This article by Luke Johnson on the Financial Times website on why big businesses are bad for business, with the point made that the senior executives of these large organisations are very similar to public servants of large government departments, strikes a chord with me.
We are in a situation of assets being slowly controlled by fewer and fewer hands. More and more companies are interlinked through shared ownership structures, and are plagued with the bureaucracy of governance which is emerging more as protecting directors from prosecutions than actually following through on whether governance is really adding value.
Issues such as risk, vulnerability, bribery and corruption that occur outside the usual Anglo-American governance regimes is a major problem. All our studies indicate that 80 percent of business transactions outside European or American boundaries involve more than one bribe, or a substantial amount of bribery, [...]

A recent article in Forbes asked if innovation was purely the domain of the young, saying
“youth seems to have advantages in innovation: everything is possible, knowledge is fresh, obligations are few and reputation is not at risk.”
Innovation can occur in products – we see this clearly in the field of mobile technology, for example – as well as in processes and services. Depending on the impact of innovation on environmental conditions, it can be classified as breakthrough innovation or  incremental innovation .
Any environment, business, culture or otherwise will be shaped by innovation that evolves through periods of incremental change, and will be punctuated by innovative breakthroughs that either enhance or destroy the existing competence of firms and the individuals that make them up.
Incremental innovation creates changes through cumulative processes until a major advance that creates discontinuity ruptures the beginning point altogether.
Through incremental [...]

In August, Nada and I visited Australia. On 4th August I was interviewed on the cultural attitudes to bribery. Is it corruption, or a friendly payment? This is the link to an interview on Business Today with Whitney Fitzsimmons for the Australia network:

In advance of the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference , I recently gave a presentation at Copenhagen Business School on Business Schools, Society and Climate Change. Here is a short video overview of my presentation: [...]