Gender fatigue is the secret lassitude that grips chief executives and directors when asked for the Nth time to discuss targets, quotas, audits and reports aimed at bringing more women into the boardroom.
Capello’s exit makes Hester look tough
A highly paid manager doing his duty for the nation resigns in a huff after his ultimate paymasters interfere with his right to manage. Fabio Capello, manager of the England football team, has done what Stephen Hester, chief executive of state-controlled Royal Bank of Scotland, declined to do.
Mr Hester – who spent most of Wednesday doing interviews to explain his decision to stay, despite the row over his bonus – has told the world that it would have been “indulgent” to resign. At the same time, he has sent a strong message to the government that if it wants to earn a return on the taxpayer’s £45bn forced investment in RBS, it should leave him alone.
To use Mr Hester’s terminology (and assuming that the England manager jumped and wasn’t pushed), by comparison, Mr Capello’s decision looks, frankly, indulgent. If the FT’s Simon Kuper is right, the resignation has less to do with the Football Association’s decision to override his view on whether John Terry should keep the England captaincy, and more to do with England’s poor prospects in the coming Euro 2012 tournament and the potential that it would put a blot on Mr Capello’s reputation.
Reckitt’s brave new world
Rakesh Kapoor has been in charge of Reckitt Benckiser for less than a year but already he’s changed the world. Or, more accurately, he’s changed Reckitt’s view of the world, by merging its European and North American operations into one Amsterdam-based unit, and splitting the rest of the world into two reporting areas.
Like three ugly sisters, the new operations are called Ena, Rumea (Russia, Middle East, Africa) and Lapac (Latin America and Asia-Pacific). Stefan Wagstyl has pointed out on the FT beyondbrics blog that the clear message is that “emerging markets matter” for the multinational consumer goods group.
Reckitt’s change is more than a laborious redrafting of the corporate organigram. Pankaj Ghemawat wrote in World 3.0 that General Motors’ decision to make many of its non-US, non-European operations report to China was “a basic realignment of power”. The impact of Reckitt’s move to aim resources more directly at growing markets could be just as profound.
FT column: Big Pharma should learn from Hogwarts
Harry Potter and Viagra have more in common than you may imagine. They came to market within a year of each other in the late-1990s; they enjoyed enormous success; and what was a boon for the companies that produced and sold them could turn into a bane as their popularity fades and rivals emerge.
By James Mackintosh, investment editor
Arise, Mr Fred Goodwin. The banker who single-handedly brought down the British banking system has had his knighthood stripped away, and no one is sorry. Politicians, the public and the press are united in supporting the move against the former chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland.
I’ll say one thing for co-chief executives: two scapegoats are better than one. Since Research in Motion’s fortunes took a sharp turn for the worse last year, its dual-leadership structure has taken a beating. With the BlackBerry-maker’s decision last week to revert to one chief executive, the double-edged knives really came out for Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis.
Petrobras’s new CEO: secrets of her success
“Petrobras is a very successful company, completely male-dominated,” Maria das Graças Silva Foster told the FT’s Women at the Top Conference in November 2011. “But things are changing and it’s just question of time.”
A question of just two months, in fact. On Monday, the Brazilian company’s gas and energy director was named as the next chief executive of, in the FT’s words, “arguably Latin America’s most important company”.
Her promotion will also make her, by a long shot, the most prominent businesswoman in Latin America, and a symbol of the diversity policy of Brazil’s first woman president Dilma Rousseff – who used to chair Petrobras and is said to be close to Ms Graças Foster. The president appears to be lining up another Brazilian businesswoman - Luiza Helena Trajano Inácio Rodrigues, who heads the retailer Magazine Luiza – to become a minister for small business. But the number of top female CEOs in Brazil still looks low compared with, say, India or China.
KFC tempura chicken strips get progressively spicier, the deeper you penetrate inland China. Iglo’s frozen fish fingers used to have four different colours of breadcrumb, depending where you bought them in Europe.
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John Gapper is an associate editor and the chief business commentator of the FT.
He has worked for the FT since 1987, covering labour relations, banking and the media. He is co-author, with Nicholas Denton, of All That Glitters, an account of the collapse of Barings in 1995.
Andrew Hill is an associate editor and the management editor of the FT. He is a former City editor, financial editor, comment and analysis editor, New York bureau chief, foreign news editor and correspondent in Brussels and Milan.
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