HAPPINESS HARDLY seems at the top of the management agenda when the financial world is falling apart. But, as participants at a seminar on “Recession: health and happiness”, organised by the Economic and Social Research Council, heard last week, it probab
However good the pay, it doesn’t buy results
IT’S A LAW of management that more is less – and if it’s complicated it’s wrong. On both these scores, nothing embodies management’s current ruinous disarray better than the knots companies are getting themselves into over pay.
Inside every chief exec, there’s a Soviet planner
THE MOST REMARKABLE thing on show at last week’s banking hearings was the capitalists’ naivety about capitalism – a gullibility that has endangered both of the economy’s major institutions, markets and companies.
We can’t afford to give bosses a blank cheque
SOMETHING approaching panic is stirring the rarefied atmosphere of Planet CEO. Last week, President Obama did the unthinkable, in effect imposing a maximum wage ($500,000) on top executives of firms that receive “extraordinary help” from the US government
We must decide to keep the red flag flying here
WHAT WAS Sir Fred Goodwin thinking when he committed Royal Bank of Scotland to the fateful pounds 48bn takeover of ABN Amro? And the bankers who piled into sub-prime CDOs and 100%-plus mortgages?
Darwin’s theory turned bosses into dinosaurs
THERE’S A case for saying that the credit crunch is all down to Charles Darwin.
It’s got so horrible that we ought to be revolting
IN RETROSPECT, one of the most remarkable things about the events of 2008 is that there weren’t any.
Corporate apocalypse
Since the 1980s, dealmakers earned fees pushing firms into dodgy takeovers and spurious share buybacks. Self-interested managers abandoned long-term goals to collect rewards as share prices rose. Now that the bomb has gone off, business leaders must find
Be efficient, please customers, cut costs… that’s it
By taking care of customers you serve the company’s financial goals, while the reverse is not the case. Of course, we’ve really sensed this all along – we’ve just forgotten it in the Gadarene rush to get rich quick
A senseless system graduates without honours
THE 2008 university Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), whose results have been announced with a mixture of fear, loathing and exhaustion, is a classic example of the self-defeating performance-management drive that is overwhelming the public sector.