Performance Management
Author Alasdair White
In the wake of collapse of the banking system, it is understandable that we want to make sure that is does not happen again. Politicians, those who are ostensibly elected to act on our behalf, are the ones who have to take the responsibility for finding a solution – not because they are knowledgeable and competent in the field but because it is the responsibility of politicians to act at a national and supranational level, a level at which we, as individuals, simply cannot. Unfortunately, the world’s politicians have assumed that they are competent to act directly (i.e. they are knowledgeable and have the skills in the field), rather than accepting that their role is to seek considered and thoughtful input from those that do know what they are talking about and then to mange the process so that a solution is found. The result of assumption of competence has been a rush by politicians to develop policy and enact law – and to get it spectacularly wrong!
Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France and a member of the G20, has recently called for a tax on financial transactions as a method of reducing risky behaviour amongst bankers. This is profoundly flawed as an idea Read the rest of this entry »
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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 »
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 »