Earlier this month as a reaction to the global collapse of the financial sector, the members of Parliament made BBC Business Editor Robert Peston defend his reporting on Northern Rock last year. Peston outlined that he was acting on his duties as a reporter and was not responsible for creating a panic by highlighting the deficiencies of Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley. He’s quite right. How can a conscientious investigator cause a panic when in fact the system in which we work has such glaring deficiencies?
It is absolutely right that the press and the media should bring to the surface the social issues that we face, particularly one as worrying as the collapse of the financial system. I can see why MPs would wish to take the line of blaming greedy and selfish bankers and an insensitive press and media. The reason we [...]

Last Sunday I came across an article in the Observer by Martin Parker ( If only business schools wouldn’t teach business , Nov 30th), outlining how Business Schools should rethink their position as well as their curriculum in this period of downturn. I found it appropriate and welcome.
The shareholder value philosophy of pedalling management techniques to literally thousands of students, and by so doing limiting their horizons to units of three months, is seriously flawed. The alternative is stakeholder value thinking and practice, which requires delving deep into concerns of corporate responsibility, the future role and contribution of boards, and the nature of the business/government interface. Such considerations have been given minimal attention.
So far, I am with Martin Parker. Think broader, dig deeper and see beyond quarterly profit targets. Yet, Martin Parker argues on behalf of Business Schools promoting a new capitalism. Why? [...]

Conventional wisdom is that new CEOs need to boost earnings per share in two years or they’re out. However recent findings from Booz & Company’s latest CEO Turnover report seem to suggest otherwise. Dismissals are happening, but they’re more often caused by board infighting rather than poor CEO performance. Using ten years of data they had collected, researchers Per-Ola Karlsson, Gary L. Neilson, and Juan Carlos Webster found:
For all CEOs, the likelihood of being dismissed for poor performance in a given year is only 2.1 percent. Given this data, it is not surprising that the correlation between stock performance and dismissal is generally not significant. Indeed, the very worst-performing chief executives – those in the bottom decile, whose companies’ two-year stock price had fallen by 25 percent in absolute terms and whose companies had under­performed their regional industry peers by 45 percent – [...]

By promoting an agenda that put the United States above international law, and by ignoring international agreements (like the Kyoto Treaty), George W. Bush has done little to enamor himself with countries around the world. This is part of the reason that Barack Obama is so hugely popular outside the US-his message of change seems to really strike a chord in the US domestically as well as internationally.
But it’s interesting to note how now that he’s the democratic candidate, he’s moved back towards the center the way American candidates often do to appeal to the greatest percentage of the electorate. One example: in the past Obama made a large issue of campaign finance reform and limiting the amount of public funding a candidate can use-however there isn’t a limit if you only use private funding and Obama has decided to go that way. His supporters say [...]

In the Wealth Creators , a book I wrote in 1991, I discuss how Heinz went from a small company to a big multinational one through effective leadership and a clear vision. Recently I came across a fascinating article by Malcolm Gladwell about one man’s quest to create an upscale ketchup that could compete with Heinz. He hasn’t been that successful, and it turns out the flavors in Heinz have something to do with it:
What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons.  The taste of Heinz’s ketchup began at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo.  How many things in the supermarket run the [...]