Tom Peters made his name as a management guru by analysing what made big US companies successful.

In Search of Excellence - the hugely influential 1982 bestseller he co-authored with Robert Waterman - scrutinised Caterpillar, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson and 40 other businesses the pair had deemed to be “excellent”.

Now, in an audio interview with the FT Management Blog, he says their focus on the largest beasts was a “guru gaffe” that helped to create a lingering misconception that the global economy is merely a division of General Electric.

These days, the companies that get him excited tend to be small- to medium-sized enterprises operating in dull industries: companies like Jim’s Group, an Australian franchiser whose activities range from lawn mowing to dog washing, or members of the German Mittelstand.

“There are actually more companies than GE in the world,” he says. And that goes for Google too.

Continue reading "Audio interview: Tom Peters yawns at GE and Google" »

David Rubenstein, co-founder of The Carlyle Group, the private equity investor, has defended his industry’s management style in an interview with Wharton business school’s private equity club:

The techniques that private equity developed have helped to make companies more efficient. They do make workers more motivated and they do produce the kind of returns that I think enable the system to move forward…. if you give a manager a large piece of a business, if you have people who are investing in the business, putting their own money at risk, and if you can operate in a private setting to a large extent, you can create value.

But does that add up to much without colossal slugs of debt? Michael Gordon, the global head of institutional investment at Fidelity International, says it hasn’t so far. In a recent article for the FT, he declared that the turbo-charged returns delivered by private equity investors before the credit markets seized up were almost exclusively the result of leverage, not the superior accountability or incentivisation of owner-managers. “Private equity as we have come to know it is all about debt - lock, stock and sinking barrel,” he claimed.

Students at Canada’s Richard Ivey School of Business will have an unusual guest speaker on Thursday: Nick Leeson, the rogue trader who served four years in prison after bringing down Barings Bank. Mr Leeson will aid the students in a case study analysing the bank’s collapse, while giving tips on the safeguards needed to prevent similar debacles. Afterwards, the students will take part in the “Ivey Ring Tradition Ceremony”, in which they pledge “to act ethically and honestly in all their activities”.

Ivey confirms that it is paying an undisclosed sum to Mr Leeson to come over. The website of the agency that represents him says his normal fee for an after dinner speech ranges from £6,000-£10,000 ($11,800-$19,700; €7,600-€12,700). To give a little perspective, Sir Geoff Hurst, England’s 1966 World Cup hero, costs £2,500-£5,000.

Continue reading "Coming to a b-school near you: white-collar criminals" »

There’s an enjoyably quirky article about multiplayer online games in the latest Harvard Business Review. The authors, professors at Stanford, MIT and North Carolina State, report on whether the likes of World of Warcraft and Everquest can teach real managers any leadership lessons. Tentatively, they conclude that the way players - often complete strangers - operate in teams during these games can be instructive:

True, leading 25 guild members in a six-hour raid on Illidan the Betrayer’s temple fortress is hardly the same as running a complex global organization. For starters, the stakes are just a bit higher in business. But don’t dismiss online games as mere play.

Continue reading "I killed Illidan the Betrayer, now promote me" »

Senior management teams are great at coming up with strategic priorities, to the extent that many are drowning in them. But while it is platitudinous to point out that the existence of too many goals confuses staff and leads to sketchy execution, the path to rectifying strategic overload is less obvious. Yet Peter Killing, a professor at IMD, the Swiss business school, says there is a clear method that bosses can use to define and approach their company’s “must-win battles”. You can listen to him detail these steps in a 16-minute audio interview here, or click on the rest of this post for a written summary.

Continue reading "Audio interview: defining ‘must-win’ strategic battles" »

The plummeting value of the US dollar has helped Atlanta to emerge as a particularly desirable location in which to hold conferences and training sessions. The city has burst into the Economist Intelligence Unit’s list of top ten destinations for business travel, occupying 6th position. Three other US cities make the list. Here is the top ten in full (the ranking relates to December 2007 and is based on cost and environmental issues such as infrastructure and culture):

1. Vancouver
2. Toronto
3. Adelaide
4. Honolulu
5. Perth
6. Atlanta
7. Auckland
8. Helsinki
9. Pittsburgh
10. Detroit

A wise colleague once said: “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you have probably failed to grasp the seriousness of the situation.”

How bad are market conditions today? Should we be panicking or is it time to keep a cool head when all about you have lost the plot?

I cannot answer these questions for you. But we should, I think, be guided by the sobriety and realism of the words quoted above. Even if some economists have predicted all seven of the last three recessions, that doesn’t mean they are necessarily wrong this time.

Continue reading “Kipling’s wise words”

Sir Stuart Rose, chief executive of British retailer Marks & Spencer, faces a new corporate governance kerfuffle, following the controversial plan to make him executive chairman. He has a tiny stake in Lucky Voice, a karaoke bar group backed by Martha Lane Fox, a dot-com entrepreneur who is an independent non-executive director of M&S.

Britain’s corporate governance code requires companies to offer an explanation to investors if an independent director has a significant business link to another director. To keep the mood light - this isn’t about any wrong-doing, after all  - I suggest that any such explanation should take the form of a karaoke evening in one of Lucky Voice’s private rooms.

Ms Lane Fox would begin by singing Independent Women Part One by Destiny’s Child to remind M&S shareholders that she is a wealthy person - “I buy my own diamonds, I buy my own rings” - who doesn’t need Sir Stuart’s backing to satisfy her material needs.

Shareholders would then seek to emphasise the point that companies must not just do the right thing but also be seen to do the right thing, through a rendition of It Ain’t What You Do (It’s The Way That You Do It) by Fun Boy Three and Bananarama.

Sir Stuart would at this point launch into Suspicious Minds by Elvis Presley, before upping the stakes with a burst of the Clash’s Should I Stay Or Should I Go? The latter ultimatum would provoke an instant response, with the investors assuring him that We Can Work It Out, and then deciding to Let It Be.

Feel free to suggest any other appropriate songs below.

Thirty years ago, a French business legend was peering into the abyss. Once classed as one of the world’s richest men, Marcel Boussac was known as King Cotton, ruler of an eponymous textiles empire that included the Dior haute couture house, which he founded. But in April 1978, the heavily indebted Boussac group was on the verge of collapse. Its autocratic but paternalistic owner, then 89 years old, had failed to respond to a surge in cheap imports from developing countries, and had also been left vulnerable by the rise of synthetic fibres. Could Mr Boussac ward off bankruptcy with yet another attempt at restructuring?

Continue reading "From the archive: the fall of Marcel Boussac" »

Since my post last week on the dilemma facing corporate sponsors of this year’s Beijing Olympics, John Quelch, the eminent Harvard Business School marketing professor, has weighed in on the issue with an article published on the Harvard Business website. Notably, he says marketers are waiting to see if there will  be more unrest in Tibet before finalising spending plans for Olympics-related advertising:

Marketers are not overcommitting funds to Olympics-related brand advertising and promotions and the normal Olympics year advertising boost may be less than expected. Instead of long-term preset media advertising buys, many companies are planning short-term promotional bursts that they can activate as late as July and August if all appears to be in place for a successful, trouble-free Games.

Otherwise, he says Lenovo, the Chinese PC maker that is a first-time global sponsor of the games, has much more at stake than veteran backers such as Visa. Long-time Western sponsors may be pragmatically two-faced, he predicts, putting forward one message for the Chinese market that will tap into the country’s pride at hosting the games, and another, more neutral message for the rest of the world. To my untrained eye, that doesn’t necessarily look like a shift in strategy, just a reflection of the fact that sponsors might have different goals in different markets.