Bill Rushbrooke
Bill’s special interests are:
- Marketing
- Management audits (also known as organisational health checks)
- Strategic planning and operational budgeting.
Bill started his career in industrial marketing for Shell-Mex and BP Ltd where he worked in contracts for state trade customers and helped to manage the restructuring of the industrial market into separate companies. After six years he changed tack and, after working in a FE college, took a masters degree in management at Henley Business School and subsequently moved to Roehampton University where, as principal lecturer and senior academic tutor in the School of Business and Social Sciences, he worked for over twenty-five years. Initially he taught a range of marketing and general management modules at first and higher degree levels but then specialised in organisational theory with particular relevance to the not-for-profit sector. He was a founding member of the Centre for the Study of Voluntary and Community Activity.
Bill has had more than ten years’ experience of teaching about the voluntary and community sector at postgraduate level. Initially this involved teaching international students about the nature of the UK voluntary sector and the organisational issues involved in considering the boundaries between the sector and the state. He supervised a series of student dissertations which explored these and related issues. In 2000 he worked with Colin Rochester to develop and deliver a new MSc in Voluntary Action Management aimed at students from the UK. For both programmes Bill developed the idea for a management audit as a key part of the student’s assessment: this involved the preparation of a report which identified any critical issues that a case study organisation had experienced in its internal or external environment and suggested tailored recommendations for addressing them.
Bill is highly experienced in project management: as programme convenor for undergraduate courses in Business Studies he was responsible for designing and implementing robust systems to deal with the admission, registration and progression of some 600 students; leading the teaching team; and liaising with the wider structures of the university. His duties including chairing programme and examination boards; liaising with external examiners; ensuring that quality assurance regimes were in place and functioning; and organising regular re-validation of degree courses. He also played an active part in committee and working parties at School and University levels and held various offices in the local branch of the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (now the University and College Union). In the latter capacity he was instrumental in negotiating the local implementation of the national pay framework agreement, a process that took two years.
Bill has been a sociability officer of the Voluntary Action History Society and is a former trustee of the Wandsworth Student Housing Association. He is currently a volunteer at Merton Volunteer Centre.
Bill is the author (with J.W.D. Glover) of Organisational Studies (Nelson, 1983); (with Meta Zimmeck) The Case for Statutory Compacts between Welsh Local Authorities and the Third Sector: Annex C: Literature Review (Welsh Government, 2013): and (with Meta Zimmeck and Colin Rochester) Use it or lose it: A summative evaluation of the Compact (Commission for the Compact, 2011).
Bill’s expertise cuts across both the corporate and voluntary and community sectors, and he is well versed in the practicalities of translating policies into action in organisational settings.