Simon Caulkin

WE’RE SO used to the idea of business as separate from the rest of life that the extent of family business initially comes as a surprise. But look around: Ford, Wal-Mart, Sainsbury, Cadbury, Porsche, Michelin, Cargill, Samsung, Ikea, BMW, News Internation

Not much more than a decade ago, the second of the UK’s ground-breaking reports on corporate governance was headed by a certain Sir Richard Greenbury – who happened to be M&S’s combined chairman and chief executive at the time.

AS RECENT headlines attest, placebos – sugar pills and sham operations – make people feel better. Less widely known is that they work just as well in management, where their effect is both huge and almost completely ignored.

ON TRIAL in the credit crunch is not the ‘banking system’ or the ‘international financial system’ or even the markets in which they operate. It is the fundamentalist model of management by which our institutions are governed.

Perhaps only in UK public services could ‘reform’ have come to signify something like the reverse: a grim trial of strength in which the centre imposes a new set of untried methods, often free-market-oriented, on reluctant consumers and providers in an at

WE LIVE IN strange times. In the private sector, market rules are so degraded that it has become the role of companies in the real economy, some built up over decades, to act as chips tossed around by high rollers in the City supercasino. Meanwhile, the p

IN HIS witty column last week, my colleague William Keegan recalled Gladstone’s description of finance as ‘the stomach of the country, from which all the other organs take their tone’.

FOR SUCH an important announcement, the launch of the government’s ‘world-class apprenticeships’ scheme has evoked a curiously muted response.

THE POLICEMAN’S lot is not a happy one. The force exhibits in extreme form the organisational stupidity that successive governments, particularly this one, have visited on all public services by imposing designs and procedures that make it impossible for

What gets measured gets managed – so be sure you have the right measures, because the wrong ones kill.