IT’S ALL very well going green, but some companies seem keener about that than they are about their employees.
Why our love for M&S will make other stores green
MARKS & SPENCER’S return from the corporate valley of the shadow of death – even ultra-cautious chief executive Stuart Rose has said the ‘r’ word, conceding that the company has moved from the emergency to the recovery ward – is cheering and instructive i
In the drive to save the NHS, I’m choosing a Toyota
TWO RECIPES for fixing the NHS were on offer in the media last week. The one that garnered the headlines – Sir Gerry Robinson’s televised attempt to galvanise Rotherham General Hospital – demonstrated that leadership and common sense are sensible and important. But it came suspiciously close to business reality TV, and Robinson’s idea that […]
Tying a firm up in a budget straitjacket is madness
The budget is a management weapon of mass destruction, according to a new report.
Things can get better (and you can do it on the cheap)
Instead of saving pennies by shaving routine expenditure and delaying payments to suppliers, why not resolve to do things better – not just a bit better, but orders of magnitude better so much better, in fact, that they become cheaper?
Galileo’s life shows there’s always room for doubt
BY A STREET, this column’s business text of the year is Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo.
How Michelin put the bounce back into its rubber farms
SUSTAINABILITY, like social responsibility, is a much-abused term, often more about public relations than substance. But Michelin’s Brazilian Ouro Verde (‘green gold’) project shows that that doesn’t have to be the case.
If only their firms grew as fast as their pay packets
HEADLINES ABOUT soaring directors’ pay have become so regular that we are suffering what might be called fat-cat fatigue. Even so, the news in the 2006 Directors’ Pay Report from Incomes Data Services that average total pay for chief executives of FTSE 100 companies shot up by more than 40 per cent this year should […]
Friedman’s unethical rot made wrongs into a right
SUMMING UP his own achievement, Milton Friedman, the celebrated Chicago economist who died last month, wrote: ‘Judged by practice, we have been, despite some successes, mostly on the losing side. Judged by ideas, we have been on the winning side.’
Innovation’s back, but does that change anything?
INNOVATION GOT a bad name in the dotcom years, being more about finding new ways of parting unwary investors from their money than customers.