Table of contents for February/March 2017 in Management Today

When it comes to considering evil and all its works, I’m one of those people willing to give Google the benefit of the doubt. (I quite like the fact that there’s something purer in its scientific intent than is the case with Facebook or Amazon.) Its corporate tax arrangements make us all cross but Google is doing little that is different from other ‘stateless’ businesses of its scale, which have made the most of globalisation to turn tax planning into a lawyer-led fine art of side-stepping and offshore obfuscation. The chances of an international agreement to level the tax playing field are now distant with the advent of Trump. He threatens US businesses who stray abroad – ‘all you have to do is stay!’ – but has no interest in…

My first job after university was in the Foreign Office. Or should I say the Foreign Office was my first employer, as to describe what I did as a ‘job’ stretches the meaning of the word. My humble task was to keep an eye on the bilateral relationships between the UK and Scandinavia, Italy, Austria and the Holy See. As things turned out, 80%of my time was spent on Iceland (a cod war broke out), 10% on the Vatican (Ian Paisley was always spoiling for a fight) and 10% on the rest. We managed to avoid going to war with Sweden or Italy, an achievement of which I felt proud. But at the time there was one serious bone of contention between us and Italy, as a recent trip to…

Prisoners of Geography Tim Marshall Elliott & Thompson, 2016 This book helped me understand our world just that little bit better. We learn how international tensions can only be understood with reference to history and the physical geography of a region. President Putin’s actions make sense when looked at through this lens, from his perspective. In these uncertain times, understanding other people’s points of view has never been more important. The Fourth Industrial Revolution Klaus Schwab Portfolio Penguin, 2017 Klaus Schwab, a founder of Davos, argues that we are seeing technology breakthroughs in, for example AI, robotics and 3D printing, which amount to a fourth industrial revolution, and could transform our economies and society. But, for me, most importantly, he encourages a dialogue of how we use these innovations for…

_Typically I would not pick up a business book espousing lessons that can be gleaned from young children – I tend to prefer KPIs to lullabies. However timing, as entrepreneur and author Paul Lindley points out, is one of the most undervalued elements in both business and in life. And so it happened that his new book, Little Wins: The Huge Power of Thinking Like a Toddler, fell in to my lap at the precise moment that I was embarking upon a new business venture. ‘Go on, why not?’ I thought to myself, and decided to give it the time of day. And boy, am I glad I did: I have found it to be an unexpectedly and delightfully invigorating read. Lindley is the founder of Ella’s Kitchen, a marvellously…

McKinsey first introduced the notion of a war for talent, the idea that since people are the critical asset of organisations, organisations’ success depends on attracting, motivating and retaining top employees, in 1997. Twenty years on, the war for talent is still in full swing, and arguably the only two conflicts that are discussed more frequently are the war on drugs and the war on terror. Like those two, the only rational or data-driven conclusion one may reach about the war for talent is that we are losing it: the war for talent has become the war on talent. Some of the major problems we face are due to a misunderstanding of what talent actually is, and a general tendency to overrate our ability to manage it – a talent…

1 THE BUSINESS HAS OUTGROWN YOU ‘Some entrepreneurs are great at starting up. Some are great at scaling up. Some can do both. But very, very few can go on to lead and operate a truly scale enterprise,’ says Nancy Cruickshank, who sold her fashion and beauty portal Handbag.com to Hearst for £22m in 2006 before launching MyShowcase.com Be honest about where your skills lie and step back if you’re choking a business’s growth. Kellie Rixon, former director of people at Macdonald Hotels & Resorts, likens it to parenting a child who’s about to go off to university. ‘You’ll always love it. You’ve done a great job helping it develop. But sometimes you need to let go for it to mature.’ 2Y OU’VE LOST YOUR SPARK Gareth Jones remembers the…

I unwittingly walked out of Vietnam with two leadership models. My first commanding officer in the Navy construction battalion was the epitome of the can-do spirit: don’t tell me about the four-month monsoon or the bad guys shooting at you, you’re here to build shit, so build it. The second, whom in retrospect I call Voldemort, would rather have a perfect report for a job never finished than a crappy report for a job finished on time. When I got out I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Business schools were becoming cool, believe it or not. I thought what the hell, I haven’t got anything honest to do for a living. While I was doing my PhD in Stanford, I ended up, as I like to put it,…

rb Can Anglo-Dutch RB ditch the headaches and get back to cleaning up in CPGs? Formative years RB as we know it today was created by the £5bn merger of the UK’s Reckitt & Colman with Dutch rival Benckiser in 1999, creating a brand powerhouse to rival, in theory at any rate, the biggest beasts of consumer packaged goods. Its roots lie in 19th-century laundry with Isaac Reckitt’s starch mill in Hull and Johann Benckiser’s household chemicals business in Pforzheim, Germany. FTSE 100 RB’s brands today include Cillit Bang, Calgon and Durex, but it is still substantially smaller than arch-rivals P&G and Unilever. Recent history A focus on consumer healthcare – it produces Nurofen, Gaviscon and Strepsils among others – has helped RB make up in quality what it lacks…

Q I’m 75 and still work four days a week as a partner at an advertising agency. I’ve always loved my job but I’ve started to feel that the younger partners think I’m ‘past it’. They’re always making jokes about me retiring to the golf course and quips about my age. Clients still respect me but I’m afraid my colleagues don’t. Have you experienced ageism at all? Any advice on how to handle it? A You must be the only 75-year-old still employed by an advertising agency. According to the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, the agency trade body, the average age of employees in UK agencies is under 35 You say that clients still respect you and I’m sure they do. But for what, I wonder? Is it the…

Our fascination with the world of the future has long been the topic of fact and fiction, and this book is no exception. Based on the idea that it can be useful to consider the longer term, it encourages us to be more thoughtful about the technologies we are building and their implications on our world, three decades from today. Although focused specifically on technology (its predecessor Megachange: The World in 2050 looked at broader trends), it makes the point that technology has become such a dominant force in our society that it pretty much influences everything. Therefore, deep-diving into this topic provides a good indication of what the future might look like. The first section introduces a toolkit to help make predictions. By looking at how technologies of the…

Why do crazes and consumer fads suddenly erupt, earning bucketloads of cash for the lucky instigator of said frenzy? If only we knew that, we would be rich – well, some of us might be, anyway. Perhaps that thought lay behind the huge success of Malcolm Gladwell’s first book. A contributor to the New Yorker magazine, Gladwell dusted off some academic papers into group psychology and behaviour to explain why certain products – Hush Puppies shoes, the Sesame Street TV show, and many others – acquire cult status and popularity. Gladwell found that certain types of individuals seemed to have a disproportionately large influence on the response of masses of people. These types were either ‘connectors’ or ‘mavens’ (gurus) or ‘salesmen’, who in their own way would spread the word…

C ompared with a decade or so ago, it’s tempting to think that the battle over flexible working has been won. These days no one bats an eyelid if you need to work from the coffee shop, or from home, occasionally. Even the stigma of ‘reduced hours, reduced commitment’ that used to hang around those who opt to work properly part-time is dispersing fast. Tempting, but wrong – there is still at least one group on the bleeding edge of flexible working who are pretty hard to find, especially at a senior level – the job-sharers. Perhaps it’s the thought of having two people to manage instead of one, the extra cost of allowing for handover time and duplicated benefits, or worries about where and with whom the buck stops.…

Fall in a pothole unfilled by your local council and you’ll be in line for ‘compensation’: a recompense for something nasty happening. But you can also get ‘compensation’ as a top executive, just for doing your job. The word is Latin in origin, and it means the act of counterbalancing or putting right. When it comes to pay, the usage dates back to the US Constitution, which specified that congressmen would be paid ‘a compensation’ for their services. Now compensation is for everybody, or at least those for whom mere cash is not enough.…

A pronounced trend of late has been the onward march of the gig economy – the move away from traditional 9-to-5 employment towards technologyenabled ‘gigging’ for several different work providers at any one time. There is a tension between embracing the new flexibility and freedom the gig economy offers and the need to protect vulnerable individuals against exploitative practices. Both legislators and judges are starting to grapple with this issue. An employment tribunal has ruled that two Uber drivers qualified as ‘workers’ rather than self-employed contractors, as they had been categorised by Uber. Another case involving a CitySprint bike courier reached a similar conclusion. Meanwhile, the government has launched a review into the status of individuals working in the modern economy, chaired by Matthew Taylor, which may lead to legislative…

The market for shiny, clever and expensive cybersecurity technology is booming. Industry estimates reckon that data breaches will cost business $2tn globally by 2019, and a battery of impressivesounding solutions are being rolled out: AI, context-aware behavioural analytics, neural networks, microsegmentation… No I don’t understand it all either. But you don’t have to understand it to know that cutting-edge tech (or the lack of it) hasn’t really been the problem in many of the largest incidents. TalkTalk (150,000 customer accounts compromised) was the victim of two teenagers and a 20-year-old using a technique which had been known about for 10 years, and for which a defence existed. The company just hadn’t noticed that its software was out of date. This is like a bus company operating a vehicle that hasn’t…

__This book, by young Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, is a riot of forgotten stories (in 1970 US President Richard Nixon came within a hair’s breadth of implementing a universal basic income); counterintuitive propositions (‘The big reason people are poor is that they don’t have enough money, and it shouldn’t come as any surprise that giving them money is a great way to reduce that problem’); and unlikely facts (someone on the poverty line in the US – or UK – is in the top 14% of the world’s income bracket and thus part of the global elite). This, plus a liberal sprinkling of spirited quotes and a first-rate translation from the Dutch, makes Bregman’s book, which had a big impact in the Netherlands when it came out last year, an…

Allen Lane, £20 The Undoing Project Tell us about Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and why you decided to write about them? They met in war-torn 1960s Israel. Both were gifted young psychology professors: Danny a rootless son of holocaust survivors who saw the world as a problem to be solved; Amos a voluble, instinctual blur of energy. I wanted to tell the story of their unlikely friendship, which went on to become one of the greatest partnerships in science of all time. These guys developed behavioural economics, revolutionising everything from medicine and finance, to politics and sport. In a weird way, my books Moneyball and The Big Short grew out of their work. They showed how the human mind was capable of systematic misjudgement and bad decisions. Is it…

H ad I been researching this article 20 years ago, it would have been a considerably more arduous process than it remains today. The task would have begun with a trek up to the Press Association library on London’s Fleet Street and a request for the files on Matt Brittin, Google and its commercial rivals. The brown manila folders would have taken half an hour to arrive from the filing cabinets and contained a large number of carefully folded newspaper articles. (All would have been in English.) I would carefully have unfolded each one, read it, and if it was of interest, placed it to one side for photocopying. In 2017, I sit here in MT’s office and put the keywords into a search engine and hey presto. Google ‘Google’…

When we all woke up on 24 June last year, few were more surprised than the inhabitants of Northern Ireland. The population there voted heavily for Remain: 55.8% to stay put, 44.2% to Leave. But the province is small and lacks clout. Accounting for a mere 789,879 votes of the 33,577,342 UK total, the Northern Irish are now living with a Brexit reality the implications of which are even more profound than those faced by other Brits over on the mainland. Set apart across the Irish Sea, Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK – Gibraltar aside – to share a land border with another EU member, the Irish Republic. This distance and difference leads many Northern Irish to believe they are of marginal significance to those in…

It’s no exaggeration to say that the European car market is about to drive into a diesel-fuelled technological and legislative cul-de-sac. Long-held EU plans to reduce average fuel consumption – which gave the advantage to diesel engines – have suddenly collided with rigorous new air pollution tests, which are very difficult for those same diesel engines to meet. For fleet and business users – perhaps the single most important part of the new car market – what should have been a useful transition to ever-lower fuel costs, now seems likely to result in more expensive and more complex new vehicles. A worst-case scenario could see businesses pushed to purchase electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, which might well have less solid residual values. After all, the cost of running business fleets…

WHY? Reading the regulatory runes is an increasingly onerous task these days. From HR to H&S, from data protection to environmental standards, the number of legal banana skins on which the unwary, ignorant – or occasionally just the downright crooked – can come a cropper only seems to get larger. Throw in spiralling multimillion pound fines and public opprobrium for those found to be in breach and it has all got too much for the poor old directors to handle. A new breed of professional has thus emerged to police the ever-expanding corporate rulebook – say hello to the compliance officer. WHAT? Box tickers have been around for decades but it took the financial crisis of 2008 for them to really escape from their, er, box. Now making sure that…

A book about time management crossed my desk some years ago. It had all the usual advice – check emails at set times, eliminate unnecessary meetings, schedule difficult tasks first thing. The reason I remember it is for one of the more unusual tips I’ve read. It suggested, ‘You should wear a wig. Think of all the time you will save washing and styling your hair.’ Indeed. I have coached many people since then, and while most have managed fantastically busy schedules, they have done so without wearing a wig to save time*. I’m pretty sure business stars like Bill Gates or Sheryl Sandberg have never succumbed to one for that reason either. Thankfully, there’s a new wave of advice focusing less on ‘saving’ time, and more on rethinking what…

Although there’s no universal recipe (or formal training) for dealing with your boss, no formula will work unless you first understand their personality. That entails working out what they are like, and what their habits signify. These goals are best achieved with scientific assessments, but since it is hard to force your boss to take a psychometric test, here are some pointers for deciphering their character. Intelligence: Imagine a scale ranging from David Brent to Jeff Bezos; that is the range of managerial IQ. If your boss is able to identify and solve complex problems better than their team, translating data into knowledge, and ideas into innovative solutions, you are in luck. However, most people don’t work for Jeff Bezos. At the other extreme are managers who overestimate their intelligence,…

EARLY STARTS My favourite time is going downstairs at 5am to a still and empty house, which is very telling of the fact that I have four small children. We’re a family of six extroverts, but I’m borderline, I need a little more solitude. Our home in Berkshire is open plan, and for many years I tried to work while I was with the kids, but I ended up doing both badly. Now I am strict that I can’t mix the two. I took the emails off my iPhone and got rid of my voicemail. When the kids come downstairs, I close my MacBook Air. RELAXING We get into Netflix box sets like Narcos, but I rest by going to the kitchen. If it’s been a heavy week, I’ll put…