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.
Memo to would-be Indian CEOs: get an MBA, start young
The route to success in corporate India starts early, and it usually goes via business school. That’s one message from new research into the performance of Indian chief executives, from the same stable that brought us what claimed to be the first ranking of the world’s CEOs over their entire tenure.
Insead professors Bala Vissa, Morten Hansen, Herminia Ibarra and Urs Peyer have now produced a compelling ranking of top Indian CEOs, published on Wednesday by Business Today, based on shareholder performance since they took office. It is topped by Naveen Jindal of steel company Jindal Steel and Power (JSPL).
‘Margin Call’ speaks to managers everywhere
Jeremy Irons as the bank boss in 'Margin Call'
To those who think all bankers are villains – or heroes, for that matter – let me commend Margin Call, the excellent and balanced film about a Lehman-like bank’s implosion, released last autumn in the US and out this week in the UK.
When the movie first came out, the FT invited two real-life bankers to the screening. One of them said:
I don’t think any banker will want to go, because they lived this, and traders will just point up the stuff that wasn’t right.
It was a film “made for outsiders who want to be smart about the inside”, he added.
But, speaking as an outsider, I think it’s much better than that.
Eastman Kodak’s last big investor meeting ended with its executives trying to finish while a shareholder shouted at them: “You guys have no credibility. Zero.” Since then, things have got worse
When Kazuo Inamori was appointed to lead the restructuring of Japan Airlines (JAL) two years ago, analysts worried about his lack of experience in aviation. Never mind that he was about to turn 78, had founded two of Japan’s best-known companies – Kyocera, in electronics components, and KDDI, in telecoms – and was, for good measure, an ordained Buddhist priest. Studying Buddhist teachings, he told the Wall Street Journal four months into his new role, “improves the quality of my heart and mind and enriches myself as a human being. This enhanced spirit is useful when it comes to revitalising JAL”.
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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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