Dr Michael Reddy is best known as the Founder and former Chairman of ICAS, the psychological services company, which he ran for 20 years and brought to international status with 17 offices overseas. In September 2007, when the business was bought by AXA-PPP, the health services group, to form an integrated physical and mental health services provider, Michael turned his attention to tackling those issues he had identified throughout his working career and academic life that he felt ICAS couldn’t address. You could say they were simple enough ambitions: to stimulate research that would prove the link between the way people are treated in the workplace and their productivity (the so-called HR Holy Grail); to bring psychology students in, say, China into the same space as psychology students in the UK; to change the way psychology is reported in the media, applied in the workplace, and taught in the University.

“When I left ICAS I was left with two ambitions, not connected in themselves but both of them arousing some passion. After focusing for so many years on individual mental health, one of them was the urge to look at the working environment itself, as part of the equation which makes a company more or less financially successful. This is the age of Human Capital with a new question: how to grow the human assets in a business, not just deploy them. And it’s reverse: how can we stop deviant human behaviour from damaging the asset. People are our biggest liability as well as biggest asset. How can we measure that and have it included in conventional financial reports? Hence HPA – Human Potential Accounting – and now we are joined by People Resolutions which immediately strengthens our resources in all departments: audit, research and consult.

I’ll talk about the other more private initiative some time else. It’s called MavEdu and comes on stream soon. It’s an online service for students, for academic staff and for educational institutions as a whole. And it’s international. Much of education is cramped in a pre-Internet world which ignores the new options of collaborative learning, student and staff interchange, alternative publishing options and career enrichment. The site is nearing completion. Would you like to know more about it in due course? Write to me at: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .”