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Author Alasdair White
Email is a wonderful thing – or is supposed to be. The trouble is that it is addictive and time consuming – many managers spend more than 25% of their working day dealing with their email in-box and feel outside their comfort zone when deprived of email connectivity. But when one considers that the estimate by the Radicati Group, a company supplying research in this area, is that 76%+ of the 267,000,000,000 email messages sent each day are spam, it is easy to understand that email has lost its competitive advantage as a communication process. Perhaps we should re-think our communications strategies!
Although the research suggests that corporate email suffers slightly less badly that private email – 66% of corporate emails are considered spam as against 82% of private emails – it still means that Read the rest of this entry »
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Author Alasdair White
Recent reports in Business Week and The Economist suggest that business schools are not as recession-proof as once thought.
But there is more to this than first meets the eye and there are other possible implications – Business Week reported that business school applications (particularly for MBAs but also for undergraduate degrees) have been sliding downwards since the middle of last year. The immediate impulse has been to blame the recession (and it certainly has an impact) but research is showing up a more worrying issue: business schools and particularly the MBAs are seen as being too closely aligned with the thinking that has led to the current recession – and that the degrees being offered are not supplying the skills needed – skills such as thinking and interpreting rather than simply analysing, understanding the range of strategic Read the rest of this entry »
Author Alasdair White
Is there a link between the behaviour of “bankers” who have been credited with bringing down the world’s financial system as they pursued ever-greater bonuses, and British parliamentarians who have been credited with ripping off the taxpayer in an orgy of greed and dishonest expense claims?
Clearly, in the minds of much of the press and perhaps most of the public, there IS a link in that both groups have been driven by greed and avarice … or so it is assumed. But is this actually true?
The neoclassical economic approach (and the one that underpins the position of much of the press on this matter) is that both groups have been exercising rational and fully informed decision-making and have concluded that the long-term financial benefits accruing from their decisions are of far greater economic value than the costs incurred. But this is to fully misunderstand that neoclassical economic theory simply does not apply in cases where a behavioural approach makes more sense Read the rest of this entry »