Humour and charm are a surprisingly powerful combination as a means of ascent in life. I have met a number of entrepreneurs who have built fortunes on the back of their wit and general popularity – and not much else. They disarm us with self-deprecation, we enjoy their company – so why wouldn’t we want to do business with them? Of course, it all has to be done well; sycophancy and flat jokes do not weave the same spell.

Continue reading "Leaders who use charm to reach the top"

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.

Continue reading "Strengths become weaknesses"

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 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.

• The Obamas are good for business - a farmers market is set to open near the White House
• Merkel wins with Opel sale - it would seem that this earlier story I linked to got a bit ahead of itself. Having said that, a lot of details remain to be worked out, so maybe we have, too
• Wal-Mart has helped ruin the US - its values are shaping the economy and that’s not a good thing. In our review of The Retail Revolution, we suggested that much at the company had changed in recent years (Hat tip: The Browser)
• The sorry tale of Rover - maybe the workers shouldn’t have been so scared of Alchemy Partners after all

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"

Apple held its “It’s only rock-n-roll” event yesterday and Steve Jobs the leader of the Apple tribe (which I wrote about in Why Community Matters a few weeks ago) was back in front of the camera and his community. In the video after the jump, Richard Waters explains why this was the most dramatic news from the company and why there remain some major unresolved questions in terms of the company’s future prospects.

Meanwhile, Chris Nuttall reviewed the video iPod nano, the “technology star of the event” and live-blogged the event over on the Tech Blog.

Continue reading "Steve Jobs is back but Apple has work to do"

I’m coming a bit late to this but just as our debate on women in the boardroom generated a fair bit of heated discussion a few weeks ago, today’s report that women in the the UK’s financial industry suffer from a “shocking disparity” in performance related pay (many receive 80 per cent less than male colleagues) has rightly been getting a lot of attention.

If the report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission is accurate, the results are difficult to swallow. Not only is the pay gap is one of the widest in the UK economy and could be being entrenched by recruitment patterns, an issue we take to task in an editorial in today’s paper.