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. [...]

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: [...]

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. [...]

Prompted by this story on executive payouts at Sun, in this podcast I discuss talent and how bonuses and golden parachutes reflect the end of the shareholder value world in mature markets. [...]

Recently the Mail Online broke a story about how the BBC technology chief spent £639 on taxi ride . These sorts of expenses are nothing new. The BBC, as well as the and House of Commons and House of Lords, are legacy institutions. Introducing change in legacy institutions is very difficult. The critical issue is how do you manage to adapt an old culture that is used to doing things in own way when that culture is also financially supported and so has no reason to change. [...]

Prompted by this blog post by Dan Pallotta on Harvard Business Blogs, in this podcast I discuss how organisations outside the private sector should evaluate compensation. Charitable work is becoming more professional, and as it does so, it is becoming increasingly necessary to pay the market value for executives.
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

An interview with Cristóbal Conde, president and CEO of SunGard, recently appeared in the New York Times . I found it particularly interesting because the debate between flatter structures and more hierarchical structures and their relevance for today is an ongoing issue.
The interview didn’t quite capture the issue of confusion between structures and culture. We cannot escape the fact that we are in mature markets. Few companies and few industries are not within the tail end of the cycle of maturity, and I would have thought an organisation like SunGard would be no exception. Mature companies tend to have ‘taller structures’ in which tasks, roles, responsibilities, accountabilities, and even governance are made very clear. You need that–you need to know what people are doing and why they are doing it because you’re going to make as much money from the products you sell and their [...]

Prompted by this article on how Republicans in the US want to block American shareholders from having a say on CEO pay , in this video I discuss how executives are blocking shareholder activism against executive remuneration, and how the equity-based financing system that prevails in Anglo-America won’t shift to a longer-term stakeholder-based financing system. This is because the issue of executive bonuses in the short term takes away attention from global long-term needs and planning.

In mature markets, where growth is slow and costs are managed to the extreme, what differentiates one company from another? Many organisations and managers have actually become rather indistinguishable in that they uniformly pay attention to teamwork and quality, reduce costs where they can (often through outsourcing) and get rid of poorly performing executives—these activities make for good organisations. But then what give some companies a leading edge over others? It comes down two factors.
The first is brand—a strong brand reputation makes people believe that a Mercedes is better than a Ford, and can help a company even if this belief proves not to be true (e.g. if Mercedes outsourced some faulty components and their quality did decline below the perceived quality of Ford).
The other differentiating factor is people. Better led teams will be more motivated; when there’s a single company mentality, especially among [...]

When Nada and I read this Economist story about Harvard Business School graduates pledging to act with integrity, our first reaction was one of cynicism. It’s all very well to get students to pledge to “serve the greater good” and “act with the utmost integrity,” but making these anything other than platitudes is difficult.
The question is: has Harvard Business School identified what that greater good is, or is the pledge just window dressing? [...]