situation.

For example, have you noticed when you’re really angry at someone and then you get distracted by something else, you stop being angry. But then you think about that person again and you become angry.

Resilience is not acquired, it is not learnt and it is not handed down to you from previous generations or an ethereal mystery.

We all have a universal capacity for resilience in any given moment. It is not dependent upon what is going on around us. The only thing that gets in the way is a misunderstanding of where we think it comes from. You have the potential to be resilient right NOW.

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 Jayanie is a former PriceWaterhouseCoopers Management Consultant, turned Innovator, Business Advisor and Coach who shows leaders the unexpected keys to Insight; the ultimate leverage point for creating a thriving organisation, team and life. She can be contacted via http://www.jayanie.com/. If you want to know more, sign up to her newsletter.

Executive Education has been recognised for its offering by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB).

We have been recognised by the world’s largest business education alliance for our pioneering ImpactLab™ – an experiential approach to learning which uses lab settings from across the College.

These experiential approaches take managers and executives out of their comfort zone and into unfamiliar environments in which they can experiment with new ways of thinking and working.

The ImpactLab™ takes place in settings across the College including the Carbon Capture Lab in the chemical engineering department, a performance simulator housed in the Enterprise Lab and a sequential simulation in partnership with the Centre for Engagement and Simulation Science.

These environments are used to help participants manage uncertainty, time constraints and stress. In the Carbon Capture Lab leaders are divided into two teams and given a 30 minute task of transporting carbon across the North Sea with the aim of focusing on decision-making under stress.

The performance simulator is a virtual reality simulator which allows business professionals to build their confidence in public speaking by giving a presentation to a virtual audience. The simulator, which was developed by the Royal College of Music, was originally designed to help musicians overcome their fear of performing in front of a large audience.

The association singled out Imperial in the category of schools that ‘Enhance Approaches to Leadership Education and Development’. This is for business schools who are creating non-traditional and sometimes cross-disciplinary opportunities for students to hone their leadership skills both inside and outside of the classroom.

Imperial College Business School was one of 30 global institutions recognised by the AACSB which connects educators, students, and business to achieve a common goal: to create the next generation of great leaders.

David Brown, Director of Executive Education at Imperial College Business School said: “We are delighted that our ImpactLab™ has been recognised as an industry leader in enhancing approaches to leadership education by AACSB.”

He added: “We believe that the experiential method to discovery in Imperial’s STEM background has a lot to teach the world of executive development. The ImpactLab™ combines an enquiring consulting approach with high-impact learning to help change culture on a large scale. International awards such as this continue to endorse Imperial College Business School as a global pioneer in innovation.”

A business executive uses the performance simulator

The AACSB’s third annual Innovations That Inspire challenge recognises institutions from around the world serving as champions of change in the business education landscape, with a specific focus on innovation in leadership development, a key pillar of the accreditation process and one of five opportunities identified in the Collective Vision for business education.

“The biggest risk to business schools is not the rapid pace of change. It is in failing to prepare the next generation of business leaders to cope with that change,” said Thomas R. Robinson, president and CEO of AACSB. “Through its best-in-class leadership development program, Imperial College Business School’s ImpactLab™ is ensuring that the business leaders of tomorrow will be ready for whatever lies ahead.”

Beate Baldwin, Director of Open Programmes, Marketing and EMBA at Imperial College Business School said: “Our ImpactLab™ takes its roots from the scientific research that Imperial does: we begin by challenging our participants’ assumptions. We then test their ideas in a safe environment and invite them to think about their behaviour.

The solutions they validate are integrated in the work place and enhance the business. We are not here to prescribe nor “teach” but to inspire and support senior executives in this fast paced technology driven world.”

For an overview of all the featured innovations in this year’s AACSB’s Innovations That Inspire challenge, visit the AACSB’s website.

Professor Nelson Phillips delivers a webinar on how leaders can adapt their skills in the technological age.