Oh, @WarrenBuffett, not you too
If you’re on Twitter, you’ll know by now that Warren Buffett is – to quote his first and (at time of writing) his only tweet – “in the house“.
His appearance on the social media service is apparently linked to a Fortune forum in which the Sage of Omaha is due to participate. It has already garnered him (again, at time of writing) 40,000 followers and prompted some Twitter wit from his bridge partner, Bill Gates. Read more
It is easy to forget. Most of us work in buildings where safety can largely be taken for granted, and fire drills are annoying disruptions in which a security official seizes the chance to talk loudly and repeatedly on the public address system, stopping us from doing any work. Read more
Arriving in Shenzhen last week, I saw a poster for a local company called Stylution. Multinationals have concocted a similarly awkward “stylish solution” to the problem of how to staff expansion in China: hire hybrid managers with a perfect mix of global and local experience. Read more
Corporate DNA jargon is nothing to celebrate
It’s 60 years since James Watson and Francis Crick published their model of the structure of DNA in the journal Nature. No better time, then, to eradicate the use of the expression by smug business leaders, as in “It’s in our DNA” or “It’s in the company’s DNA”.
The origins of its corporate use are a little obscure, but it may have started with Gareth Morgan’s 1986 book Images of Organization, which laid out eight metaphors through which people think about organisations, including as a machine, as a political system and as an organism – hence “organisational DNA”. Fair enough, but the use and abuse of the term has bloomed in recent years: I delved into the archive and found only about 100 instances of the two sentences above in the 10 years from 1995 (it does crop up in a 1996 Dilbert album – a sure advance warning that a phrase is becoming management-speak), but more than 550 in the past year alone. Read more
Too soon for KPMG to come out fighting
Unless KPMG is now publicly ditched by a raft of big clients (which is unlikely), we may never know the damage inflicted on its reputation by the insider trading scandal involving the former head of its Los Angeles audit practice.
But for the firm’s chairman Michael Andrew to dismiss it already as “a one-day wonder” in “a slow news week” was silly and premature. There may come a time when Mr Andrew should come out fighting, but it is not yet. Read more
China: filmmakers’ main feature
Expect more Chinese heroes. That seems to be the clear message of the tie-up announced on Wednesday between China’s Seven Stars and Pinewood Shepperton Studios. Among other things, it should allow Chinese co-productions wider distribution in the fast-growing Chinese market, provided, my colleague Robert Cookson writes, they have “at least one Chinese actor, some scenes to be filmed in China, and somehow relate to China”. Read more
Dogs bark and Xstrata’s Davis moves on
Mick Davis’s departure from Glencore-Xstrata without serving a six-month transition period at the merged company is a classic dog-bites-man story. It looked inevitable even when my colleague Helen Thomas and I met him in January for an interview, but the Xstrata chief executive and cricket fan played a straight bat to questions about whether he would sit patiently in his office after what he plainly described as a takeover by Glencore. Read more
FT column: How not to stifle your new subsidiary
One company may decide to buy another for its people, its clients, its products, its technology or a combination of all four. But how often does a company acquire another for its culture? Read more
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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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