To browse David Pogue’s 1kg doorstopper Apple: The first 50 Years, is to trigger a range of reflections. Even after all the tellings, the first is the extraordinariness of the story. The journey from scrappy two-man garage start-up via several near-bankruptcies to today’s dominant computer industry player, founder-member of Big Tech’s Magnificent Seven,  and sometime most valuable company in the world, now worth a staggering $4 tr, could only be done justice by a blockbuster series financed by the bottomless resources of the subject itself. There are the outsize industry figures, volcanic slanging matches and crises, interspersed with an amazing series of industry-, even world-changing innovations. All this stemming from the first boxy Macintosh computers that debuted in 1984 – remember the legendary ‘1984’ Superbowl ad? With a list price of $2500, 128k of memory and one 3.5 inch floppy disk, those first Macs were expensive, wildly underpowered – and revolutionary. Everyone wanted one. 

Which is where I came in. The second remarkable thing about the Apple story is how the rise of Apple to world domination is mirrored at the personal level. In 1984, I bought one of the first Macs in the country, and proudly lugged it in its carry bag from Norwich to the office in London by train. The personal link was reinforced the following year when in the course of writing a piece on the development of the personal computer I visited Apple in Cupertino and interviewed the then chief executive – not, alas, founder and moving spirit Steve Jobs, but John Sculley, the former Pepsi marketing man whom Jobs had recruited with one of the most famous lines in Apple lore: ‘Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?’ (To my huge pleasure, I did get to meet Jobs’ co-founder, the lovely Steve Wozniak, much later for The Observer. To considerably less pleasure I also interviewed young Bill Gates around the same time, but that’s another story.) I no longer have my notes of the Sculley encounter (alas again), but then I had no idea that 1985 would be a pivotal point in Apple’s history: the year Jobs was pushed into exile, beginning a 12-year period when Apple was really only Apple in name.

Since then I have only ever owned Macs, even during that Jobs-less ‘interregnum’ when design took a back seat at Apple. What kept us buying was the unparalleled integration of hardware and still mostly elegantly simple software. The boast was that with Apple you never needed to learn how to use a new application, unlike the opaque and unfriendly Windows, which we treated with unremitting disdain. To this day my own computers are more or less Microsoft-free, except for the odd period of working in an office where Word or Outlook was unavoidable.

I can’t be precise, but over my 42 years as an Apple customer I must have bought around 15 computers, along with assorted printers, disk drives, Air Ports and a (still functioning) Time Capsule that Apple made for a time. Then factor in a couple of iPads, iPods (ever wondered why podcasts are so called?), AirPods, and of course since 2007, a succession of iPhones. Since the rule of thumb was that Macs never cost less than £1000 and often – including some of the hideous portables devised during the design-free years of Job’s exile – a lot more, I must personally have spent around £25,000 over the years on its computers and phones. But I am not alone: all my family are Mac users, some quite intensively, which means we can usually help each other out with recommendations or technical hints where necessary. To this family product franchise, in the recurring services that Jobs and then Tim Cook have cannily added – Apple Music, TV, News, Fitness, iCloud Storage, Pay. We don’t all use the services, of course, but their reach and ubiquity do underline the colossal asset value of the company’s installed base. This is beneficial in two ways. Offensively, as the basis for extensions to existing ranges – as with the new Macbook Neo computer, at $599 Apple’s first low-cost device, which is garnering rave reviews – and defensively, where the network effect of its wide ecosystems provide a kind of protective ‘moat’ that is rare among consumer-oriented companies (perhaps that’s why, with the company’s shares near an all-time high, moat-champion Warren Buffet recently confessed he might have slimmed down Berkshire Hathaway’s Apple holding a bit prematurely).

Of course, Apple is far from perfect. As Pogue chronicles, it has had its fair share of flops and mistakes. Currently, Vision Pro, its VR headset, is far from a best-seller, and all visible traces of the $10 bn Titan project, aka the Apple car, have disappeared. Tim Cook’s memorably awful fawning over Donald Trump was a rare but egregious blemish on a political copy book that has stayed notably unblotted relative to most of the Apple CEO’s Silicon Valley tech brethren. But the mistakes are heavily outweighed by the successes, their effect cushioned by the company’s ability to recycle the technological and other discoveries from  discontinued projects seamlessly into subsequent offerings. ‘Absolutely not wasted!’ is one senior insider’s judgment on Titan, for instance.

Above all, as that installed base demonstrates, Apple has maintained the pact with its customers that has sustained it through its first half century. Perhaps wisely, Pogue forbears prediction about Apple’s product future, noting reasonably that while the post-Jobs firm has certainly failed to come up with blockbuster innovations comparable to the astonishing run of iMac, iPod, iTunes, and iPhone of the Jobs years, no other company has either. More intriguingly, he devotes his last chapter to ‘throughlines’, the enduring principles and values that he sees running consistently through the arc of Apple’s first half century. He lists 15 of them, including ‘beauty’, ‘small acquisitions’, ‘tiny teams and fiercely short time frames’, and, curiously, rounded corners on all its products, among them. But in my view all the rest (‘best not first’, ‘focus’, ‘simplicity’,’ sustainability’ etc) are tributary to and products of, the two cardinal ones: ‘the whole widget’ (Jobs’ insistence that Apple should provide both software and hardware), and above all, excellent execution. 

Jobs was a fan of Japanese manufacturing, and the first Mac plant at Fremont, which I visited, was a tribute to what he had learned. What companies like Toyota discovered was that that brilliant execution wasn’t just being efficient – it was a powerful strategic weapon delivering competitive edge that was hard for rivals to match, at least in the short term. Companies that execute supremely well don’t outsource – on the contrary, given the chance, they bring processes inside, because they know they can do them better. So over time Apple has steadily increased the amount of the widget it makes or controls, and some of its greatest though often unsung hits come under this category. Retail is one. Despairing of the poor job existing computer retailers were making of selling quirky Macs, in 2001 Jobs and Cook decided to a chorus of ridicule (and even board resignations) that Apple would open its own stores. It rook Apple three years to rewrite retail rules and history, becoming the fastest chain ever to hit $1bn in sales. By 2025 it had 530 stores in 27 countries, the flagships generating $100m each a year.

Or take Apple silicon. In 2008, Jobs – yet again! – dissatisfied with the performance of existing devices, decided that Apple should develop its own iPhone processor. Chip design is fiendishly difficult, but within two years its new team had developed its own system on a chip that was thinner, smaller, faster, less power hungry and cheaper than the Samsung design it replaced. Computer chips are even more complex, but by the time of Apple’s 50th birthday in May, the company was on its fifth iteration of its ‘M’ series processors, leaving competitors scrambling. Today’s M5 powered MacBook Air is currently the world’s best-selling laptop computer. There are plenty more examples of insourcing, each one giving Apple more control over its products and ultimately its own destiny.

In recent times Apple has often been criticised, even mocked, for its stumbling efforts to implement Apple Intelligence, its proprietary version of AI. But remember the ‘best not first’ mantra. I’d be willing to make a small bet that when the dust has settled Apple will be seen to have the last laugh – perhaps less in its consumer products and more for the more difficult and consequential integration of AI into its brilliant supply chain and manufacturing processes. In the meantime, as I begin to envisage travelling again I’m pondering the choice of my next portable: MacBook Air, iPod Pro, or Macbook Neo? Truly, I have never been more spoiled for choice.

Three years ago I wrote a piece for the FT suggesting that the time was ripe for women managers, now an increasingly influential majority in US business, to start moulding the tired management tropes of the 20th century into something fresher and more empathetic. Given subsequent developments, this might have qualified as the worst timed article ever – but for the shrewdness of my article interviewees, who all ended by warning me of the dangers of a backlash. 

Of course they were right, even though they didn’t anticipate its extent. The backlash was swift, first in the shape of Roe v Wade, then the MAGA-inspired assault on woke and diversity and finally the abrupt cultural pivot of the US workplace towards a take-no-prisoners, often overtly macho management style, elegantly summed up on one side by the, sadly unfulfilled, cage-fight challenge between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, and on the other by the banker who declared his relief at being able to use the words ‘pussy’ and ‘retard’ in public again without fear of retribution. 

It’s worth spending a moment considering how savage the backlash has been. With hindsight, the reset had already begun with the ending of Covid, as impatient bosses coupled increasingly pressing demands for a return to work with the imposition of work surveillance tools and tighter performance management generally. With Big Tech and Wall Street in the lead, and fuelled by the advent of AI, big firms have accompanied successive rounds of redundancies with a noticeably toughened-up stance on productivity. Some leaders have taken to boasting of Silicon Valley’s ‘9-9-6’ culture – a bruising six-day-a-week 9am to 9pm work schedule – that they claim is the only way of keeping up in the AI arms race. Quite apart from the physiological and psychological damage wrought by such extreme regimes, this 72-hour work week might have been designed as a filter to screen out women, who as everywhere juggle paid jobs with being the unpaid domestic carers of choice.

At the same time, Big Tech’s slashing of trust and safety teams has created a coarsened, even hostile digital environment, fuelling fears that the headlong unregulated growth of artificial intelligence is fostering a new age of gender inequality by facilitating widespread digital abuse and systemic bias. On one hand, tech firms are monetizing ‘nudify’ tools and non-consensual deepfakes, while safety guardrails are dangerously absent. Beyond sexual violence, critics claim that AI reinforces misogyny and prejudice in critical sectors like healthcare, finance, and recruitment, where biased algorithms provide inferior service to women. In this view, only preventive, safety-by-design regulation can stop a downward spiral that excludes women from the digital future and erodes their fundamental human rights. 

Add in Zuckerberg’s famous call on the very manly Joe Rogan show for ‘more masculine energy’ to reinvigorate the US’s ‘neutered’ workplaces, and  a chainsaw-toting Elon Musk celebrating the depredations of his DOGE troops with what looked like a Nazi salute, and it would be surprising if women were feeling anything other than unwelcome at the corporate centre. Far-right fringe commentators such as Nick Fuentes have have been unafraid to cast women as the ‘No 1 political enemy in America’, asserting that they ‘constrain everything’ and suggesting they should be kicked out of the workplace altogether.

Grim, yes. Yet every action brings a reaction. On closer analysis the full story turns out to be more nuanced, and less depressing, than first appearances might suggest. It turns out that out of the limelight women have been far from idle. As federal support has dwindled and the traditional corporate environment become less welcoming, women are simply moving out and setting up on their own. Female entrepreneurship in the US is hitting all-time highs. As of early 2026, women were accounting for almost half of all new business applications, nearly 70% up since 2019. What is driving this surge is nothing less than a new ‘financial and lifestyle strategy’ by which women are taking back control over their careers and workplaces.

And it is happening across the board. A self-sustaining ecosystem is emerging, fuelled by women funding women. Women reportedly now comprise nearly 50% of angel investors, providing a vital alternative to traditional venture capital, which, depressingly, has seen funding for women drop to historic lows. The resulting women-led firms are finding particular success in ‘resilience’ sectors such as healthcare and femtech, sustainable energy, and edtech, where male raw output is no substitute for focus, empathy and value. Interestingly, research suggests that these firms often operate with superior capital efficiency, burning less cash than their male-led counterparts and outpacing them in turnover growth.

It may be too soon to speak of a ‘Great Divergence’ in the American business landscape. But it seems clear that something significant is going on. While public attention is focused on Big Tech and finance, conspicuously politicised as they have now become, women are quietly moving out to decentralised and less fraught sectors where the ‘political’ writ doesn’t run. In effect, manosphere-style corporates have become a kind of centrifuge, spinning out female talent to become entrepreneurs in charge of their own

boutique consultancies and micro-agencies. While the corporate centre remains noisy, politically favored, and volatile, the decentralized female periphery is showing itself to be financially stable, efficient, and resilient to the current chaotic economic climate. Watch this space.

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Pets Cornered (cont)

The FT rather agrees with me on the subject of vets and private equity. Lex thinks the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has meekly sheathed its claws for Big Vet – the six large firms that have locked up nearly two-thirds of the UK’s £6.7bn veterinary market – in its polite just-published review of a sector where, surprise surprise, consolidation has been accompanied by sharply rising prices and acute lack of comparability, to the mounting chagrin of anxious pet owners. No break-ups or divestitures are recommended, so the firms can keep their labs and pharmacies, and not much either in the way of price controls. They can continue to grow as before. No wonder investors are purring, and one of the big six has welcomed the report. Lex notes that PE firms are already busily rolling up small firms in areas of human health, such as dentistry and fertility clinics: ‘The hope is that [the CMA] shows more teeth there’.

To a Martian, the UK economy might appear to have plenty going for it. It has the City of London, still – just – Europe’s, and in some respects the world’s, preeminent financial centre, and the Lloyds insurance market. It has had more than half a century of bounteous North Sea oil, and from a renewables point of view its buffeting winds and sweeping tides make it a charmed location. It is big in professional services, such as accountancy and audit, consulting and advertising, and has vibrant creative industries ranging from great museums, to world-class theatre, cinema and video gaming, together producing around £124 bn of gross added value a year. Then, the UK is home to 165 universities, some of the highest global rank, to which foreign students, or at least their parents, queue up to pay exorbitant sums for an undergraduate or postgraduate degree – not to mention, and this is more to the point, more than 100 business schools, whose business courses attract 250,000 students, more than any other subject at both undergraduate and graduate level.

All of which begs a rather large question. It’s tempting just to dismiss the UK as a bullshit economy, all talk and no action. And there’s something in that. But behind that hides another and more specific question. Business is the science of action – researching, planning, implementing and managing it to eventual completion. So how can the UK have so many and well reputed institutions teaching this science to such a quantity of willing students and still make such a mess of its economic endowments (absurdly high energy costs, inability to build either houses or infrastructure, failure to generate growth anywhere outside London, Oxford and Cambridge, just for starters.)

In an interesting piece in the FT’s Business Education magazine, David Willetts puts forward some partial answers. He thinks that the UK’s overly globalist business schools put the needs of lucrative foreign students before those of domestic ones, and pay insufficient research and teaching attention to specifically UK areas of concern (admittedly a pretty wide field). He also questions the weightings used in the influential business school rankings published in the press, heavily oriented towards individual before and after salary comparisons and omitting benefits to the local economy.

There is some truth in all this, just as there is in the idea that the UK has infuriatingly squandered many of its strengths by carelessly taking them for granted or, which comes to the same thing, leaving them to the market instead of developing them strategically. That certainly goes for energy, North Sea Oil, our transport networks and also our universities, which I have long thought to be a bubble that some day soon will pop. Our most culpably wasted strength, of course, literally tossed away, is free access to, and movement to and from, Europe, loss of which, as recent research makes clear, has caused colossal damage not just to GDP, but also to our economic dynamism. ‘The things the UK excels at, points out one recent study ‘finance and business services, tech and the creative economy, various advanced manufacturing niches – depend on openness to trade, to ideas, to skilled workers’, while its neglected provinces have never been more in need of Europe’s regional support funds.

But that still leaves the enigma of UK business education, that bulks large everywhere except in the productivity and growth figures. Many UK management courses, as Willets remarks, are fairly elementary, well below MBA level. But he overlooks a much simpler and more radical explanation for their mediocre contribution to their host country’s economy. What if, far from being an inexplicable conundrum, it is the entirely predictable consequence of teaching courses that are, um, bullshit? That what generations of business students have been learning on their expensive courses is in fact just wrong?

This diagnosis is less extreme than it might sound. LBS’s late lamented Sumantra Ghoshal began a celebrated 2005 essay, ‘Bad Management Theories are Destroying Good Management Practices’, with the observation that preventing fresh business scandals (this was post Enron, Tyco and Global Crossing), wasn’t a matter of business schools putting on a bunch of new courses, so much as stopping teaching a lot of old ones. These included governance based on agency theory, which decrees that self-interested managers must be bribed to do their job of maximising shareholder value with incentives such as stock options, organization design reflecting the need to control people’s opportunism by hierarchy and sanctions, and strategy that pits companies against their stakeholders, including society and regulators, by assuming that given the chance all of them are are out to eat everyone else’s lunch. With these gloomy and ideologically-based ideas, he concludes, business schools have conspired to create theories and practices that absolve their students from any moral responsibility for their actions and turn the daily practice of management from a force for good into a force for bad – its baleful influence all too visible in today’s grotesque wealth inequalities, the travails of an overheating planet, and the unprecedented concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a few overmighty tech oligarchs.

First, close down all the business schools, you might conclude – and you’d have my sympathy. But a more positive, and ambitious, course would be to join the courageous minority of business academics who are struggling to renew the management discipline against enormous inertia from within. When pushed, almost everyone will admit that the outcomes of today’s management practices are too grotesquely lopsided to be defensible. There are many ways to take part in the inside job  of renewal, ranging from the Drucker Forum’s Next Management initiative now taking shape in Vienna and other cities, the study of the intriguing ‘positive deviant’ firms that in industry after industry appear to succeed not despite challenging sector or industry norms but because of doing so, to following in the footsteps of the systems thinkers who, like Russell Ackoff, have crossed the Rubicon to realise that ‘Problems in organisations are almost always the product of interactions of parts, never the action of a single part. Treating a single part destabilises the whole and demands more fruitless management intervention; management becomes a consumer of energy, rather than a creator’. That’s today’s UK management in a nutshell: the wheels are spinning faster and faster, but nothing is happening.

Note: Happy Christmas and an apology to patient subscribers for recent blips on the site and the delayed appearance of my recent post. The back story is that I am at present uncomfortably holed up in La Pitié Salpétrière, France’s largest hospital, with a fractured hip sustained in an accident in the Paris Metro. After an operation two weeks ago, the hip is mending and I am regaining mobility – but typing is awkward and concentration hard to maintain… I hope to get back to normal (and home) in the next month or so. As ever, thank you for your continued support and for your excellent comments.

HS2 and its phases: Cnbrb, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The default British policy of ‘make do and mend’ has many infamous monuments to its discredit. Think only of the Mother of Parliaments crumbling into the Thames as report after report on its repair is kicked into the long grass, or the water companies whose failure to do their job of preventing raw sewage from polluting our waterways and coastal waters is gross enough to be visible from outer space.

Yet bigger and far more telling of the seriousness of our multiple institutional failings than these is the debacle of High Speed 2 (HS2). Born as Europe’s biggest infrastructure project, once intended to be a vital means of rebalancing the UK’s economy with a high-speed rail line linking London with Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, and places north, not to mention a showpiece of UK engineering, HS2 now stands as a grotesque laughing stock, exhibit A in the house of horrors of how not to execute an infrastructure project. 

After 10 years construction work, following Rishi Sunak’s 2023 brutal amputation of phase 2, the Y-shaped arms stretching beyond the West Midlands, all that remains of the grand plan is the bloody stump of a fast London-to-Birmingham line, on its own justified neither by economics nor strategic national connectivity. Meanwhile, the cost of this travesty has ballooned in reverse proportion to its shrinking scope. From an original £30bn for the whole network (admittedly a heroic underestimate) the bill for completing what’s left of it has soared to nearly £70bn in today’s money – this on top of the £26bn already spent, which includes £1.7bn on the now ghosted phase 2 north of Birmingham, and £548m on the terminus at Euston, much of it wasted, for which there is no final plan, nor one in sight, which won’t be finished before 2040, and whose ambition has shrunk from being ‘world class’ to ‘serviceable’ and ‘value for money’ (even the latter being a stretch since dependent on private-sector development of the surrounding site). Hardly surprisingly, the truncated scheme is qualified by Parliament’s spending watchdog as ‘very poor value for money’, with costs now forecast to significantly outrun the benefits.

What went wrong? According to Sally Gimson, who chronicles the project’s descent into chaos in her indignant if hastily written Off the Rails: everything. First and foremost was a lack of fixed political purpose. As Gimson shows, the UK Treasury has never viewed railways as anything but a costly nuisance, rather than a strategic asset to be developed. While France, for instance, launched an ambitious electrification programme immediately after WWII and now runs an expanding TGV network, the UK still puffs forlornly behind – as Gimson notes, as Japan inaugurated its bullet train for the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, the UK was still building steam engines in Crewe, and even later putting converted Leyland buses on rails for local services. Beeching’s cuts in 1963, axing 5,000 miles and 2000 stations, were strictly about cost-cutting rather than modernisation – another wasted opportunity. 

True to this tradition, when HS2 was mooted in 2009, it appeared as more an abstract exercise on which politicians imprinted a wide variety of local and personal ambitions – levelling up, showcasing engineering, greenery, regional links, local regeneration – than a transformative, once-in-a-generation national project to the direct or indirect benefit of the entire country. Thus conflicted, it disappeared from view during Brexit and Covid, which dedicated Home Counties naysayers cleverly used behind the scenes to wheedle ever more costly exceptions and modifications from ministers and departments whose attentions were elsewhere.

Political vacillation has been a recurring cause of escalating costs. Others were built in. A key reason why HS2’s costs per kilometer are eight times higher than those of countries like France and Spain lies in spectacular technical overspecification. Failing to learn the lessons of its predecessor High Speed 1 (HS1), which was delivered quickly and without drama using proven French technology, HS2 decided that its trains would be ‘the fastest, quietest, most energy-efficient high-speed trains operating anywhere in the world.’ This was not only demanding technologically; it also dramatically raised construction costs, requiring greater noise damping, stronger viaducts and bridges, and costlier track alignments and cuttings.

Weirdly, the technological overkill seems to have been driven not by technical necessity – there is none – but by finance. While the strategic case revolved around adding capacity to main-line rail links north of Birmingham, currently bursting at the seams, the economic justification depended heavily on traveller time saved, which accounted for more than 70 per cent of the calculated benefits. So, in a perfect Catch-22, to make the economics add up, HS2 needed to break speed records, which made it so hard to build it was unaffordable; but with construction so far advanced it was impossible to stop.

This inauspicious start was compounded by systematic organisational, management and governance flaws. HS2 Ltd, the government-owned project owner, already poorly staffed, had to work out how to do the biggest infrastructure project for decades at the same time as delivering it. At key points senior leadership roles were vacant – at one point the company was without a CEO for a year, partly the result of oversight from the Department for Transport (DfT) that was lackadaisical at best.

The mistakes started early. Although parliamentary approval for Phase 1 of the line was delayed from 2015 to 2017, the original 2026 opening date was inexplicably not reset. To speed up procurement, HS2 awarded high-value contracts before ground conditions were fully surveyed, leading directly to cost increases when engineering work began. Again, the civil engineering work was contracted to four international joint ventures, but lack of an overall engineering ‘guiding mind’ meant that the opportunity to standardise designs for common elements like bridges and stations — lesson No 1 from low-cost constructors Spain and France – was entirely missed. Gold-plated engineering designs from the four JVs to minimise their risk only increased the cost pressures. Not surprisingly, the parliamentary watchdog found that there was ‘not convincing evidence’ that HS2 – or civil servants, or the government – had, or even could have, the project under control.

Among too many other absurdities to mention, the most poignant section of Gimson’s book is a chapter called ‘A Disaster for Crewe’. When it was selected as a crucial hub for the new line in 2016, the Cheshire town, once the proud heart, now a sorry shadow, of the industry that the UK invented 200 years ago, could realistically see itself as a modern logistics hub ideally placed at the centre of a joined-up Britain to reverse half a century of decline. With a  comprehensive overhaul of the ‘old, broken-down junction’ in the offing, the town began planning for new jobs, new homes and even a cultural centre to breathe new life into the run-down community.  

All that evaporated in a puff of smoke with Sunak’s surprise announcment in 2023 – Crewe being just the largest casualty among many smaller ones on the cancelled northern arms of HS2. As well as a callous social and economic tragedy, it is a potent illustration of another unenvied UK speciality which reflects the reverse side of Boris Johnson’s slapdash cakeism: the unerring ability to to get the worst of all worlds. In this case, a hideously expensive and near valueless White Elephant of a rail line between one station that will be far too big outside Birmingham to another that doesn’t yet exist in London, using too many overengineered trains whose capacities can’t be used for what they were designed for, to the point where, scarcely credibly, service on the West Coast main line above Birmingham may actually end up worse than it is now. The Infrastructure and Projects Authority based in the Cabinet Office has one word for HS2, ‘unachievable’ – which effectively ensures that other much-needed UK infrastructure projects, in energy and water, for instance, will be quietly shunted into the already crowded siding labelled ‘make do and mend’, in the hope that they will somehow go away – anything to prevent them actually having to be built.

‘Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.’ 

Thus P.G. Wodehouse, magnificently summing up everything about the British attitude to foreign languages – unconfident, half-hearted, apologetic and a bit guilty, all of which are reflected in the fretful handwringing that has greeted recent news of the continuing decline of language learning in UK schools and universities. 

Having dropped like a stone since the Labour government jettisoned obligatory language learning in schools in 2004, annual exam candidates now number in the single thousands for French, Spanish and near-extinct German, while more undergraduates study PE than languages spoken by our nearest neighbours. Fewer than half our universities, and none outside the Russell group, boast language departments. Just 20 per cent of Brits say they can speak a foreign language, and only a much smaller proportion can do better than Wodehouse’s rightly nervous hero.

None of this is because the British are congenitally less able to learn languages than others. It’s because they don’t bother to. For which thank the grossly inflated assumptions they hold about the benefits of speaking ‘the language of Shakespeare’. True, enough people speak English that you can make yourself understood in much of the world, but the value of that is wildly overestimated and about to disappear anyway with the AI instant translation apps that are burgeoning on every other smartphone.

The fact is that being Anglophone isn’t a blessing. For Brits, the English language is a kind of cultural resource curse – a one-time advantage that we have failed to notice has long-since decayed into its opposite – a monument to the UK’s sloppy penchant for taking the easy option without thinking through the consequences.

Language is about far more than mechanical translation. The great polymath George Steiner compared it to vision: while with one eye you can see, two gives perspective. The same goes for language – as anyone suddenly struck by their own country’s eccentricities from the vantage point of a sojourn abroad will attest. ‘A different language’, summed up filmmaker Frederico Fellini, ‘is a different vision of life.’

This matters. For the monolingual UK, English becomes a one-way filter that screens out everything else. English is the basis of London’s cosmopolitan appeal, a lingua franca layered over the capital’s brew of 300 other languages – and also, incidentally, an important reason why the country is so attractive to migrants. But under its surface nest enclaves and communities whose culture and habits remain hidden in plain sight behind the linguistic filter. Think of radicalisation or the belated and wholly inadequate institutional response to the grooming gangs phenomenon, for example. Or would we have been quite so obsequious in our embrace of Russian oligarchs, and quicker to acknowledge Russian involvement in the Leave and other political campaigns since, if we had had a little more linguistic intelligence to apply to proceedings?

Again, consider the UK’s much prized ‘special relationship’ with the US. As the last two presidents have demonstrated, the current one most cuttingly, very far from being equal, the transatlantic relationship consists of little more than a shared language and the application of a flattering layer of royal pageantry (‘I am sure we can get along if he doesn’t try to give me too much soft soap,’ was Harry S Truman’s aside about Winston Churchill). 

The shared language, meanwhile, is accompanied by serious downsides. It makes us more susceptible to US economic and management ideas than European ones, and its American weaponisation as a tool of political and cultural imperialism is now unashamed and blatant. Just as bad, the Walter Mitty illusion of a shared language equating to shared destiny has helped to sustain the vacillation between the poles of European and US influence that has dogged UK politics ever since the second world war – and still does. Forever tugged between the two, Britain has never made up its mind whether it is a buccaneering US-style free market (the Brexit or Liz Truss vision) or a European social-market economy, as a result getting the best of neither and often the worst aspects of both; while the idea of relying on the US for security has never looked more naively fanciful.

So we plod on, wilfully unaware of how post Brexit our political and economic choices are still being shaped not by market opportunity but our insular linguistic traditions. Take, for example, our export performance, which faithfully reflects our self-imposed need to sell to foreign markets in English rather than their own language. While for Anglophone markets such as the US, Australia, Ireland and India, the UK exports more than it imports, the reverse is true for Germany, France, Italy and Spain, our European trading partners that together account for nearly three-quarters of UK exports. The telling case is little Denmark – population 6 million, almost all of whom speak English – which accounts for as much UK trading volume as all central and Latin America (population 670 million) put together.

There is a similar lop-sidedness on a personal level. As state funding has shrunk, many British universities have become dangerously dependent on the outsize fees paid by foreign students, two or three times higher than those charged to Brits. But part of the price is paid by home-grown learners, particularly in humanities. As university teachers are quick to testify, foreign students arriving with two or more languages have a built-in advantage over their monolingual UK counterparts. With double the cultural reference and more sophisticated perspectives to draw on, they are simply better equipped to benefit from their UK-provided university education – and the gap often widens during their studies. 

Projecting forward into the world of work, other things being equal, why would an employer, even a British one, not choose a candidate with double the cultural capital and savoir faire over a monoglot Anglophone, even one less caricatural than Wodehouse’s silly asses? It is surely deeply ironic that our cash-strapped higher education sector should be devoting a substantial part of its effort to creating better-qualified foreign graduates for top multinational jobs that are effectively closed to UK nationals because they haven’t been taught a second language.

Commenting on this year’s dire language exam figures, a prominent educationalist described the Blair government’s decision to drop compulsory language learning in 2004 as ‘quite clearly… the worst educational policy of this century.’ Even Wodehouse couldn’t make a joke out of that.

In September the CMA is due to publish a draft action plan for making the market for veterinary services work better. The cost of taking a pet to the vet soared by two-thirds between 2016 and 2023, it has found, nearly double the rate of other consumer services. Clinical advances and new medicines don’t satisfactorily explain the increase, it believes. 

More to the point, perhaps, is that while a decade ago 90 per cent of vet practices were run by local owner-practitioners, now a whopping 60 per cent belong to six large groups. One of them, Swedish-British-owned IVC Evidensia, is the second largest vet services provider in the world.

Yet the most important thing isn’t that vets have gone corporate. It’s that three of the large organisations, including IVC, are owned by private equity (PE). When prices suddenly soar, look for the incentives. In PE these are extreme, and they operate at every level, from the professional treating your sick cat or dog, to, most sharply, PE general partners sitting behind their desks in New York or Mayfair who have never been anywhere near the dispensaries or rural treatment practices that their funds own.

Let’s be clear. PE has zero interest per se in pet – or human – health or welfare, nor that of the communities they serve. What it does care about is industries or sectors that share certain characteristics. They have guaranteed demand, an assured income stream, and are small in scale – qualities that make them particularly susceptible to PE’s blunt instruments of consolidation or ‘rollup’, leverage and debt financing. So yes, PE loves vet practices, funeral services, human care homes and dental surgeries  – with the love felt by killer whales for seals and penguins or crocodiles for small deer or wild pigs. What pets, elderly relatives and people with toothache have in common, and what makes PE lick its chops, is that, in today’s merciless Trumpo-Muskian economic world, they are suckers who deserve to be exploited: as customers they are captive and unprotected, as industries small-scale and charmingly unsophisticated, and as employees and patients unorganised and isolated.

The small scale and local nature are important. First, they allow serial buyers to claim modernisation and scale efficiencies while they are actually laying the foundations for local monopoly, enabling them to raise prices, restrict choice and change payment methods – peddling insurance or subscriptions to smooth revenues, for example. Most acquired vet practices craftily retain their existing identities, so pet owners aren’t aware that they are now dealing with big corporates, while the scarcity of published price lists means that they are often also in the dark on that score. 

Thus does neighbourhood little vet quietly morph into corporate Big Vet. But that’s not all. Hidden in the acquisition process is a potent financial turbocharger in the shape of the dull-sounding ‘multiple arbitrage’. Larger organisations attract relatively higher valuations than smaller ones – they’ll be worth a multiple of say eight to 10 times earnings, rather than three or four. This means that as it grows, the budding cartel grows faster, sometimes dramatically faster, in value than in size. Coupled with leverage, high levels of debt and asset sales – the new owner may charge the acquisition a dividend for the privilege of being taken over; if the latter owns its premises, they may be sold and then leased back – this will work magic for the ‘carry’ of the general partners sitting on top of the fund when it is wound up and the proceeds distributed seven or more years later.

PE titans justify their outsize returns by pointing to gains in economic efficiency procured by their elimination of waste and improvment of firms’ operations. In the 1970s and 1980s this may even have been partly true. But the larger truth is that with the extraordinary growth of the sector, all but a very few of the easily improvable firms have already been done over, while the end of zero interest rates has revealed in all its glory the degree to which PE has depended on the magic of financial engineering and leverage for its returns; now that it really matters, the boasts of bringing operational management expertise to bear are shown to be largely hot air.   

The rollup strategy now being practised for vets, dentists, funeral services and others gave PE a new canvas to paint on: monopoly by stealth, achieved by flying under the radar and focusing on cottage industries rather than large, visible concerns. Once accounting and administration have been centralised and other costs cut to the bone, including professional personnel where possible, the next step is to move into related services – emergencies, diagnostics, pharmacies, insurance, burials – that can be similarly rolled up and billed separately. Anecdotal evidence suggests that as they are brought into the corporate fold, frontline vets too, to their discomfort, are coming under increasing pressure to meet sales and financial targets. One big corporate owner of vet practices is food group Mars (Whiskas, Pedigree, Sheba) – guess why. Any competition between them seems focused on edging prices up, rather than down.

The CMA’s action plan will likely require improved customer information, urge pet-owners to shop around , discourage the abandonment of basic (ie cheap) treatments, and possibly regulate to prevent further ownership concentration in some localities. What it will find harder to do much about is PE’s fundamental indifference to the industries it ‘invests’ in. This means that if push comes to shove – if pet owners, who go to prodigious lengths to pay for their animals’ care, can finally no longer afford to pay up and rates of ‘economic euthanesia’ rise too high – it will simply sell on its companies or flog the assets and move on to another trade to pillage. As one PE-owned US media company coolly announced as it auctioned off its last run-down websites last year, ‘we are working towards a full wind down [from which] we will exit having increased shareholder value.’ Closing down an insufficiently profitable practice or charging an eight-times mark-up on drugs for pets — it all ends up as fuel for the greed of some existing or would-be private equity billionaire.

The CMA goes out of its way to exempt vets themselves, praised for their continuing commitment to care and high professional standards, from criticism. But the financial and accounting margins within which they work are much more tightly drawn than in the past. When some years ago our aged cat had to be put to sleep, the vet, something of a celebrity who ran a practice in a posh part of central London, quietly told us he’d contact us later to settle up. He never did. Have no doubt that in the age of PE-driven Big Vet, such a human gesture not only wouldn’t happen – it might be a sackable offence.

19 June saw the relaunch of Director magazine, the journal of the Institute of Directors – and very good it is too, featuring challenging pieces from the trenchant Margaret Heffernan on AI, John Kay on business myths and Stefan Stern on managing, among others. It also carries my short review of Charles Handy’s last book, The View from Ninety, which is reproduced below.

As it happens, the review appeared on the same day that Paypal informed me that Charles Handy would not be renewing his membership of this website and blog, which made it a bittersweet occasion. The final farewell to one of our age’s most cherished social and business thinkers will take place at 3:00 pm on 1 July at a celebratory service in St James’ Church, Piccadilly, with a chance to meet over coffee in the churchyard afterwards. There may be a few places left on Eventbrite, or it can be followed online.

A murder in broad daylight on a city street usually prokes horror and revulsion. In the case of executive Brian Thompson, shot in New York on 4 December last year, there was some of that. But it was rapidly drowned out by a much louder vibe: the viral fame, and subsequent elevation to vigilante status, of the suspected killer, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, who even before the trial has become a social media phenomenon, the subject of a stage musical as well as of burgeoning conspiracy theories, and a political football. He has a Wikipedia page, and his supporters have spontaneously raised a fighting fund of more than $1m to pay for his defence in court.

Robin Hood or economic terrorist? The symbolic weight heaped on the slight figure of the suspect is enormous. Mangione, who has pleaded not guilty to murder charges, including murder as a terrorist act, is innocent until proven otherwise. But that hasn’t stopped the case becoming instantly politicised along intransigently ideological lines. Long before the case is due in court, US attorney general Pam Bondi publicly directed prosecutors to demand the death penalty for a political, terrorist crime, something his supporters charge would be a state-sponsored killing in support of the ‘broken, immoral, and murderous healthcare industry that continues to terrorize the American people’, in the worlds of defence counsel.

In an Agatha Christie-type touch, three cartridge cases found near Thompson’s dead body were inscribed with the words ‘delay’, ‘depose’, ‘deny’. These turned out to be part of formulations commonly used by US insurance companies to avoid paying out on medical insurance claims, which they do in around 20 per cent of cases. 

Medical expenses are a constant worry for many Americans and a major cause of personal bankruptcy, for which profit-making insurance companies are often blamed. The largest US medical insurer is UnitedHealthcare, which also happens to be the meanest payer, reportedly refusing 30 per cent of claims – and Thompson was its well-paid CEO. (Mangione was not insured by United.) Observers tracking the twists and turns of the manhunt following the shooting quickly the relationship between the outcome of insurance claims and the company’s profitability and hence also Thompson’s pay. Protest movements sprang up and social media was soon awash with #freeluigi hashtags and anti-healthcare slogans. According to recent polls, most Americans, while not absolving the shooter from blame, believe responsibility for the killing is shared with social inequality, a healthcare system that is rigged against them, and the brutality of US capitalism in general.

In  that context, the murder, although not excusable, should only have been a surprise to anyone blind to American history.

Writing in the FT recently, Martin Wolf identified ‘the real US exceptionalism’ as its unique blend of entrepreneurial vigour and violence. Despite Trump’s complaints, the country is out on its own as an economic powerhouse, boasting not only the world’s biggest and most dynamically innovative companies, but an ever-renewing population of from-scratch unicorns that have no counterpart in the Old World. In terms of real GDP per head, meanwhile, while the US is surpassed by one or two small nations like Switzerland, it still pulling ahead of large advanced economies like Germany, the UK and France, which ought to be catching up.

Yet there is a vicious reverse to the rosy economic picture. Violence, H. Rap Brown famously pointed out in the 1960s, ‘is as American as cherry pie.’ It runs like a dark streak throughout American political history, from the slave plantations and Ku Klux Clan, to repeated political assassinations and the storming of the Capitol in 2021. And it’s there, remorselessly, in today’s statistics. A murder rate at 6.8 per 100,00 people in 2021 that was the 10th highest in the world, six times higher than that of the UK and 30 times that of Japan. The biggest prison population in the world, at 1.8m greater than China’s and four times Russia’s, and the planet’s fifth highest incarceration rate, after only El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda and Turkmenistan. Civilian gun ownership at a staggering 120 per 100 people, more than double that of Yemen, the next highest, and four times that of neighbouring Canada (which will obviously have to do better if it becomes the US’ 51st state), and, not surprisingly the second highest number of gun deaths, accounting for 16 per cent of the world’s total in 2021.

America’s lopsided expenditure on healthcare – twice as much per head as anywhere else – also has its darker side. Healthcare, hospitals and drugs are three of the top five US industries by value, and healthcare is by far the largest component of US consumer spending on services. Yet health outcomes are dire. Life expectancy is four years lower on average than in peer nations. Infant, maternal (particularly for Black mothers) and avoidable mortality rates are the highest in the G7, while Americans suffer disprortionately from chronic conditions such as obesity, diabetes, and depression. All this reflects waste, excess cost and corruption in the healthcare system, as well as deep-seated wealth and social inequalities in the economy as a whole. Which brings us back to Mangione and the cruelty of American capitalism, which, taking its clue from the President Trump, has been on full display these last few months. 

As the Nobel economist Paul Krugman pointed out on his excellent Substack, Trump takes a brutally zero-sum view of all relationships. There are only deals, and for every one there is a winner and loser. The sole arbiter is power. It behoves winners to flaunt their power and humiliate losers who can’t defend themselves, whose function is to grovel. (This is why Trump detests Zelenskyy, who in the logic of power should have rolled over for Putin, and whose failure to do so thus ‘started the war’.)

Or look at DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE represents the deliberate application of Silicon Valley’s ‘move fast and break things’ mode to the public sector. Behold Elon Musk brandishing a chainsaw and rejoicing at the prospect of chopping up jobs, livelihoods and putting whole agencies to death. But the chainsaw isn’t just symbolic. Condemning Musk for feeding the main conduit for US foreign aid, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), into his woodchipper, Bill Gates commentated: ‘The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one …I’d love for him to go in and meet the children that have now been infected with HIV because he cut that money’. 

Perhaps because wealth and power are still such a potent part of the American dream, the excesses of the corporate world haven’t so far reaped the hate and violence that has spread through other institutions such as the government, politics, the university, and social media. With the attack on Brian Thompson, another threshold has been crossed. You don’t want it to happen, but those who live by the sword may have to get used to the idea that the blade is two-edged. Looking back, it was always going to be a matter of time before it came back to bite them.

Swamped like everything else by Trump’s black tariffs farce, Tanya O’Carroll’s landmark privacy case against social media giant Meta at the end of March received little follow-up. 

Yet the London human rights worker may have just put the first serious dent in the armour of the social media platforms that have done so much to poison our politics, wreck public discourse and, although much less widely appreciated, enable online grifters and criminal organisations to make off with billions of dollars in what is quite possibly the biggest fraud the world has ever seen.

Although O’Carroll’s case was settled before it could come to court, one thing shines through: Meta has accepted that under current data protection laws it can no longer use the personal data it has collected on O’Carroll to target her with personalised advertising.

Why is this a big deal? 

Personalised advertising and the tracking that enables it – adtech’s ability to record every click we make and website we visit on the internet – are the dark heart of surveillance capitalism: the engine of a digital advertising industry that will rake in an estimated $700bn in 2025 and in a couple of years will likely pass the $1tr mark. (Online now takes two-thirds of all ad spending.) Meanwhile, the lung that supplies the oxygen to feed that dark heart is our new frenemy ‘free speech’, in the form of the fake news, conspiracy theories, alternative facts and radicalisation that flourish like weeds on the internet courtesy of the notorious Section 230 of the 1996 US Communications Decency Act, which shields website owners from responsibility for content supplied by their users by designating them as ‘intermediaries’ rather than the publishers that they really are.

Since its birth in coffee houses centuries ago, old-style print and broadcast advertising unproblematically supported generations of ‘legacy media’ – press, radio, TV. It could equally well pay for a free internet, too. But it was swept aside by the adtech-powered surveillance and targeting business model pioneered, developed and now completely owned by Google, Meta and Amazon, a dominance they have no intention of giving up.

For them, the model is a perpetual-motion cash machine. Trackers hoover up every trace of the digital exhaust we leave behind as we move around the internet, feeding the data into algorithms that ‘learn’ from it what content is most likely to keep us hooked on the site where we can be fed as many of their business customers’ ads as possible. Hey presto! Naturally, the ‘freer’ and more controversial the speech featured on their pages – the more toxic the message – the louder the cash machine rings, simultaneously delivering more juicy personal data for the algorithms to learn from and digging deeper rabbit holes for viewers to fall down. So much for ‘Don’t be evil’.

The ad industry’s bland assertion that ‘precision targeted advertising’ is ‘more effective’ is twaddle of Trumpian proportions. As every poll confirms, people hate targeted ads even more than they do other kinds. Far from making them better, tracking just makes ads creepier and more intrusive. To avoid seeing them, an estimated half of all web users have installed ad blockers on their computers, and when Apple gave them the ability to turn off tracking on their iPhones, 80 per cent of US customers thankfully did so. 

They are right to be mistrustful, even if not nearly as much as they ought to be. Not only do companies such as Oracle and Google boast databases containing as many entries as there are people on the planet, the data in them is broadcast daily all over the internet by the constant information flux that makes up the advertising process. 60 per cent of online advertising is automated or ‘programmatic’, mediated through an auction process called Real Time Bidding (RTB). But whereas in old-style advertising what’s sold is a designated space or spot in a publication or TV or radio schedule, in an RTB auction each lot is a kind of viewer, wherever they might be on the internet. RTB wouldn’t work without tracking, profiling, trading and sharing people’s data, including on race, sexuality, health status and political affiliation, on a  massive scale every day, all without consent or control. According to marketing activist Bob Hoffman, the online activity and location of the average US or European web user are broadcast to thousands of companies hundreds of times a day. Many doubt whether it is actually legal – but even if it is, at least it is now a bit less useful, thanks to O’Carroll’s case.

But the trading of personal data isn’t the limit of adtech’s horrors. Online advertising is a sink of almost unimaginable fraud and waste. It’s impossible to know exactly, but of the $700bn a year spent on web ads, it is generally agreed that around $100bn is fraudulent, making it second only to drugs as a source of criminal profit. This is largely because the mind-numbing complexity of the system makes it trivially easy for a profusion of scammers to insert themselves into the supply chain and help themselves to advertisers’ cash on the ad’s way to the intended website – or not. Many ads are never seen by a living person. Others end up on porn or other clickbait sites, or fake ones created for the purpose. The ease with which even small-time villains can create fake websites, audiences and clicks means that an estimated third of online ad spend simply vanishes into thin air. When Uber switched off two-thirds of its $150m ad budget, its suspicions of fraud were reinforced when its business levels changed not one jor. Data security firm Barracuda Networks reports that more internet traffic is produced by malicious bots than by humans.

Once the most glamorous side of capitalism, its creatives feted like rock stars, advertising is now its seediest. Surveillance marketing is just a decade old. Yet in that time, the power of adtech has turned the industry of advertising from a bit of a joke into a monster from hell that that is a potent threat to our democracy. Would Brexit or Musk or Trump have happened without Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google or TikTok? The ramifications for both individuals and nations are hair-raising. In a recent TED talk, journalist Carol Cadwalladr, who did much to uncover the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal around Brexit, notes that when she asked ChatGPT to write an article in the style of Carol Cadwalladr it turned out an ‘creepily plausible’ piece, using LLM learning from her IP and personal data, entirely without her consent or knowledge. She calls this data rape, and the tracking of children, who by the age of 13 will have dossiers containing millions of data points logged against them online, child abuse. This is the infernal machine in whose fuel line O’Carroll has just made a puncture. Small, admittedly, but growing every day as more people take advantage of campaigning organisation Ekō’s web page allowing others to follow her example and demand not to have their personal data used to serve them targeted advertising, as I just have. I urge you to do the same.

If you were told how to run your successful business by a blustering, anti-science, bullying felon who once suggested drinking bleach to cure Covid, and the extent of whose management knowledge appears to have been culled from a TV game show – oh, wait… – what would you do? 

If you’re CEO of a blue-chip US company, having marched your men to the top of the hill, you may well be hastily marching them down again, shredding your commitments to diversity (Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG, Goldman, Meta, Amazon, McDonald’s, American Airlines, Boeing, and much of Hollywood among others), combating climate change (Walmart, BP and a bunch of financial institutions) and the ‘moral crime’ of working from home (Elon Musk – Amazon, Dell, J Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Tesla and X, obviously), while taking steps to install a more muscular, masculine, even aggressively energetic workplace as you go. KMPG has gone as far as to scrub all mentions of its past DEI programmes from its websites. One (anonymous) top banker celebrated this epochal civilisational advance thus: ‘I feel liberated. We can say “retard” and “pussy” without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.”

Sucking up to Trump is the expedient choice. Yes, for companies like consultancies KMPG that depend on government contracts, it’s a money decision too. Yet they might have been better advised to pause and reflect on what it says about the company and its leaders when apparently core values can be tossed overnight as if the company, perish the thought, had never believed any such thing.

Not much that is complimentary, is the answer. The damage is both direct and indirect, affecting both customers and workers, their most important constituencies. When Meta announced its changes, which included cancelling content moderation, Facebook and Instagram users piled in with extravagantly unprintable allegations about chairman ‘Mark Suckerberg’s’ personal habits, causing panic among corporate customers that their ads might end up against a fake nude of the Meta chairman (sorry). Retailer Target, which had traditionally made a point of wooing Black customers, found itself facing demonstrators and boycotts for its retreat. The same at Tesla, where, enjoyably, investors have got in on the act, slashing 20 per cent off its share price (and $140bn of Musk’s net worth) on the news that the company’s January 2025 UK sales were 45 per cent lower than a year earlier. Some analysts suggest there may be further to fall.

These responses are the material manifestation of  a damaging loss of confidence. Indirectly, the long-term costs may be higher. How would employee morale not be affected by their employer backing away from a commitment to fairness at work? How would ambitious young job-seekers not prefer to send their CVs to consultancies that didn’t expunge basic commitments from their websites like a Soviet commissioner erasing non-persons from the photographic record? Unsurprisingly, Gallup is reporting levels of engagement that are plumbing new depths. What employees want from leaders, the pollster reports, is (in order) hope, trust, compassion and stability. Well, with compassion, stability and hope in shrinking supply, trust, which up to now had held up relatively well, takes a triple whammy. Not to defend it, but the level of contempt reserved for company bosses is well illustrated by the extraordinary public show of support for Luigi Mangione, who shot UnitedHealth chief executive Brian Thompson in January (of which more on another occasion).

Evidently even further from CEO minds is any thought of wider managerial responsibilities. They might cast their minds back to the 1930s, a similarly turbulent and threatening period in world history, as management was beginning to take cognizance of itself as a standalone discipline. Surveying the rise of authoritarianism, Peter Drucker noted the salience and importance of institutions to democratic society. As Martin Wolf put it recently in the FT, ‘Civilised societies depend on institutions. The more complex the society, the more vital those institutions. Institutions provide stability, predictability and security.’ Companies, schools, universities, courts and hospitals are all institutions. All need managing and managers, and the effective functioning of society requires that they be managed well.

From this derived Drucker’s conclusion that management held a unique and often forgotten responsibility: to hold society together by keeping the institutions and organisations that make up its weft and warp honest and effective. Absent trust that they will deliver their services – justice, education, health, information and news as well as our daily bread – fairly and efficiently, the collapse of civil society into partisanship, cronyism and authoritarianism, as eloquently described in a recent essay by Nobel economics laureate Daron Acemoglu, is all too credible. America’s collapse, he suggests, will follow Hemingway’s famous line about bankruptcy: ‘It happened gradually, as shared prosperity, high-quality public services and the operation of democratic institutions weakened, and then suddenly, as Americans stopped believing in those institutions.’

How should managers react to these highly politicized times? In one sense, that’s easy: double down on the way you would behave in more ‘normal’ times. Management’s first duty is effectiveness. Whatever politicians froth about, an increasing number of firms have learned that purpose is as necessary as profit; your purpose being what you do, it had better be something you and your employees believe in. Since the case for good jobs is unanswerable on any dimension, fairness, or equity, at work is not an option. (The business case for diversity is hard to prove; but it stands to reason that if your customers, suppliers and investors are diverse, it may be helpful if your decision-makers and salespeople are too – ask Target.) Work should be done where it is most productive, not where it gratifies the boss to exert his power for the sake of it. ‘Hardcore working’ à la Musk is idiotic and dangerous, as is multi-tasking – viz the near disaster of Doge’s teenage nihilists abolishing units responsible for Ebola tracing and prevention and nuclear security before twigging that this might cause, er, issues. As for the planet, although Musk would like it otherwise, we only have one of them to experiment with, and every business needs to do its bit to keep it habitable. No planet, no business. It’s not as if the advance signs of the current scorched-earth policy weren’t already visible. It’s not wokery that is driving insurance firms to abandon large tracts of California, or a hoax that in a decade Mar-a-Lago will be under water, however loudly its owner commands the waters recede.

So all in all, it’s time for managers to stop pretending they are just hired hands at the behest of shareholders or even worse, politicians (not me, guv!), do what they know to be the right thing, and call out those who don’t, as their employees want them to. It’s called leadership. It takes courage, and in return it gives people hope and stability, helping to shore up the institutional trust that holds society together instead of splitting it apart. It’s still not too late, just. But the clouds are gathering. ‘It’s not dark yet’, advised Bob Dylan on his album Time Out of Mind. ‘But it’s getting there.’