What motivates high achievers? Is it money, status or power? Perhaps it is none of these. Perhaps the strongest urge is simply the overwhelming desire to escape boredom.

Unquestionably, the executive suite embraces melodrama with more enthusiasm than any other activity. Making sales, hiring new staff, generating a profit are all very well – but what really excites the boardroom is corporate intrigue. After all, even in business, the key players are not robots but humans, impelled by emotions and irrational dreams of glory or revenge. Life in many ways is but a brief play, or possibly a tragedy, and most of us are acting some imagined role or another half the time anyway.

The actual stuff that makes most companies function is mundane: producing and delivering the goods every day, efficiently and at a decent margin, can be deadly dull. So the favourite form of escapism in most organisations is to conspire and manipulate with and against colleagues like the cast in some low-budget thriller. It is a tendency that is especially pronounced among the leadership class; after all, lots of them are exhibitionists with outsized egos and a thirst for the limelight.

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F Scott Fitzgerald said: “There are no second acts in American lives.” An awful lot of entrepreneurs, investors and executives must hope he was talking nonsense.

The past 18 months have seen many reputations ravaged, plenty of high-profile sackings and a lot of business failures. I am afraid that in this digital world, such blemishes are recorded for all time.

Not many of us will emerge entirely unscathed from the battering of this downturn – a great deal of mistakes of different sorts have been exposed. So we should all maintain an optimistic belief that the world is more forgiving than is commonly supposed.

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Dame Anne Owers, the Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales, said today that a number of prison managers had moved out “difficult” inmates because they were worried that their presence would negatively impact their inspection.

It seemed especially farcical because, apparently, it would have had no impact if the prisoners had stayed.

“The presence of those prisoners wouldn’t have affected our inspectors assessment at all,” said Dame Anne.

“Sadly for the many staff and managers who had worked hard to improve the two prisons, their efforts will inevitably be overshadowed by these events,” she said.

“This is deplorable, not only because of the effects on individuals, but because of the underlying mind-set that prisoners are merely pieces to be moved around the board to meet performance targets or burnish the reputation of the prison.”

What really struck me about Dame Anne’s comments was her concern that this would have a damaging impact on moral for the staff and lower level managers, and provide a negative example to them.

Continue reading "Even prison managers sometimes fiddle"

The news that Raj Rajarathnam, head of hedge fund Galleon, has been arrested for insider trading opens up all sorts of interesting issues. The use of wire taps to track white collar crime is reminiscent of tracking down mobsters, the Sri Lankan government’s claims that he had ties to Tamil separatists and Mr Rajarathnam’s motivation - in the book New Investment Superstars, he said: “After awhile, money is not the motivation. I want to win every time. Taking calculated risks gets my adrenaline pumping.” - and his prominent position in the philanthropic organisations in New York, and so on.

What struck me, is that he planned to be in the office this morning to explain this all to staff. Managers face all sorts of communication challenges and this surely has to be among the toughest, a delicate balance of trying to maintain a level of credibility as the company leader but also, presumably, trying to make sure the people in the business keep the business going, all against the background of a handcuffed Mr Rajaratnam being escorted by FBI agents on the front page of most major newspapers.

UPDATE: Ok, so I guess you simply protest your innocence.

In today’s paper, check out our latest ranking of executive MBAS. As you will see, the trend for success seems to be those programmes that are taught in multiple locations. In the age of globalisation, that has to make sense.

• A husband and wife switch jobs for two weeks - Huband takes become the stay-at-home parent, wife takes over his job as an editor of Slate, the online magazine. Not exactly the craziest switch in the world; Susan Burton is a former editor at Harper’s Magazine (declaration: I was an intern at the magazine at the time when Susan was an editor there) but still could prove an intriguing experiment. At the very least, it should be a good read.
• David Hockney’s iPhone passion - If I was Apple, I’m not sure I could have come up with a better advertisement of just how useful the iPhone is for some people. This has to take the mobile phone as utility to a new level. The piece includes examples of work he’s created on the phone
• The price of being gay - The authors admit that this isn’t an exact science but…
• Parental benefits for the self-employed - I’m Canadian and a parent and I know lots of people who might break out and do their own thing if not for the need to keep their benefits, including maternity or paterntiy pay. Does this hold back business and entrepreneurship?
• France Telecom makes changes at the top in wake of scandal of suicides - a story that still has yet to be resolved. Here’s the FT’s take, the story in Les Echos, Liberation and Le Figaro

• Lunch with Fritz Henderson, CEO of GM - “The anonymous man with the trim mustache met me at the door to his impressive office, and with a touch of old-fashioned courtesy, offered his card.”
• Public sector managers are looking to recruit from private sector - a downturn is an opportunity for some organisations (good people losing jobs in private sector means good people able to fill public sector roles). Of course, with cuts looming to UK public services, this may be a bit premature

If you haven’t read it already, take a look at today’s fascinating interview with Tidjane Thiam, the CEO-elect of Prudential. If you have the time, it is well worth reading the full transcript of the interview.

There are all sorts of reason why the 46-year-old’s ascent to the top of the one of the world’s biggest life assurers is so interesting, not least the fact that he is the first black person to head a FTSE 100 company.

But Mr Thiam’s professional experience is also a bit unconventional for a chief executive for a City of London company. After an early career as a consultant for McKinsey in Paris, he became an independent adviser to the government of the Ivory Coast and, later, minister for development. Following a coup, he was briefly detained and then offered the position of chief of staff to the military government. He chose instead to return to McKinsey - don’t know of many consultants who have had to make such a choice - and n 2002, he was headhunted by Aviva to become its strategy director before heading the company’s continental European operations. He became finance director of Prudential in March last year and was appointed chief executive in March of this year.

From a management point of view, he offers some very revealing insights about how his time in Africa impacted (i.e. didn’t) his career in Europe:

Continue reading "The new man from the Pru"