Tabla de contenidos para April/May 2017 en Management Today

Matthew Gwyther MT Editor Prisons are pretty grim places at the best of times and those in the UK are currently enduring the worst of times. A short spell actually spent inside, even if only as a visitor, is usually enough to revise the opinions of the most enthusiastic members of the ‘hang ’em and flog ’em’ brigade. Our jails are currently filled to bursting and rife with violence and drug-taking. And, with 48% of individuals imprisoned reoffending within a year of release, they can hardly be said to be fulfilling one of the critical roles for which they exist in the first place. Prisons have always interested me and I’ve visited about 10 including a mother and baby unit at Styal, which housed drug ‘mules’. (The Stansted Airport transparent…

Is the Swedish streaming star a saint or sinner? You decide Formative years Stockholm, 2006, and disillusioned former dotcommers Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon decide to save the music business from annihilation by iPod (remember those?). MP3 piracy had driven the industry to the brink, but the pair reckoned music fans were not crooks at heart and would do the right thing, if that thing was also better and more convenient. Thus was streaming service Spotify born. Only one snag – their ‘freemium’ online music library, with millions of songs funded by advertising and subscriptions, relied on persuading the big labels to give away the stuff that punters had traditionally paid them for. Not easy, but as Ek himself noted of the time, ‘The industry was in the shitter. What…

Q I get the distinct impression that I’m being managed out of my job. My boss has started setting me ridiculous targets, which are impossible to meet, and he’s being offish with me. What can I do about it? Should I stick it out or make a run for it? A There are certain individuals, luckily not that many, who develop irrational and groundless aversions for other human beings. And when the aversion is held by a senior person, there’s nothing that the luckless object of that aversion can do about it. Attempting to counter such irrationality with an appeal to reason is doomed to failure. The danger for you is this. Although you know with an absolute certainty that the targets your boss is setting you are objectively impossible…

The New Koreans: The Business, History and People of South Korea Michael Breen Rider Books, £14.99 Can any country have come so far so fast? Sixty years ago, South Koreans had the same income as the Sudanese. Poverty was worse than in India and Pakistan. Until the 60s, peasants boiled grass and bark to fend off starvation. The greeting of the time was, ‘Have you eaten rice today?’ The phrase is still occasionally used, but from habit not need. Five decades of continuous annual growth of 5% have turned the bullock-cart economy of South Korea into a prosperous industrialised nation. The swish Seoul metro makes the London Underground seem like a clanking, dirty throwback to a dark age. Gangnam in Seoul reminds you of Manhattan in the opulence of its…

Managers Not MBAs Henry Mintzberg Berrett-Koehler, 2005 No one has done more to remove the bogus mystique surrounding self-styled elite business school graduates than Henry Mintzberg. His long-established, strongly held views are based on observation and critical intelligence. You can learn a lot of useful stuff at business school, of course – but you don’t learn how to be a manager, which is a practical skill best studied in the context of real-ife situations. This is the thrust of his 2005 publication Managers not MBAs, which drew together the lessons of his academic research with his experience of teaching and working with managers over the course of several decades. ‘Considered as education for management, conventional MBA programmes train the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences,’ Mintzberg…

McDonald’s – the original food industry disruptor – recently received the ultimate US accolade: a Hollywood film about its history. The Founder – starring Michael Keaton as the hard-driving, erstwhile paper cup salesman Ray Kroc – didn’t do big box office and met with mixed reviews. Using Kroc’s no nonsense autobiography Grinding It Out as source material, the movie finishes with Kroc in 1970 doing up his bow tie while practising a speech to be delivered in front of the then California governor, Ronald Reagan. ‘Nothing in the world can take the place of good old persistence,’ Kroc insists. ’Talent won’t. Nothing’s more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius won’t; unrecognised genius is practically a cliché. Education won’t; the world is full of educated fools. Persistence and determination alone…

_Few would chose to spend a day out at HMP Rye Hill, despite its bucolic location in open country close to the Oxford canal, south of Rugby. The category B prison isn’t dramatically daunting in the way Dartmoor or Alcatraz are. Bland and low rise, it was built in 2001 and could pass for a low-cost, minor university campus if it weren’t for the tall fences and miles of curled barbed wire. Nobody has escaped from Rye Hill since 2002 when a pair doing 10 years each made off hidden in the back of a delivery lorry. But that is about as close to Porridge as Rye Hill gets. Since 2014, Rye Hill has exclusively housed sex offenders and there are currently 664 inmates (its operational capacity is 625). The…

It would be nice to imagine our career moves as stepping stones in a long, satisfying and coherent arc. Chapters, if you like, in a career narrative. Except often we find ourselves stuck in a role that feels more like an interval – a break between acts that may not even be related. If this is you, welcome to the unhappy world of career drift. Career drift isn’t always unpleasant. It can be nice to enjoy the work you’re doing without fretting overly about the bigger picture (hello mindfulness). But left too long, it becomes unsettling. You feel dissatisfied or bored. You look around at colleagues who seem to have a plan and wonder what yours is. And drift can feel particularly dissonant in this ‘age of accelerations’ as The…

ROONEY ANAND CEO OF GREENE KING I was a deep disappointment to my parents because I didn’t want to be a doctor like them. I’m still squeamish. Studying construction probably wasn’t the smartest decision, but it did allow me to run £20m building sites at 19. Being a graduate in that industry was quite tough. Being an Asian graduate was… character building. My parents had to struggle a bit more because of race, but it wasn’t an issue when I was coming through. You want people from different backgrounds for a richer company culture, but too often the debate about diversity is dominated by conversations about gender. The discussion should be framed around merit and opportunity. After doing an MBA, I joined the marketing department of United Biscuits, then went…

The government wants to boost productivity by increasing the quantity and quality of apprenticeships. It aims to create three million of them by 2020, funded largely by a new apprenticeship levy that started to apply in April. Employers with a wage bill of more than £3m have to pay an annual levy of 0.5%, which operates effectively as a tax with the organisation paying and reporting it to HM Revenue & Customs on a monthly basis. The levy will go into a central fund, which employers can then seek to access for use on apprenticeship training and assessment via an online portal. Businesses within scope of the levy should budget for the additional cost and urgently liaise with their payroll department or provider about the practicalities of complying. They should…

The key selling point of many a new product or service is price. But as a customer the first question we should ask is not ‘How much does it cost?’ but rather ‘What does it do?’. Take all those online operators that want to disrupt the estate agency business. They’ll sell your property for a very modest fixed fee, saving you the grief and expense of dealing with those greedy sharks, traditional estate agents. But if you are selling a property, don’t you want some greedy sharks acting on your behalf? Someone who spends all day, every day selling properties, something you only do a few times in your life? The greedy sharks might get a better price, and more than pay for their higher commission. Another example: Someone I…

WILD RIDE ? THE NEW KOREANS ? THE VIRGIN BANKER Wild Ride: Inside Uber’s Quest for World Domination Adam Lashinsky_ Portfolio Penguin, £14.99 __The problem with writing a book about something as topical and newsworthy as Uber is that it can get out of date awfully fast – in this case, before publication. Not long after the text was put to bed, an ugly video of CEO Travis Kalanick berating one of his drivers went viral, and one of his top henchmen quit over the company’s values, both of which moved the reputational needle sharply south. In the week I was reading the book, Uber was booted out of Denmark, the FT graphically highlighted the unenviable lot of their drivers in India, suggestions emerged that David Cameron exercised improper influence…

JOHN TIMPSON Keys to Success Icon Books, £12.99 What exactly is Upside Down Management? It’s the way we run our business, started because the only way to give great service is to trust colleagues to look after each customer in the way they feel is best. So we only have two rules: 1. Look the part. 2. Put the money in the till. We got our first bonus from Upside Down Management in 1996, when I visited our Timpson shop in West Bromwich and discovered Glenn the manager was taking in a few watch repairs. He apologised, but I certainly didn’t mind when he told me his watch repair sales were over £100 a week. It triggered our watch repair service, which Glenn has played a key role in developing…

H e’s the boss of one of the world’s most successful chip design businesses and the closest thing to an Apple, Microsoft or Oracle that the UK tech scene has managed to produce, but Simon Segars is not one for public display. Despite the fact that he’s just enjoyed a hefty £11m windfall as a result of the controversial £24.3bn sale of ARM to Japan’s SoftBank last summer, there’s no limo, no entourage and definitely no corner office. In fact if it weren’t for his name on it, the door to the ARM chief exec’s personal cubbyhole could be mistaken for the broom cupboard. Compact, windowless and decidedly nofrills, the flat-pack look furniture and institutional carpet make a striking contrast with the plush lair of MT’s last interviewee, Google’s Matt…

At 60mph the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.’ David Ogilvy’s legendary advertising copy line is now 60 years old and it remains true today. On the outside lane of the motorway, the driver can whisper to passengers in the back. Other things have changed: the price of the Silver Cloud in 1957 was £5,078. The Wraith Black Badge tested here comes in at a buttock-clenching £267,180 plus VAT. (You could buy quite a nice BMW – Rolls’ owner – just with the sales tax.) The photo accompanying the 50s ad shows a woman – it was marketed, in the US at least, as a family vehicle. Now Rolls-Royces go to male oligarchs, many of whom never get behind the wheel but watch their chauffeur’s…

In the last few years, there has been a growing trend for HR professionals to rebrand themselves to make their jobs sound cooler. From Google’s people analytics VP to Heroku’s vibe manager and Zappos’ chief happiness officer, there is no shortage of glamorous labels to describe what was once regarded as a pretty boring and uninspiring job. Yet these labels are in stark contrast with the bleak reality experienced by most employees: abusive managers, narcissistic leaders, stressful and meaningless jobs, and no real prospect of advancing their careers. If, as global engagement and passive job-seeking figures suggest, fewer than 30% of employees are happy at work, is it not more appropriate for organisations to hire chief misery officers (CMOs)? Consider some of the duties for that position: Eliminating happy outliers…

When spring is in the air, a young man’s (well, let’s stretch a point for effect) thoughts turn to cricket. To get a jump on our regular opposition, Barnes Common CC took all roads to Rome for a pre-season warm-up weekend. We were not optimistic about our chances in the first fixture, against the official Vatican team, known inevitably as St Peter’s XI. Armed with the Pope’s personal patronage they have a well-earned reputation for infallibility, and indeed had not lost at home for five years, until they came up against our ecumenical combination of a Muslim/Hindu bowling attack, evangelical Aussie bats and some godless Brits. The game took place in a racecourse, with funny little chariots trotting round the boundary. The sun shone and with the addition of some…

Sapiens Yuval Noah Harari Harvill Secker, 2014 This might seem a strange business read, but the lessons are clear. It’s the ability to contemplate things that never existed – gods, countries, money -- that according to Harari resulted in homo sapiens outsmarting all other types of humans. That’s where the leadership lessons come in, because groups – if they are to move towards a common goal – have to believe in the same thing. And the great sapiens can all tell stories. Who Moved My Cheese? Dr Spencer Johnson Vermillion, 1999 A classic of its kind, small and easily digested, I still love this book having read it more years ago than I choose to recall. It examines the scary, necessary, unavoidable part of life that is change. This simple…

The Virgin Banker: My Life in Finance Jayne-Anne Gadhia Virgin Books, £20 This book is Jayne-Anne Gadhia’s journey from being the tall, awkward bullied schoolgirl in East Anglia, via Norwich Union and RBS, to heading up challenger bank Virgin Money and listing it on the London Stock Exchange. At the start, Gadhia sets out the three lessons she has learned: never give up; you need true supporters to succeed; and be yourself. I know, we’ve all heard these phrases a million times. But as the book progresses, Gadhia gives them colour and depth. ‘Jayne-Anne the fighter’, as she describes herself, has strived to get through the tough times (and never give up). Her genuine enthusiasm for what are occasionally the duller parts of business shines throughout the book. She describes…

When people talk about AI, they usually mean software that can ‘think’ about a broad range of issues – artificial general intelligence. They might even talk of ‘the singularity’, the moment when a machine mind becomes more intelligent than the human mind, conscious even, before ascending to Godlike intellect. Do our experts see it happening? Pesenti: ‘There are good and bad questions about ethics. A bad question is: when are machines going to take over the world? That’s not going to happen, it’s a complete distraction. I do believe that the capabilities of machines will keep improving until at some point it will match humans. But I also believe that by the time we get there our society will be completely different. It will evolve, but in a way humans…

Offering state-of-the-art floatation pods, complementary therapies, yoga and meditation classes, Camille Pierson launched The Float Spa in Brighton and Hove in 2015. What was your light bulb moment? A few years ago, my daughter Dali became very sick and had to spend time in a paediatric intensive care unit. Following her recovery, I suffered from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). My father suggested floatation as an alternative to taking antidepressants. After a few sessions, the PTSD radically improved; it was incredible. I couldn’t believe there wasn’t a float centre in Brighton so, with my experience in sales, marketing and the leisure industry, I decided to open one. My father is a chartered financial planner and helped me get the business off the ground. Now we’re in a position to use the…

No5 FOOD SCIENTIST WHY? Because there will be nine billion people alive by 2050, and they won’t feed themselves. Keeping the wolf from so many doors without denuding the planet of absolutely everything edible will require all the initiative mankind can muster. Fortunately, there is a growing band of professionals who might just be able to help find some alternative sources of global nourishment – say bon appétit to the food scientists. WHAT? Best known for humdrum activities like tweaking the recipes of ready meals and coming up with increasingly outré flavours of crisps, food science is enjoying a second coming, thanks to the increasingly pressing need to feed that booming global population. Aspirational Asians hanker after a Western-style meat-based diet but it’s an agricultural, ecological and ethical impossibility to…

DAY IN THE LIFE The morning madness begins at 6.45am, with my two-year-old daughter Juniper chanting ‘cereal, cereal, cereal’ and son Calon (four months) demanding his milk. It’s a short cycle ride from our house in Tooting to Lambeth Cemetery, where Poppy’s Funerals is based; my office is in The Gatehouse and we have a mortuary in the chapel. It took us two years to find these premises; most agents run a mile when you tell them you want to store dead bodies. I’ll have a catch-up meeting (on beanbags) with my six staff, then spend the day meeting families and leading funerals. ? MOST AGENTS RUN A MILE WHEN YOU TELL THEM YOU WANT TO STORE DEAD BODIES ? CAREER I studied art history before working for Sotheby’s, where…