Council

Sarah Childerstone

Sarah chairs the council of the Institute. She has worked in the NHS for nearly 30 years and is currently Director of Workforce for the West Herts Hospitals Trust. Sarah is also chair of the Skills for Care Committee for Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Luton and has recently been elected to be co-chair of the East of England Regional Skills for Care Committee. Her particular interests are organisational, team and personal development.  

Sue Browell

Sue is Head of People Development for the Commission for Social care Inspection. She has worked in human resource management and development in public, private and non-profit sectors for all her career. She is currently a member of the editorial advisory boards for Training and Management Development Methods and the Journal of Management Development and has been external examiner at a number of UK universities.

Sir Rodney Brooke

Sir Rodney Brooke CBE DL became the first permanent chair of the General Social Care Council in 2001 after chief executive jobs with West Yorkshire County Council, Westminster City Council and the Association of Metropolitan Authorities. He chaired the 2007 Commission on Governance in the Third Sector.

Barry Curnow

Barry is a strategic consultant in professional services.

David Hollywood

David chairs the Institute’s Finance and General Purposes Committee. He is an experienced businessman having held senior financial and general management positions in Wilkinson Match Ltd, Raychem Corp and Brammer PLC. He is currently Group Financial Director of Livingston Group Ltd and non executive director of Lavendon Group plc.

Sue Merchant

Sue has spent most of her career as an OR analyst with the MoD and the Metropolitan Police. She held several senior posts in the Metropolitan Police Service and was Director of Consultancy and Information Services for ten years. Sue has been an independent management consultant since 2003 and is currently President Elect of the Operational Research Society.

Liz Nelson

Liz is a marketor - she started TNS plc, now the world's second largest market research company and went from market research into public service and the NHS. She is currently the Director Chronic Granulomatous Disorder Research Trust (a medical research charity funding gene therapy for rare genetic disorders) and is Chairman of Q Research Limited, the first mobile phone market research company in the UK  researching via 3000 panel members aged 11-24 attitudes and behaviour on health, technology and other issues.

Adrian Furnham

Adrian Furnham was educated at the London School of Economics where he obtained a distinction in an MSc Econ., and at Oxford University where he completed a doctorate (DPhil) in 1981. He has subsequently earned a DSc (1991) and DLitt (1995) degree. Previously a lecturer in Psychology at Pembroke College, Oxford, he is now Professor of Psychology at University College London. He has lectured widely abroad and held scholarships and visiting professorships at, amongst others, the University of New South Wales, the University of the West Indies and the University of Hong Kong.

He has written over 650 scientific papers and 52 books including Culture Shock (1994), Personality at Work (1994), The New Economic Mind (1995), The Myths of Management (1996), The Psychology of Behaviour at Work (1997), The Psychology of Money (1998), The Incompetent Manager (2003), The Dark Side of Behaviour at Work (2004), The People Business (2005) Personality and Intellectual Competence (2005) Management Mumbo Jumbo (2006) Just for the Money (2006) The Psychology of Attractiveness (2007) Dim Sum Management (2007) Personality and Intelligence at Work (2007).

Professor Furnham is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and is ranked the second most productive psychologist in the world since 1980. He is on the editorial board of a number of international journals, as well as the current elected President of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences. He is also a founder director of Applied Behavioural Research Associates (ABRA), a psychological consultancy. He writes regularly for the Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph and is a regular contributor to BBC radio and television.

Yiannis Gabriel

Yiannis Gabriel is Professor of Organizational Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London. Earlier he held posts at Imperial College and the University of Bath. Yiannis has a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Imperial College London, where he also carried out post-graduate studies in industrial sociology. He has a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Yiannis is well known for his work into organizational storytelling and narratives, leadership, management learning, the culture and politics of contemporary consumption and organizational psychoanalysis. He has used stories as a way of studying numerous social and organizational phenomena including leader-follower relations, group dynamics and fantasies, nostalgia, insults and apologies. He is the author of Storytelling in Organizations and Organizations in Depth and five other books. He has been editor of Management Learning and associate editor of Human Relations. His enduring fascination as a researcher lies in what he describes as the unmanageable qualities of life in and out of organizations.

Riccardo Peccei

Riccardo Peccei was born in Turin, Italy. He has a B.A. in history from Harvard University and a B.Phil. and D.Phil. in sociology from Oxford University. As part of his academic career he worked as a researcher in the Industrial Sociology Unit at Imperial College, was a part-time Senior Research Officer at the Tavistock Institute in the early 1980s, and a Research Fellow at the London School of Economics, where he also taught for nearly twenty years.

In 2000 he joined the Department of Management at King’s College London where he is now Professor of Human Resource Management (HRM) and Organisational Behaviour (OB). He has been involved in a range of international research projects and has held a number of academic appointments outside of the UK. He is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He has published widely in the fields of HRM and OB and his current research interests are in the areas of work and well-being, HRM and performance, and employee participation and involvement at work.

Roger Sykes

Roger is Head of Studies at the Audit Commission. He has spent most of his career working on a range national research programmes. He spent ten years leading a Research and Information Unit at Anchor Trust; and seven years as Head of Research at the Local Government Association before he joined the Audit Commission in 2005. He has a particular interest in making research more useful to policy makers and practitioners.