With some major economies decelerating - or in outright recession - many younger managers are getting their first experience of cyclical business pain. What do these callow youths need to know to adjust to a harsher economic climate?

For the first in a series of occasional posts on this issue, I spoke to Tony Cram of Britain’s Ashridge Business School about one of the most important things to get right when economic confidence is evaporating: pricing. He says that managers should do three things when they set prices during a slowdown or a recession.  

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Do you have a personal assistant whose abilities exceed their traditional job description? Then maybe you should offer them a seat on one of your company’s boards. That’s what a leading engineering consultancy did.

Sharon Huckstep is the PA to David Bennison, UK and Ireland managing director for URS Corporation, which has more than 50,000 employees. She has just been named PA of the Year by The Times and Hays Secretarial. Having been hired partly to raise the profile of support staff, she originally attended meetings of its business improvement board to take minutes:

But I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. In the end, it was easier to give me a seat and let me have my say because I was going to have it anyway. But I still take the minutes.

Ms Huckstep’s responsibilities have included rewriting the job descriptions of admin staff and introducing a mentoring system for other PAs. She says she has a “real business partnership” with her boss. The runners-up in the competition were also impressive, including a male PA who handled a corporate rebranding.

Do you have any tips for managing and retaining exceptionally able PAs? Please share them below.

What are holidays for? Most people would probably say “for rest and recuperation”. You take time out from work to get out of a rut, to refresh your mind and perhaps experience something new and stimulating, such as a Venetian altarpiece or the view from a mountain top in New Zealand.

I can’t say there was anything quite as remarkable as that on the island of Fuerteventura in the Canaries, where I have just been holidaying. The old church in Betancuria was worth a look. But the sun shone and the baked goat was delicious. It was a welcome break.

Continue reading “No respite on the beach”

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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