Tudor Rickards is a self published author of non-fiction and fiction, a business academic, and a scientist. He is Professor Emeritus at University of Manchester and formerly Professor of creativity and Organisational change at Alliance Manchester Business School. His fiction works include The Unnamed Threat: A Wendy Lockinge Mystery , Seconds Out and Chronicles of Leadership. His non-fiction includes Tennis Matters: A Leaders We Deserve Monograph, Tennis Tensions, The Manchester Method and The Double Houdini. By the mid-70s he had established international contacts. A collaboration with :de:Horst Geschka|Horst Geschka at the Battelle Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, lead to a joint publication comparing practices and deficiencies in the application of creativity techniques in the UK and in Germany. Furthermore, he participated in most of the European creativity conferences a speaker or active participant. During this time he intensively worked on the development of networks enabling European creativity practitioners to work together and explore alternatives to the dominant US models. He co-founded the academic journal, Creativity and Innovation Management, in 1991 and is Alex Osborn Visiting Professor at State University of New York, Buffalo, a lifetime position offered to scholars who are deemed to enrich teaching at the University’s Centre for Studies in Creativity. Rickards is regularly quoted in the British media. He is a pioneer and advocate of the ‘Manchester Method’ – the system of creative and applied learning championed by Manchester Business School – on which he has written widely. He was an early promoter in Europe of the TRIZ system of creativity and idea generation, inviting TRIZ pioneer Dr Phan Dung to speak at EACI conferences and publishing some of the first papers in English by Dr Phan Dung on the subject in Creativity and Innovation Management. Challenging traditional models of creative thinking, leadership, problem solving and team building, Rickards’ research has been described by The Financial Times as non-traditional. The influences and inspirations for his insights and research are diverse, and include chess, poetry, sport and politics. He is developing the use of non-traditional fictional modes for exploring issues in leadership theory. The world of nature has also been a powerful source of inspiration, with well-publicised work on intelligent horsemanship and the lessons it offers for the workplace, and profiling management and leadership styles using animal behaviour. His work has been criticised for attempting to learn lessons from studying animal rather than human behaviour. Rickards was educated at Pontypridd Boys’ Grammar School and went on to study chemistry and radiation chemistry at The University of Wales at Cardiff. Following post-doctoral research at New York Medical College in the 1960s, he returned to the UK to work in the R&D department of Unilever Laboratories, based in Port Sunlight, Merseyside, UK. It was there that he became interested in creativity and its role in structured problem-solving systems, and from there that he joined Manchester Business School in 1972. Alan Pearson, founding editor of R&D management journal invited him to join MBS to study creativity techniques in R&D laboratories. The work was subsequently subsumed by the INCA programme at the Fifth National Medical Leadership conference at the Macron Stadium, Bolton. In 2015, Rickards began his first self-publishing project which culminated in the release of the eBook "The Manchester Method: A Leaders We Deserve Monograph" which is based on over a thousand posts originally published on his blog, Leaders We Deserve, over the period 2006–2015. He also lectures at the Research University - Higher School of Economics in Moscow.
