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: [...]

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. [...]

Executive pay is clearly out of touch with executive performance.
In the past 30 years or so, while real growth has been difficult to come by in mature markets, executive performance has become short-term transactional (i.e. through the buying and selling of businesses at inflated prices). These transactions have been executed in order to bolster a company’s share price in the short term. For a long time these transactional results seemed positive, and executive pay correspondingly grew. [...]

I recently came across this article in the Financial Times by Michel Ferrary of the Ceram Business School, in which he argues that companies (and the boards and senior management therein) with a higher number of women managers are better able to face the economic downturn. This finding will certainly find favour across a number of quarters.
However, the research that we have conducted–which spans 12,500 top teams and well over 2,000 boards–suggests that there is no difference in operational or strategic performance between male and female managers. In fact, gender emerged as the least predicted demographic concerning effectiveness of performance.  It should be noted that similar findings applied to education, sector, religion, geographical location and personal background. [...]

Earlier this week I came across this interesting article in the FT from Michael Skapinker about corporate social responsibility. Skapinker argues that one reason companies focus on CSR (instead of solely focusing on shareholder value, as capitalism suggests companies should behave) is that it makes executives “feel better”–it is a way for them to give something back when they can’t afford to act personally philanthropically in the way that Bill Gates can. [...]

From a recent article in the FT:
In an analysis entitled Turning the Tide, Deloitte yesterday said central and local government must seize the opportunity “to take radical steps to emerge as leaner, more commercially savvy entities”. In practice, it argued, the downturn “provides a chance for public sector organisations to drive through reforms they could not necessarily achieve in more prosperous times”. [...]

Is the global financial crisis motivating people to seek extramarital affairs? Anecdotal evidence from FT columnist Lucy Kellaway suggests this is the case . In the process of doing research for a novel, she found that the adultery-enabling website Illicit Encounters has seen a 300% increase in registrations from London-based men in the financial sector since September. [...]