Simon Caulkin

Lynda Gratton’s new book, Glow: How You Can Radiate Energy, Innovation and Success , was written before the crunch, but many will find its subject – self-help in a globalised and corporate world – perfectly suited for the times.

WILL ROYAL MAIL be New Labour’s political and managerial watershed? There could hardly be a clearer test case of what, if anything, 12 years of bruising encounters with public-sector reform have taught it.

SIGH. Another grand efficiency wheeze that should have been strangled at birth.

IN AESOP’S fable of the boy who cried wolf, the sting in the tail is that when the wolf actually appears, the young shepherd has lied so many times that no one comes to his aid even when the wolf is devouring the flock (and, in some versions, the boy hims

JOHN LOCKE defined a madman as someone “reasoning correctly from erroneous premises”. For Einstein, madness was repeatedly doing the same thing and hoping for a different result. The worst of modern management – and alas, that often seems most of it – man

AS THE DUST clears after the collapse of the old financial order, mixed with fear and loathing is a palpable sense of release.

THE CREDIT crunch confronts the corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement with its biggest crisis. Over two decades, the idea that companies should voluntarily “put something back” has acquired impressive support from the great and the good.

READING THE opinion and letters pages of the Financial Times these days gives a curious sensation of seeing cogs and gears that have not moved for 30 years creaking into motion.

Put abstractly, targets distort judgment, disenfranchise professionals and wreck morale. Put concretely, in services where lives are at stake – as in the NHS or child protection – targets kill.

Banks, financial services