IN PROFILE: Neil Bendle

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By Trevor Melanson
Thursday, October 21, 2010
From working for Labour to studying labour markets



Neil Bendle thinks about how others think.
 
People see the world through different lenses, he explains. They live different lives and face different hurdles. His mother, for example, never had the advantages he and his brother and sister had. She worked as a lunch lady. “Compare the opportunities I’ve had with the opportunities my mother had: massive differences.”
 
Now an assistant professor of marketing at the Richard Ivey School of Business, a job he began earlier this year, Bendle hopes to help his students see these differences, too. “People tend to like to think in these broad categories, and we find it quite hard to narrow down to the individual,” he says.
 
Now in his 40s, he has had many more experiences than many other freshly minted PhDs. Yet even though he finished his doctorate at the University of Minnesota earlier this year, he didn’t have to wait long to start work. In fact, he’d picked Western from a long list of schools interested in him.
 
Bendle began university life 22 years ago. After growing up in East London, England — near the “edge of the Tube” (London’s rapid transit rail system) — he earned his BA at the University of Nottingham in ancient history and history. “At 18, I really did not know what I wanted to do,” he says. “I thought it was interesting.”
 
He got his MA in Hellenistic studies at the University of Liverpool. After graduating, he became a qualified accountant and took a job with the Labour Party. “It’s relatively usual in England to do some sort of classics, history-type stuff, and then go into accountancy,” he explains.
 
Over the next six years at the Labour Party, he worked his way up from being the accountant to running the finances.  “Very interesting time,” he says. “We went from being the opposition party to being the party of government.”
 
Then, the party wanted to relocate him to northern England, but for Bendle, the prospect wasn’t very appealing. “I thought it was an excellent time in my career to think about pursuing something else.” 
 
That something else turned out to be an MBA from the University of Virginia. It was also there he met his wife Emily, then a fellow MBA student. Bendle says he liked her for six months before working up the courage to ask her out. When the couple moved to Minnesota, where Bendle did his PhD, they married.
 
Their daughter is now a toddler and a second child is on the way. Bendle says they don’t know the sex yet. “It’s more exciting not to know.”
 
His children were one of the reasons he picked Western, and London, over other universities. He says the quality of life in London, Ont. is a lot better than the quality in, say, London, England. You can afford a big house here, he explains.
 
But he was also drawn to Ivey. “I like the fact that Western takes teaching seriously,” he says, sitting in a still mostly undecorated office. “For a research-focused university, the students are actually very important.”
 
And of course, his colleagues are important too.
 
“We have a really collegial marketing group here,” says Miranda Goode, assistant professor of marketing at Ivey. “A lot of our spouses know each other and have no problem connecting.”
 
Bendle says his colleagues are very diverse. “From the outside you might think that business people are all (identical), whereas they’re very varied.”
 
He believes his background in history helps him keep an open mind, knowing “that the world has been different and the world will be different in a few years.”
 
In fact, he’s already seen the world change, he says. He and his two siblings—a journalist and a teaching assistant—have been given chances his mother never had.
  • He enjoys English soccer. His favourite team is West Ham United Football Club.
  •  He also likes to play soccer, but says he isn’t very good (but the exercise is).
  • He’s an avid movie watcher and appreciates most genres—just not slasher flicks.
 

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