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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
During their academic careers, students go through a series of major changes and entering university is one of the most significant. From primary school through to the end of secondary school, they have been in a ‘protected environment’ under the control of teachers; at home, they will have had parental guidance and support; and within […]
I actually heard a politician say something sensible this weekend! It was Alistair Darling, the UK Chancellor, and he was echoing something President Obama said last week. What caught my attention was the statement “there is nothing wrong with rewarding success, but there has to be a penalty for failure”. I’m afraid that, after that, […]
Given that the majority of companies are currently run by those in their forties and fifties and that most middle managers are younger than that, it is no surprise that few in business today remember the last really major global recession, which took place nearly 28 years ago in 1980-82. There have been other economic […]
When Margaret Thatcher became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and her soul mate, Ronald Reagan, became President of the United States, it did rather seem that a new era had dawned: one in which collectivism died and individualism became the dominating philosophy. Gone were the restrictive practices of the unions and the […]
One can hardly fail to be aware of the current crisis in the world of finance and you don’t have to look hard to find the media (and the politicians) laying the blame squarely at the feet of the banks. It’s the fault of the banks, they scream; if the banks acted in a more […]
One of the things to come out of our research into the Performance Life-cycle (From Comfort Zone to Performance Management) concerns the importance of communications. As an organisation passes into the ‘reforming’ phase, management recognises that … they are entering a new ‘transforming’ phase and begins to revert to a ‘new’ management style of […]