Family businesses can’t be run by one generation for ever. At some stage, power must transfer to its children, then its grandchildren. It is a notoriously difficult process to manage.
New research suggests that business-owning families could smooth this transition by involving children as young as six in dinner-table conversations about their trade.
Robert Salomon, who teaches corporate strategy at New York University’s Stern business school, is highly sceptical that General Motors would benefit from buying Chrysler. After it was reported that the US carmakers had had talks about a deal, he wrote a blog post entitled “A disastrous deal”. It warned:
There is no quicker way to gain market share and increase pricing power than to remove a direct competitor. However, I’ve never been a big fan of combining two failing firms in the hopes of creating one healthy one. You generally end up with managerial attention diverted to a complicated integration, and away from what they should be doing in the first place - managing the individual businesses to make them healthy.
I asked him for a bit more detail. Did he, for instance, view the merger of Alcatel and Lucent as an example of the sort of managerial mess a GM-Chrysler deal could engender? Yep, Alcatel-Lucent “fits the bill quite nicely”, he reckons.
Further reading: FT’s Lex column; ‘GM Board was cool to Chrysler link’.
Marketers used to struggle to get all the information they wanted about their customers, says Tim Calkins, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
Now, thanks to the internet and other advances, the opposite is true: many marketing departments have access to so many facts and figures that “analysis paralysis” has set in.
In a new FT Management podcast, Prof Calkins says the profession needs to become less preoccupied with gathering information and more concerned with translating insight into action – especially now that deteriorating economic conditions have made companies question all costs that do not have a clear payback.
He warns: “If all you do is know your customer really well, that doesn’t help you.”
Tom Peters has doled out a list of tips for managers struggling to come to terms with the death throes of the debt age.
They range from the unhelpfully abstract (“underscore excellence in every transaction”) to classic Peters (be sure to wander the shop floor – or the closest thing your company has to a shop floor – in a “visible but not frenzied” fashion).
One of the soundest tips is very concrete and very simple: exercise more.
But it was one of the readers of his blog who came up with the most radical idea in the comment section of his post: “Do not spend a moment of your time talking about the financial crisis unless it directly affects you.”
I can’t decide whether this is idiocy or genius.
Male chauvinists have breathed a sigh of relief after a structural survey of the glass ceiling in leading British boardrooms revealed that it was still in good condition in spite of recent worries about localised cracking.
Anxieties about the physical state of the ceiling had been aroused by anecdotal evidence that more women had been appointed to prominent directorships.
However, an annual structural survey undertaken by the Cranfield School of Management showed that women still held only 12 per cent of board seats at FTSE 100 companies and that the glass ceiling would continue to hold back women from obtaining equal representation for another four decades or so if the recent pace of deterioration didn’t change.
One male director said it was a relief that the glass ceiling was in no danger of imminent collapse.
“Business loves certainty and it is great news that corporate Britain might not be forced into fully engaging with vital issues such as equal pay and macho HR practices until the middle of this century, when the effects of global warming will probably give us plenty of new excuses to avoid taking action.”
When he taught his macroeconomics students about the Great Depression, Insead’s Ilian Mihov used to declare that it would never happen again. Now he is not so sure.
Elsewhere:
With consumer spending under pressure in various major economies, retailers are particularly exposed right now. The tempation, as ever, will be to cut staffing. New research from Harvard Business School suggests that would be a bad idea.
Zeynep Ton, an assistant professor, studied one large retailer and found that there was a link between increased spending on staffing and increased profits. However, this wasn’t because of better customer service.
It was actually because extra payroll expenditure led to improvements in the fulfilment of some basic, behind-the-scenes tasks, such as ensuring that stock was on the sales floor and not the storeroom, returning unsold items and keeping display shelves tidy.
On a similar topic, one Wharton professor has criticised a new system for getting the most out of staff at the Ann Taylor clothing chain, saying the Darwinian software – which allocates prime shifts to the best sales people – was like “squeezing blood out of a turnip” .
Emma Jenkins, the UK head of interactive marketing at Procter & Gamble, has a snappy way of explaining a common mistake made in online brand management.
She believes that too many brands engage with online communities on a temporary basis when they have a particular marketing initiative instead of building a permanent dialogue.
It is like moving to a village, knocking on doors frantically to announce your presence and then disappearing two weeks later, she told the UK Association of Online Publishers summit today.
“A community is not a campaign,” she declared.
If your boss starts talking to you about dividing teams into “pods” today, it won’t be because they have just had a life-changing experience swimming with dolphins at the weekend. They will be talking about golf.
Paul Azinger, captain of the US team in the recent Ryder Cup, has told the Wall Street Journal about the organisational theory that lay behind its victory.
Using advice from Ron Braund, a corporate team-building specialist, the 12 squad players were grouped in “pods” of 4 throughout the competition. Each pod had an assistant captain to help its members.
One of the aims was to stop quieter personalities from getting lost in the broader group. Another was to meld players accustomed to performing as individuals into a team.
There is an alternative explanation for the US success, of course: the absence of Tiger Woods, which might have made the mere mortals on the team feel less inhibited. But management theory is written by the winners so let’s go with Mr Azinger’s version.
Stefan Stern writes a column on Tuesdays on management. He is winner of the 2010 Towers Watson award for excellence in HR journalism, and has previously won awards from the Work Foundation and the Management Consultancies Association.
Ravi Mattu is the editor of Business Life, the FT's management features
section, and a former editor of the Mastering Management series. He joined the FT in 2000 from Prospect magazine
Lucy Kellaway writes a column on Mondays on work , poking fun at management fads and jargon and celebrating the ups and downs of office life. She is also the FT's Agony Aunt.
Luke Johnson writes an FT column on Wednesdays on entrepreneurship. He runs Risk Capital Partners, a private equity firm, and is chairman of the Royal Society of Arts.
Lucy Kellaway, FT columnist and associate editor, offers her solution to your workplace problems in a column in the Financial Times. In the online edition of her Dear Lucy 'agony aunt' column, readers are invited to have a say too.
Older entries
