Simon Caulkin

Anyone watching Jamie’s School Dinners or Sir Alan Sugar’s The Apprentice these past few weeks has been taking part in a masterclass in contrasting business attitudes and management styles.

Conformance to the letter of the law now takes precedence over all other considerations – with the very real danger that corporate governance ‘improvements’ are starting to have the opposite effect to the one intended.

The challenge for companies is to stop playing at CSR (their own agenda) and focus their efforts on meeting the wants of their most demanding customers – the world’s poor.

Public service and business are different,insists Lord Browne. To take business techniques into the public sector lock, stock and barrel can be damaging and dangerous.

Do the maths: most mergers do not make sense

The clergy, like other businesses, will now be subject to performance reviews

I S THE National Programme for IT in the National Health Service, the largest civil IT initiative in the world, a bold and innovative move that will push both the NHS and the British IT industry to the forefront of healthcare technology and practice? Or i

How down-to-earth principles helped transform a typical council service, assessing and paying housing benefit, from the worst in the country to one of the best in the space of a few months, with no extra resources and never a CRM system, shared service or

Most companies are badly run not because there’s too little management but because there’s too much.

The poor don’t need charity. They need markets that work