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.

The remainder of this article can be read here. Please post comments below.

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.

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.

Is strategy dead? Chief strategy officers will deny it. Some strategy consultants may reject the idea, too. But, right now, markets are unpredictable. The economic outlook is uncertain. The world has changed. If old-style strategy formulation is not exactly dead, then it is hardly in the best of health.

For months, many leadership teams have had only one strategic goal in mind: survival. Grander visions have been filed away or forgotten. This hedgehog-style approach – roll up into a ball and wait until things are less scary – may keep a company alive temporarily, but does little to prepare it for the future.

Analysis by Boston Consulting Group suggests that corporate hibernation only works if recessions are short, if the outside world goes back to the way it was before, and if all your competitors are equally inactive, tucked up for the economic winter. In 2009, not one of these conditions applies.

The remainder of this article can be read here. Please post comments below

David Rubenstein, co-founder of Carlyle Group, the private equity firm, said last week that his industry ought to consider adopting a new name to describe what it does more accurately. How about “change capital”, he suggested. I am not sure that this is a good idea. If Mr Rubenstein thinks the word change will be less provocative than private equity, then he is likely to be disappointed.

Change is everywhere in business, and people tend not to be very happy about it. But it is not just nostalgia, or laziness, that causes the negative reaction. Change is rarely managed well.

What do managers get wrong about change? There is quite a long list. They underestimate how long it will take to get people to accept change. They fail to recognise how difficult it is to spread the message that change may be necessary or unavoidable. They do not understand what change feels like beyond the boardroom or the top management table. And, having finally got the organisation to accept the need for change, they forget to explain that the new direction or mission may change again, and possibly quite soon.

The remainder of this article can be read here. Please post comments below

This story in today’s Oberver newspaper caught my eye.

Are some British employers - consciously or unconsciously - racist? Check out the remarkable response of the person from the British Chambers of Commerce. (I trust she has been quoted accurately.)

We need more research. I am off for three days to New York, but will return to this topic when I am back.

Thursday’s FT contained two separate stories which created a rather paradoxical effect.

On the international news pages, accompanied by an impressive photo of Greenland’s melting ice cover, was this story on climate change - worrying evidence of rapid climate change and rapidly thinning ice.

And then in the companies section, good news for Cairn Energy, which has announced a major new exploration for oil in… Greenland.

Both stories were accurate. They were not incompatible. But the juxtaposition brought home how complicated globalisation is. We need growth, and new sources of fossil fuels. But we also need to change the way we live and work - and fast.

There are no easy answers to this paradox. But tough thinking, trade-offs and action are all required - now.

An arresting sight on the streets of London last night: a pile of Evening Standard newspapers, at the entrance of a tube station, simply left for people to pick up at their leisure. For free. Gratis. Nuttin’.

Last week a copy would have cost you 50 pence, in contrast to the other remaining London evening paper, London Lite, which was already available as a freesheet. No longer. The Standard, a venerable title, has joined the great 21st century giveaway economy.

Speaking as a hack, who wants to earn a living by writing, I am depressed to see the Standard going down this route. It is a good paper. It is worth paying something to read it - 50 pence, for example.

Continue reading "Newspapers - they are giving them away"