Tabla de contenidos para September/October 2016 en Management Today

TalkTalk has been a tough business to run over the last few years. A valuepriced upstart contender taking on the mighty behemoths of BT and Sky, it was the regular whipping boy of indignant consumer radio programmes bemoaning its customer service, and then last year suffered every CEO’s worst nightmare: a widely publicised cyberattack. ‘You really feel like you are living in an episode of Spooks,’ says Dido Harding, TalkTalk’s boss and our profile this month. You’d expect Harding to be a doughty survivor. The granddaughter of the commander of the Desert Rats in the Second World War did seven years under Terry Leahy at Tesco when in its pomp, and piloted her racehorse around the jumps at Cheltenham. It’ll be interesting to see which challenge she takes on next.…

You must be absolutely sure in your own mind that this new job is one you really want GET MORE CAREER ADVICE at managementtoday.co.uk/your-career  Q Our CEO is due to step down in the next 12 months; both he and the chairman have made it clear that I’m one of the frontrunners to replace him. Meanwhile, I’ve just been offered the top spot at a rival firm. I’d prefer to stay where I am but there are no guarantees I’ll get the CEO gig. Would I be a fool to turn down this new offer?  A It may be that your existing company is under some form of constitutional requirement to interview external candidates for certain jobs – and that of CEO would undoubtedly be one of them. If so,…

“What of the future? For Levi’s, it doesn’t look quite so bright at the moment. Peak Levi’s is long gone and showing little sign of coming back ❞ Earlier this year a brown leather ‘Cossack’ jacket by Levi Strauss & Co came up for auction at Christie’s in London. Described in the catalogue as ‘an incredibly worn, rather pungent jacket that seems to capture the owner’s mood as he embarks on a new life in the US’, it had been owned by Albert Einstein who lived – and smoked his pipe – in the garment for years. Having sold it to the genius of relativity back in 1935, Levi’s themselves reclaimed the jacket for a cool £110,500. A colleague of Einstein’s at Princeton, Leopold Infeld, explained the physicist’s pragmatic dress…

THE EURO • FORMAN’S GAMES • DISRUPTED CAN THE EUROZONE BE KEPT ALIVE? Stiglitz blames the single currency for the continent’s financial ills, but also offers some bold remedies to save the euro experiment, says Jeremy Cook The Euro: And its Threat to the Future of Europe Joseph E Stiglitz Allen Lane, £20 Reading a book on Europe and its economic issues in a post-Brexit world was certainly an interesting experiment in cognitive dissonance. One cannot really overstate the trauma that Europe has felt since the advent of the global financial crisis, for while it may have started in the US mortgage market and spread around the world on a wave of panic, it is the Eurozone that has been at the epicentre of economic pain. While the initial skirmishes…

Never mind all the talk of pure electric vehicles like pricey Teslas or the Nissan LEAF. The real-world fleet car of 2020 will be the petrol mild hybrid, and it will use internet-enabled ‘swarm intelligence’ to optimise everything from fuel consumption and traffic information to route planning and road safety. It may sound like a cigar from the 1970s but the petrol mild hybrid is the car industry’s mass-market response to the more esoteric full-on EVs and the much hyped arrival of semi-autonomous vehicles. Much cheaper and simpler than a full-on hybrid, more practical than a full-on BEV and considerably less polluting than the under-pressure diesel engine, the petrol mild hybrid will most likely be the repmobile of choice before very long. National and local governments are now in agreement:…

The Brits just cannot get enough of what used a decade ago to be called Chelsea Tractors and have stickers penned by eco-protesters plastered all over them. People love their versatility and perceived increased safety. SUVs are the Brits’ little castle. This year we have had new high-end glam models in the form of the Maserati Levante, the outrageous Bentley Bentayga (an onshore equivalent of Philip Green’s yacht Lionheart) and the Jaguar F-PACE. The VW Tiguan is a more modest, entry-level method of getting yourself up into the air and further away from the tarmac. It is aimed squarely at would-be buyers of the likes of the BMW X1 and X3, punters who fancy something a bit more upmarket than the Nissan Qashqai. The name came after a people’s vote…

 Say the word Basel to a banker these days and s/he will go pale. The dreaded Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, housed at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), is cooking up some new and even tougher rules on bank capital, known in the trade as Basel 4, which could be very costly to meet. The regulators do not seem to understand just how hard it is to raise equity for a bank these days. So I thought a trip was in order. It was a curious accident of history that put the world’s banking supervisors in Basel. The BIS was set up to manage the investment of German reparations after the First World War. Basel was chosen as the location, in large part because it sits at the centre…

THE MT INTERVIEW By ANDREW SAUNDERS Like the competitive landscape in which her business operates, the view out of Dido Harding’s glass-walled west London office is dominated by a looming presence. ‘Know your enemy,’ says the TalkTalk CEO, glancing at the jutting obelisk of the BT Tower a couple of miles away, the tallest building on the otherwise low-rise horizon, looking east from the unlovely Shepherd’s Bush/Ladbroke Grove borders towards the centre of town. The symbolism is almost too good to be true – BT is the incumbent dragon at which scrappy upstart telco TalkTalk tilts its lance, vigorously and often. To others the vista might grate, but like the Second World War general she says she wanted to be when she was a kid, Harding likes nothing more than…