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"

Like the rain, recessions fall on the just and the unjust, and on people of all ages. But not every age group will face the same problems or react to them in a similar way.

Some pundits are predicting that, in the coming age of austerity, the workplace will be the setting for intergenerational conflict. Tensions over unequal pension arrangements or varying attitudes to work may cause trouble.

Others argue that now is the time to invest in youth. My colleague Luke Johnson last week recommended hiring “as many bright young things as you can afford”, in the hope that “their dynamism will counteract the inevitable conservatism of an existing institution”.

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Waddya know? Tom Peters is going to publish a new book. It should be out in February 2010, and it will be based on his last five years of blogging. (Relax - he’s on his fourth rewrite. It’s not just a collection of blog posts.) The theme? The “little big things” that matter - i.e. if you pay some attention to enough of the apparent minutiae of life at work you will do a lot better. Maybe he should have called it “Do sweat the small stuff”.

I am particularly surprised about this development, however, because when we met for lunch last year and I asked him whether he was going to write another book, Tom replied: “God, I hope not!” But maybe at the back of his mind the idea was stirring even then.

It’s certainly a very 2010 idea. Good luck Tom.

Do we need to think again about globalisation in the wake of the financial crisis? Almost certainly yes. One of the few good things about the crisis is that it should have made fresh thinking possible.

Continue reading "How to compete in an upside down world"

The British Conservative party is holding its annual conference in Manchester this week. At the centre of attention is the party leader, David Cameron. Opinion polls suggest that he is likely to become prime minister some time next year.

This presents him with a leadership challenge. How should he conduct himself this week, when so many eyes will be on him? This time last year I criticised him for being too apologetic. But now there is another pitfall to avoid: seeming over-confident, arrogant, too certain of victory.

Mr Cameron is a highly effective communicator, so it will be fascinating to see what tone he adopts this week, and in particular in his speech on Thursday.

In a way political leadership can be harder than business leadership. Before you take office you are almost literally “all talk”. You have to build expectations to win. Then comes reality. You “campaign in poetry, then govern in prose,” as Mario Cuomo famously said.

Let’s see what kind of poetry Mr Cameron recites on Thursday.

Lord Turner’s recent remarks (first made in Prospect magazine) about “socially useless” financial innovation may have cost him a few friends. Perhaps a good regulator – he is chairman of the Financial Services Authority – should have a prickly relationship with the industry he is scrutinising. But he returned to his theme in front of a City audience at the Lord Mayor’s banquet last week, provoking some heckling at the time and rather more harrumphing after he had finished speaking.

Continue reading "Time for the socially useful manager"