Tabla de contenidos para November 2016 en Management Today

At MT we’ve known John Vincent and his business Leon almost since it started on Carnaby Street in 2004. Answering the question, ‘What if God did fast food?’ it was an instant success, winning The Observer’s Best New Restaurant in the UK within six months of griddling and wrapping its first heavenly chicken with shallot and rosemary salsa verde. However, despite its popularity, which created many imitators, growth in its first decade was steady rather than turbocharged. Vincent and his co-founder Henry Dimbleby took time out to do other things including the admirable campaign to improve the quality of school lunches and guarantee a free school meal for infants. (This was backed by one Michael Gove, currently residing in the outer darkness.) Matthew Gwyther MT Editor Now running the show…

BONUSES BOOST BUSINESS Many years ago, I was FD of a software company. It was budget time, and I ran into the head of sales and marketing. ‘What’s your UK sales forecast for next year, Steve?’ I asked him. ‘£2.3m,’ he said. ‘But we’re working on getting it down to £2.1m.’ Why would the head of sales and marketing be looking for reasons to sell less? Surely his job was to sell more? But he knew that his bonus plan would be based on exceeding budgeted sales, so the lower the budget the more likely he was to get his bonus. This problem bedevils all targetsetting. It would be good to get the concerned parties together for an honest discussion of the business’s potential, but what are the chances of…

PRE_SUASION ? MY STORY ???SIMPLY BRILLIANT Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade Robert Cialdini Simon & Schuster, £18.99 BOOKS __Any time I hear anyone mentioning infl uencing skills or persuasion, it seems to be followed by the name Cialdini. It’s been many years since I read Infl uence (his notorious bestseller). I’ve since been teaching it to students, used it in my talks, and based a lot of my research around it. Cialdini is no doubt the godfather of persuasion, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Pre-Suasion causes another revolution in the infl uence arena. Having said that, I think it is more like Godfather 3: a ‘must-see’ (read), but not quite as good as the fi rst (or second). This book demonstrates how trivial and seemingly irrelevant…

THE MT INTERVIEW BY ANDREW DAVIDSON I approach in peace, which is a sensible starting point as John Vincent has barely sat down before he’s standing up and offering me a demonstration of his martial arts. ‘I’m learning Wing Tsun, which is a martial art first developed by women.’ It involves: ‘staying relaxed, recognising that most conflict is created by your own ego, never attacking but always hitting first…’ He is a big man. Hold on, hitting first? ‘Only if someone has begun to attack. I really wish I could show you,’ he smiles. ‘Come on, try and put me in an arm lock.’ Please don’t hurt my right hand. ‘Why, have you injured it?’ No, I write with it. That’s why I’m here. For all the world, it looks…

Nia Morris was a hotshot finance lawyer. She joined Linklaters as a trainee, spent six years working as a solicitor and, at the age of 31, became one of the firm’s youngest partners. Four years later, she was snapped up by American law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges and helped to set up its London office. To all appearances, she was thriving. But she had a gnawing feeling that she was in the wrong profession. ‘I kept thinking, “I should be doing something different,”’ she says. ‘I had a constant yearning to do something more creative. I’d open the papers and immediately turn to the art and fashion pages when I should have been reading the finance section.’ Morris’s third child Millie came along in 1997; she was born with…

LIVE & LEARN • WORDS-WORTH • CRASH COURSE •COMPANY VITAE •WORK PLACE RIGHTS •HOW I BEAT THE ODDS • BUSINESS BIG BRAINS • TAKE FIVE •EVERYTHING YOU KNOW… ROGER WHITESIDE CEO OF GREGGS & FORMER HEAD OF FOOD AT M&S I had the idyllic childhood. My dad was in the Forces, so I grew up running around protected camps in Germany, making dens in the woods. It was like living in Center Parcs for 11 years. I studied economics at Leeds, but in today’s world I probably wouldn’t have gone. There’s a broadening element to university, but other than as a general education my degree has been of no direct relevance, and coming from a working-class background, I’d have had to fund it somehow. When I first joined M&S, it…

Body art has become much more common, particularly among young adults, with one in five of the UK population now estimated to be tattooed. What implications does this have for the workplace? While some employers may embrace such lifestyle choices, others will decide visible tattoos and body piercings detract from projecting a smart, professional image – particularly for customer-facing roles. The law generally supports employers in imposing appearance codes reflecting their business ethos. Discrimination against employees and job applicants on grounds of having tattoos or piercings is not covered by equality legislation. The sheer number of younger people with tattoos is likely to relax attitudes over time. We may see a move towards allowing employees to show smaller, discreet designs. Most employers would still want to outlaw certain types of…

I have always rather liked blue channels, especially late at night after a long day. I refer, it goes without saying, to the EU-only routes out of baggage reclaim at Heathrow. Quite what the significant difference is between the blue and the green, nothing to declare, channels is, when both are normally unpersonned, I could not say. But the blue channels have always seemed to me to be costless little tokens of friendship to our Eurochums, in a country where the blue flag with 12 gold stars has never taken root. So before they are removed, in favour of tunnels of death between rotating knives, I went on an Indian summer tour of European capitals. For the time being, you still don’t need visas, but if the pound continues on…

My Story Jo Malone Simon & Schuster, £20 _I heard Jo Malone speak at a business event back in September 2013, eight months after launching my own brand, Aurelia Probiotic Skincare. Inspired by her words, I hung around afterwards, anxious to give her a selection of my products. However the enormous queue and chronic morning sickness conspired against me; I just about managed to thrust a bag of samples into the hands of her husband Gary. I never actually got to meet Malone so I was thrilled when her new book landed on my desk. I love reading memoirs and relish the uninterrupted insight into another person’s mind. My Story opens with a quote by French author and Nobel Prize for Literature winner André Gide: ‘Man cannot discover new oceans…

What’s so special about manufacturing? Hardly a month goes by without calls from one quarter or another to rebalance the UK economy away from services and back to the ‘good old days’ of the 1970s when manufacturers accounted for over 25% of UK GDP. Britain was the ‘workshop of the world’ and prosperity poured forth in the shape of export-earning artefacts – everything from ships to steel girders, cars to chemicals – from busy factories up and down the country. Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that we live in an increasingly friction-free virtual world where the smartphone rather than the white-hot crucible is now the starting point for growth, it’s become axiomatic for many that making more stuff is the miracle cure for the UK’s economic ills. When…

David Ellis was on holiday in 2010 when his wife spotted an ad in the paper for the chief executive role at Harlequins rugby club. Ellis was working in social housing at the time. He had no experience of running a sports club but he was a massive rugby fan; he started playing at the age of six and had been a Harlequins supporter from the age of 17. This job was an opportunity he couldn’t ignore. ‘My wife showed me the ad and said I should throw my hat in the ring,’ he says. ‘I knew I’d regret it if I didn’t give it a shot.’ This was to be Ellis’s second career ‘pivot’. After graduating in theology from Durham University, Ellis spent a decade working in commercial roles…

MOTOR MOUTH Skoda Superb Estate You may not have a burning desire for this car, but it’s sensible, spacious and award-winning, says Matthew Gwyther Remarkable to think that it is now 25 years since Volkswagen took over the former Czechoslovakian Communist state enterprise that was Skoda. (It’s actually the third oldest car manufacturer in the world predating the heirs of Lenin, harking back to 1895.) Now a proud part of the European capitalist West facing off against Putin, Skoda’s rebranding exercise is complete: nobody under the age of 40 associates the carmaker with old-school gags that indicate shoddy quality. Skoda now plays a well-defined and profitable part in the VW brand line-up as the value choice. If you are going to call a car a Superb it had better not…

Former chair of Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist of the World Bank, Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz has made a glittering career of being his profession’s most highly qualified poacher-turned-gamekeeper. His penchant for kicking the establishment has seen him named as one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in The World, and it dates back at least as far as his 2002 book Globalization and its Discontents. This cast a (rare at the time) critical eye over some of the less-desirable consequences of globalisation and has sold over two million copies. Neither it nor the many bestselling works that have followed might have been written were it not for his untimely departure from the World Bank, precipitated by a characteristic refusal to toe the corporate…

WHAT’S YOUR PROBLEM? Q My wife is the breadwinner in our family and works long and hard. She leaves for the office at 7am (I drop the kids off at school), she’s attached to her laptop in the evenings and she travels a lot. While I try to be supportive, I’m starting to feel resentful. My career is suffering and the children barely see her. Any advice? A Unless you’re utterly devoid of sensitivity, you must surely recognise that your letter would be read with howls of joyous recognition by thousands of women throughout the country: ‘So now you know what it feels like!’ If you’re hoping for sympathy from them, you should look elsewhere. But you do, I think, deserve some sympathy – not least because, for far too…

Simply Brilliant: How Great Organizations Do Ordinary Things in Extraordinary Ways William C Taylor Portfolio Penguin, £14.99 Business literature usually holds up the supercreative, super-growth tech fi rms of Silicon Valley as examples of best practice, where plucky young entrepreneurs dream up radical new business models and where employees nap, do their laundry and get a massage without leaving the comfort of their offi ce. It’s obsessed with the ‘new economy’ – the Googles, the Amazons and the Apples. Not so in Simply Brilliant, the latest book from Fast Company founder William C Taylor. It draws insights from lesser-known but highly successful organisations, from the Indian Health Service in Anchorage, Alaska, to Lincoln Electric in Ohio, a globally successful producer of welding equipment founded in 1895. Taylor spent long days…

_I t’s Sunday afternoon. You start to feel anxious and the knot in the pit of your stomach tightens every time you think about work. By the evening, a mini-depression has set in. Your 48 hours of freedom are coming to an end; tomorrow morning you’ll have to trudge back into the office, to a job that makes you miserable. You’re not the only one stuck in career paralysis. Britain is home to millions of discontented workers. According to research by the London School of Business and Finance, 47% of the UK’s workforce want to switch careers, with around a quarter saying they regret entering their current profession. Despite this disillusionment, changing careers – or ‘pivoting’ – isn’t easy. Walking away from a robust salary and an established routine into…

It was the 7/7 bombings in London that prompted Sarah Wood to quit her job. After picking up a PhD at UCL, Wood had spent a year teaching American Studies at Sussex University. She loved the role – but she hated the commute. ‘I lived in Hackney and would spend three days a week lecturing in Sussex. Leaving the kids every week broke my heart.’ Then, in the summer of 2005, London was hit by the worst single terrorist attack on British soil. Wood was on the tube on her way to the British Library in King’s Cross, and just a few stops away from the explosions. ‘I was running late so it was a near miss. There were 52 people who didn’t go home that day. Moments like that…

THE IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED AWARD JOINT WINNER DUBSMASH Only a week after its launch in November 2014, Dubsmash was number one on the Apple Store in its native Germany. By August 2015, it was top of the charts in 78 more. As of this year, it has been downloaded more than 100 million times across 193 countries, raised $5.5m from Index Ventures and counts superstar celebs including Jennifer Lopez, Hugh Jackman and Arnold Schwarzenegger among its users. Who would have thought that recording yourself lip-synching to pop videos and then sharing the results with your friends would prove so popular? However like most success stories that seem to come out of nowhere, the reality was rather different. Its three founders burned through many months and numerous half-baked…