Column on the Financial Times comment page, September 27th

Even though 73,000 union members walked off the job, waving placards and protesting at General Motors’ intransigence, there was something about the United Auto Workers’ short-lived strike this week that felt fake.

The motor industry is one of the last bastions of union power in the US private sector and, if GM had remained strike-bound, parts suppliers in Michigan and elsewhere would soon have been damaged. Detroit’s big three are financially troubled and struggling to halt the advance of foreign competitors such as Toyota and Hyundai. The stakes for them were very high.

Yet the strike was hard to take seriously. It seemed more like role play than a genuine threat, something the UAW’s leaders had to do to show their members they were not a pushover rather than a fight they thought they could win. So, after two days, they came back, having accepted watered-down contracts in return for bonuses if GM recovers.

The rest of this column can be read here. Post comments below.

To the Clinton Global Initiative annual philanthropy summit, which is being held a block away from the FT office in New York, to see Angelina Jolie.

Ms Jolie was giving a press conference jointly with Gene Sperling of the Council on Foreign Relations about their initiative to promote education in conflict-hit regions of the world. They had assembled 18 projects that will place 350,000 children in school.

Quite a few others seemed to have had the same idea. As Mr Sperling introduced the event, he was lit by a battery of flashes from the cameras trained on Ms Jolie. "Boy, this happens to me everywhere I go," he remarked.

My impressions were, in the following order:

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Every now and then, a business professor breaks cover to criticise Masters in Business Administration programmes in US universities. The latest is Rakesh Khurana of Harvard Business School, whose criticisms are noted this morning in the Wall Street Journal.

George Anders describes it as "unthinkable" for professors to talk down MBA programmes but actually it happens every so often. Henry Mintzberg of McGill University in Montreal is a regular scourge.

Khurana’s argument in his new book From Higher Aims to Hired Hands is that business schools have gone from trying to educate a future generation of leaders to giving their students sufficient grounding in corporate finance for them to rush into banks, hedge funds and private equity firms.

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Even if Rupert Murdoch does not change a thing about the Wall Street Journal, there will be plenty of people convinced that he has done so, mostly for the worse.

However, it does not take a conspiracy theorist to be struck by the last paragraph of a column by Dennis Berman in the WSJ this morning. The article is mostly an interesting discussion of the parallels between Facebook and GeoCities, the community networking site bought by Yahoo for $4.7bn in 1999.

Then there is the final paragraph.

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The news that Microsoft is negotiating to take a 5 per cent stake in Facebook is intriguing for various reasons. One is that Facebook would acquire a valuation of about $10bn without Mark Zuckerberg, its independent-minded founder having to sacrifice control.

One of the attractions of a deal for Facebook must be it sets a target price if and when it eventually sells out entirely. And the practice of companies getting valuations based on minority stakes is common in the venture capital world; that is how they get valued during various rounds of fund-raising.

But it is clearly open to abuse. I could offer Facebook $1 for so miniscule a slice of equity that it would acquire a implied value of $100bn or even $1,000bn in the transaction. It would not cost me much and it would (if anyone took it seriously) benefit Facebook a lot.   

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Madonna’s negotiations to ditch her record label Warner Music Group in favour of Live Nation, her tour promotor is further bad news for music labels, which are suffering badly from the decline in CD sales and problems in getting people to pay for downloads.

But it is also of interest because it shows the pressures on flat-tariff pricing for all bands and singers, which is  being played out between the music labels and iTunes. Apple has resisted the push from some music labels to charge more for downloads from popular artists than its flat rate 99c (in the US) per song.

Variable pricing is alive and well for pop concerts. Indeed, the price of admission for Madonna, the Rolling Stones and other classic acts has inflated wildly in the past few years.

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Various people are unhappy about the way that GlaxoSmithKline is conducting the race to take over from Jean-Pierre Garnier.

The company is holding an open competition to succeed him among Chris Viehbacher, head of its US pharmaceuticals arm, David Stoute, president of pharmaceutical operations and Andrew Witty, president of European pharmaceuticals.

It is reminiscent of the bake-off among Jeff Immelt, Bob Nardelli and Jim McNerney to succeed Jack Welch as chairman and chief executive of General Electric in 2001. That tussle ended with Mr Immelt getting the job and Mr Nardelli and Mr McNerney in effect having to leave.

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It is hard to escape advertising for the new autumn (or fall, as I suppose I should call it) season on the US television networks in New York at the moment. The networks are making it impossible to do so.

As a piece in the New York Times this morning detailed, television networks are increasingly filling the bottom of the screen during programmes with little trailers for others that are coming up. It looks a bit bizarre to have little figures moving around the bottom of the screen while you are trying to watch the action at the top.

But these so-called "snipes" are not the end of it. Reading the New York Times itself in print form this morning was a bit of a labour because NBC had put wraparound inserts for its new autumn programmes on each section of the paper.

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