Andrew Kakabadse and Nada Kakabadse’s Blog

Wired’s Gadget Lab blog recently ran a piece about how Steve Jobs has been emailing customers to answer their questions directly . An interesting question stemming from the article is how Steve Jobs interprets his role as the CEO. What is the role of the CEO?
From all research Nada and I have undertaken, what the role and spread of the responsibilities of the CEO and chairman is is one of the two most difficult questions we’ve had to answer. [...]

Here is a presentation I gave at the European Academy of Management (EURAM)’s conference in Rome last May, on the moral hazards that need to be addressed in the aftermath of the global financial crisis:
Auditing Moral Hazards for Post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC) Leadership
View more presentations from kakabadse .

Earlier this week I was quoted in an article in the FT on global cultural differences. The gist of the piece is that many companies are paying attention to and celebrating countries’ differences, which runs counter to the idea that the world is becoming culturally homogenized through the internet. Two of my comments made it into the article: [...]

I recently came across this interesting article from the Kellogg School of Management on a study of status distinctions. It looks at how nightclub bouncers have to immediately judge people in the queue and quickly decide whether to let them in. This is an interesting tribal behaviour in the modern age. People belong to social networks (social groupings) based on their norms, rituals and values, and for club-goers, this includes the visible symbols–the clothes people are wearing, whom they’re with, their attitudes–upon which they are judged by bouncers. [...]

The Guardian recently ran an interesting story about England football manager Fabio Capello; his compensation package if he gets dismissed was cited as a possible reason not to remove him. In this podcast, I discuss what went wrong for England’s football team at the World Cup: some combination of the team’s psychology, the sport’s governance, and/or the manager’s coaching style.
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Prompted by this article by Daniel Gross in Slate , in this podcast I discuss the BP oil spill and why it possibly isn’t being cleaned up as quickly or efficiently as it could be. American legislation is keeping out foreign companies that might be able to do a better clean up job. Tony Hayward being caught socialising on a yacht rather than focusing on the crisis isn’t the real issue.
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Will these ongoing British Airways strikes give British Airways the chance to restructure? Robert Peston thinks so, and I agree. I was recently at a global conference in Australia on how supply chain thinking can better penetrate the boardroom, and one of the case examples was British Airways. I remember a very senior director remarking about BA as ‘yesterday’s legacy’ business — not just a legacy business, but yesterday’s legacy business that nobody had done anything about it when they should have. In effect he was saying that BA was going to go bankrupt, because they have problems that they should have sorted out yesterday, and these problems are getting worse. [...]

In this podcast, I discuss the problem with corporate consulting firms offering awards for corporate ethics (prompted by this article ), as well as whether transparency ‘blacklists’ can actually make companies more transparent (prompted by this article ).
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

The reality of work today is that, unfortunately, companies must reduce their costs, and this will probably go on until 2014 or so when we have fully come out of recession and have also paid off debt. The money supply will be restricted, and we will have private and public sector organisations fundamentally not hiring people on a full-time basis. They will be asking a lot of their full-time employees with distinct skills and experience to undertake more activities, and fundamentally offering projects to those with distinct skills, and then as soon as a project is over, the transactional relationship between the project employee and employing organisation will be over. So whoever you are, full-time employee (and there’s going to be fewer and fewer of those as time goes on), or project provider, what we will have is a situation of constantly watching the costs to make sure that they don’t go up, according to the budget set, which means that many people will be doing a lot more more for less. [...]

While the current oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is affecting the public’s perceptions of BP , I don’t think it will affect BP’s ability to attract and retain talent. I said as much in this article on Personnel Today .