Strengths become weaknesses
One year on from the fall of Lehman Brothers, the face of Dick Fuld, former chief executive, has been back on our television screens. Some of his greatest hits have received another airing. “When I find a short seller, I want to tear his heart out and eat it before his eyes while he’s still alive,” he declares in one clip.
Drug dealers are perfect gurus in a recession
At the age of 12, he was a drug dealer; at 22, he had nine bullets shot into him at close range; at 23, he had a career change and became a rapper; by 30, he had diversified into clothes, vitamin mineral water and condoms and now, at 32, has pulled off something that Jack Welch didn’t manage until he was 30 years older: 50 Cent is now a management guru.
For the rapper, this latest career move has come early. But for the management guru industry, it is long overdue. Mountaineers, conductors and army generals have all stepped forward to offer their tips for success to managers. But as far as I know, 50, as his fans know him, is the first hustler to give a helping hand to executives on their way to the corner office.
Drug dealing has considerably more overlap with business than playing the violin or climbing a mountain. It’s a competitive, fast growing industry in which the successful have to be even sharper and more flexible than the most driven businessman.
Continue reading “Drug dealers are perfect gurus in a recession”
Warren Buffett on US recovery and Ken Lewis
Warren Buffett at Fortune Magazine’s Most Powerful Women Conference has offered some praise for the US government’s recovery efforts (he was one of President Obama’s “economic advisers”, so perhaps the government listened to what he said) and has some praise for Ken Lewis.
Further reading
Further reading
Picks of the week
A few interesting stories I have seen in the past few days.
Life in a downturn
A couple of stories on FT.com highlight some of the more difficult aspects of life in a downturn.
Our ongoing series “Trading places: Migration in a crisis” is a fascinating, if slightly depressing look, at how the downturn is affecting migrant workers for a number of different communities across the world: Japenese-Brazilians who are returning to Brazil after years in Japan; Mexican labourers who have lost their jobs in the US and are unable to remit money to their families; migrants in China’s Pearl River Delta who are being offered school places to stay; and for Nigeria, a “brain gain” as emigrants are coming home.
Another story that has been getting a lot of recent attention has been the decision by BT to rethink its graduate recruitment policies by no longer particpating in the annual “milk round” of UK university job fairs (see Stefan’s column in the post below). My colleague Andrew Hill offers the latest take on the debate by assessing the value of trainees (and, as he declares, he too is a former trainee, so he knows what he’s talking about).
No room for business as usual
What should the priorities for business be as the economic recovery takes hold? It is already clear what sort of recovery some people are looking forward to.
“Investment banking is back,” purred an analyst on the BBC last week. And how. Some remarkable profit figures have been announced in recent days, which will be followed in due course by some remarkable bonus payments. Meanwhile, stock markets seem to be pricing in a pretty vigorous recovery, carrying on where they had temporarily left off.
But how can this be? The thesaurus had been exhausted over the past couple of years as commentators ran out of words with which to describe the financial crisis. And behind all the hyperbolical language lay an obvious implication: “business as usual” was not going to be a sensible or an adequate approach as companies started to rebuild.
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World exclusive interview with Google!
Ok, so we don’t actually have any sort of world exclusive with anyone from Google (although today’s news that Google is releasing an operating system is, in management terms, a huge story and it would be a great time to have an interview with the company) but I borrowed the headline from the cover of the August edition of Wired UK magazine. I added the exclamation mark at the end to show just how much better our “world exclusive” is.
It’s an odd claim given that Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has been interviewed a few times on FT.com, and that there doesn’t seem to be anything especially new in this piece. But any interview with the people (Wired also spoke to Sergey Brin) who are at the forefront of a technology revolution at one of the world’s most interesting companies is worth reading.
Niche marketing takes it to another level
Our story in today’s paper that Mars has launched Fling, a chocolate bar targeted at women (“Naughty, but not that naughty”) is part of that contant trend among consumer goods companies to change what they produce and how they market it. Consumers are changing and the company’s selling them products are trying to keep pace with how things are evolving.
One reason, of course, is the global downturn. And to get a sense of how significant an impact it is having, you should take a look at Procter & Gamble, maker of Pampers nappies and Gillette razors. The company has decided to start making cheaper products.
Jenny Wiggins, our consumer industries correspondent, explains:
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.
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