Simon Caulkin

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

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

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.

WHEN THE only response to repeated failure is a call to try harder and do better, you know there’s something badly awry with the premise. Einstein was right: insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results

AS THEIR finances go into meltdown, companies are scrambling to cut costs across the board – in every place but the right one.

IF YOU THOUGHT you felt the earth shudder on 23 October, you were right. When Alan Greenspan told the House Oversight Committee ‘I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they wer

ALONG WITH the election of a black President and the end of 30 years of Reaganomics, here’s another thing to celebrate this week: the 10th anniversary of Divine Chocolate.

JOHN CLOUGH smiles wryly at the news that the number of fuel-poor has just increased by a third to 3.5 million. As chief executive of Eaga, a green services company whose job is to help people out of fuel poverty, he can’t ignore the prospect of a few hundred thousand more homes to insulate and […]

In most companies, turning down the founder and chief executive’s request to look after a pet project would be a career-stopper for a young engineer on her first assignment. But WL Gore and Associates is not most companies.

IT’S NOT just in finance that the inquests have begun. What part have the business schools and business academics played in the implosion of the world’s banking system?