Simon Caulkin

Today, a person’s first commercial relationship is likely to be with a mobile-phone company, and for a third or more of customers it will last less than a year.

It is often argued that succession planning is, or should be, one of the most important roles that boards undertake. Yet despite the lip service, most large firms have either unsatisfactory succession plans or none at all, according to US research.

Jeff Pfeffer and Robert Sutton’s new book is a compelling tour and why it so often turns out to be unwise, untrue and untrustworthy – bollocks, in fact.

The cruel spiral of poverty that traps producers from poor countries is at last being conquered

AS THE CBI trawls for a new name to succeed Sir Digby Jones as director-general, it’s worth pondering the question: what is the organisation for ? The obvious answer is to represent its 240,000 members. But its claim to be ‘the voice of business’ is problematic. Whose voice, exactly? CBI members are so diverse, covering […]

Whatever happened to joined-up government? It’s not so surprising that there’s so little of it about, since the government’s management methods make joined-up anythignimpossible

Business doesn’t have to be like TV’s caricatural The Aprentice, and nor does reality TV.

Can ‘social entrepreneurship’ really be the white hope for British health, bringing water to Third World slums and alleviating world poverty?

Is Sven a great manager, an OK one, or, to use a technical footballing term, a turnip? Is he really worth pounds 4.2m a year? Or one tenth or even one hundredth of that?

Dutch writer Joep Schrijvers’ world is The Office rewritten by Leonard Cohen – an annoying but addictive mixture of black humour and clammy pessimism that can’t be removed from the mind.