What motivates high achievers? Is it money, status or power? Perhaps it is none of these. Perhaps the strongest urge is simply the overwhelming desire to escape boredom.

Unquestionably, the executive suite embraces melodrama with more enthusiasm than any other activity. Making sales, hiring new staff, generating a profit are all very well – but what really excites the boardroom is corporate intrigue. After all, even in business, the key players are not robots but humans, impelled by emotions and irrational dreams of glory or revenge. Life in many ways is but a brief play, or possibly a tragedy, and most of us are acting some imagined role or another half the time anyway.

The actual stuff that makes most companies function is mundane: producing and delivering the goods every day, efficiently and at a decent margin, can be deadly dull. So the favourite form of escapism in most organisations is to conspire and manipulate with and against colleagues like the cast in some low-budget thriller. It is a tendency that is especially pronounced among the leadership class; after all, lots of them are exhibitionists with outsized egos and a thirst for the limelight.

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Hard work and relentless attention to detail: that’s management for you. Talk is cheap. Visions can inspire, for a moment or two. But without graft – and competence – things go wrong. Any business, no matter how successful, will struggle if it forgets this. There are no quick fixes for organisations that have big commercial and cultural problems.

That is the lesson to draw from the story of Little Chef, the 51-year-old British roadside restaurant chain. For generations, these little cafés, with their red and white signage, have formed a familiar part of the UK landscape. “Fat Charlie” is the diminutive chef in question, smiling out at travelling businesspeople, families and lorry drivers from the side of motorways and A roads.

At its peak, in the 1970s and 1980s, Little Chef enjoyed a dominant market position. But you did not seek out a Little Chef for a thrilling culinary experience. You went there for a reliable cooked breakfast, for plaice, chips and peas, for something acceptable to tired and hungry children. It worked.

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Sad news over the weekend: Russ Ackoff has died. He was 90 years old.

Ackoff was the father of systems thinking, which in the context of management means that looking at problems in isolation is probably going to be a mistake. Work flows (or is supposed to) through a business or organisation, pulled through by customer (or user) demand. Tinkering with bits of the business without considering the whole is likely to lead to further problems.

I met Ackoff in London two years ago, when he was still in splendid form (as he was, apparently, right up until his sudden and unexpected death last week). He was a kindly, mellow, thoughtful man. And very witty.

“All of our [social] problems arise out of doing the wrong thing righter,” he told me. “The more efficient you are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become. It is much better to do the right thing wronger than the wrong thing righter! If you do the right thing wrong and correct it, you get better.”

There is a lot more to say about Ackoff and I hope to do so in a future column.

There is an obituary on his web site.

When I was 20, I thought I’d retire at 60. By the time I was 35, I expected to retire rather earlier, at about 50 or so. Back then, it was fashionable for professionals to take early retirement – either because they found they could, or because their employers had tired of them and pensioned them off. But now that I’m 50 myself, I find that the finishing line has been moved once again and it looks as though I’ll be slogging away until I’m 70 and beyond.

In the past couple of weeks, there have been various reports from economists saying that the only way of saving the economy from collapse is for everyone to work for much longer. The assumption is that while this makes sense for the public sector borrowing requirement, it’s going to be tough on us.

I’m not so sure: to have a working life that spans five decades is better than one that lasts for three or four. Work is a bit like taking exercise. It can be boring and stressful while you are doing it (and on any given day, I’d miles rather not work than work) but it is actually preferable to not working. It gives us structure, status and money; it gives us something to think about and gets us out of the house.

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Dave Carroll, the Canadian folk singer who accused United Airlines of breaking his guitar, wrote a song about it that became a huge viral success on YouTube (the biggest hit of his career) and brought lots of shame on to the airline, is at loggerheads with the company again.

Since the incident, Carroll has tried to avoid flying the airline but while en route to deliver a speech to a group of customer service executives in Denver, they lost his luggage.

It seems a curious way to deal with a customer and manage your reputation. I would have thought that after the first case, they would have put an asterisk next to Carroll’s name so that if he ever flew with them again, they would bend over backwards to ensure that he was treated well. Maybe they should have offered him free flights for life?

All companies will have the occasional bad experience with a customer. The key thing is how they deal with it. I wrote a few days ago on the case of a worker on the London Underground who resigned after being filmed ranting at a passenger. It looked liked the company handled the story well. As for United, I can’t imagine alienating a customer for a second time, after he has generated a lot of negative publicity for your brand, is a great idea.

Earlier this evening, the winner of the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award was given to Liaquat Ahamed for Lords of Finance, his history of how central bankers’ mistakes led to the Great Depression.

As it happens, I shared a table at the ceremony with Mr Ahamed and his publishers - and managed to keep from revealing the winner to any of my dinner companions.

The book bowled over the judges - but did it bowl you over, too? Do you agree with decision or do you think one of the other shortlisted titles were superior?

Have your say in the comments section or vote on the awards homepage.

You can also see video from the event at the London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and find extra information about the winner and the awards.

A few weeks ago, the most popular story on FT.com was on Dyson’s new bladeless fan. I have to admit, I couldn’t quite figure out why so many readers were looking at it, but who am I to go against the grain?

I did wonder if it had anything to do with the following Dyson has among consumers and this video suggests I may have been on to something. Emma and Molly are two fans of the fan and have created a video showing just how this impressive device works. I especially like the Brazilian music overlaying the clip. What was that I said in a previous post about the changing nature of consumer engagement?

Of course, this could be nothing more than a clever marketing ploy and for all I know these could be Dyson employees or the wife and child of the guy who designed it. Whatever the case, I wonder if it will generate as much attention as our original story.

Do take a quick look at our regular Judgment Call feature from Wednesday’s paper. It’s a particularly good one, even if we say so ourselves.

We have sharp contributions from four distinguished commentators: Harvard Business School’s Rakesh Khurana, Rotman’s Roger Martin, Kai Peters from Ashridge and Jim O’Toole from the University of Denver.

We have asked them how good a job business schools are doing in providing an ethical education to their students. Their overall verdict: probably not good enough.

But I am over-simplifying their answers, which are worth reading in full.