This cover story in the latest issue of Business Week, on changing times at General Electric, is well worth a read. I am a Jeff Immelt fan. He takes a lot of hits on behalf of CEOs everywhere, being one of the most famous corporate bosses in the world. But I know he doesn’t let it get to him, because I’ve heard him say so – “To hell with it!” is his attitude. He is not going to let the media define him.

Being CEO of GE is one of the hardest jobs in the world. But Immelt is candid, straight, thoughtful and, I think, pretty effective. We should not be writing him off just yet.

Some readers may be beginning to tire just a little of the tales of heroism some of us (me included) are inflicting on colleagues as we explain how, in defiance of volcanic ash and transport woes, we have managed to get back in to the office.

(Thanks for asking: stranded in Milan, I got a sleeper from Verona to Paris - grazie mille Fiorella Passoni of Edelman’s Milan office – and then found a suddenly available seat on the last Eurostar out of Paris last night.)

I finally got home at midnight, three days later than planned. Not nice, certainly, but not quite the nightmare others have suffered. I only had me to worry about. I managed to fit in a couple of decent meals too.

The more interesting point here is that thousands of us have been undergoing a practical exercise in crisis management. The familiar, steady-state world has been interrupted. We have been plunged into confusion. How have we coped?

Ten days ago the FT published my interview with Paul Polman, chief executive of Unilever, in which he made some strikingly robust comments on the (in his view misguided) theory that public companies should worry about creating shareholder value before anything else.

Several letters representing almost every possible point of view have since been published in the paper: derisory, technical, supportive, adulatory. My colleague Michael Skapinker offered his own wise perspective yesterday, and today we have published two more readers’ letters on the topic.

Is there anything left to say? Plenty. Yesterday my colleague Ravi Mattu and I had a fascinating conversation with Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. He had some forceful observations to make on one of the key elements of the shareholder value debate: the idea that top pay should be tied to the company’s share price to align management’s interests with those of the shareholders.

Tomorrow I am heading to Milan to attend a symposium hosted by the European Academy of Business in Society (EABIS), which is titled “The future of economics and management in a post-crisis world”. Shareholder value is firmly on the agenda. I shall blog a few highlights when I get a moment to do so.

And I shall try and make some sense out of all this in my column next Tuesday (April 20).

The appalling scenes at the Smolensk air crash over the weekend have stunned European onlookers, and doubtless many more people beyond. It is far too early to know precisely what happened, although reports of unheeded warnings from Russian air traffic controllers are beginning to emerge.

Air disasters are inevitably a macabre subject. Understandably, frequent fliers find them troubling.

Daniel Goleman first pointed to the crucial management issues at the heart of air disasters many years ago in his ground-breaking work on Emotional Intelligence. Why did Australian flight crews have such an enviable safety record? Was is it because of their lack of artificial deference, and the ability even junior staff had to speak up and warn of danger? Which flight crews could be the most dangerous? The ones where macho pilots could not or would not listen to advice, or ones where rigid hierarchy, deference and emotional chilliness led to vital messages not getting through.

The bitter and tragic ironies of the Smolensk crash are painful. Leaders of the Polish government, heading to Russia to commemorate the murder of Polish officers and others during World War Two by the Soviet military at Katyn, have now died only a few miles from the scene of the original crime. It would be distasteful at this stage to speculate further on the causes of the crash. But when the evidence becomes clear so too will the all-too human factors which lay behind it.

In London we are bracing ourselves for tonight’s first big pre-election televised debate - between the three candidates to be chief finance minister (or Chancellor of the Exchequer, as we call the job) after the election: Alistair Darling (incumbent, Labour), George Osborne (Conservative) and Vince Cable (Liberal Democrat).

All three are going to make the best of a bad job, presenting partial or distorted information to make their case. That is not surprising. They are politicians, after all.

But what if you were interviewing candidates for the position of chief financial officer at a public company? Wouldn’t you want them to have a firm grasp of the facts?

In the wake of the financial crisis, politicians have been quick to criticise reckless bankers and others who failed to keep proper control of their businesses. But when politicians practise their own version of “business as usual”, the results are not pretty. Maybe our elected representatives would be respected and trusted more if they were prepared to speak more plainly, honestly and accurately about the state of the nation’s finances.

An interesting little snippet of information here from Marketing Week. According to data from the pollster YouGov, British Airways’ brand has suffered less from the recent strike than from the calamitous opening of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 two years ago.

It seems that management’s self-inflicted wounds can be deeper than those caused by striking workers.

I had the great pleasure of catching up with Dov Seidman this morning, when he came into the FT’s offices to meet me and my colleague John Plender. Dov is a remarkable guy. He has degrees by the armful: bachelor’s and master’s in philosophy from UCLA, PPE from Oxford – followed by Harvard Law School. All this after wrestling with dyslexia as a child.

He is an entreprenuer with ideals. He founded LRN, his consultancy, 15 years ago, to pursue his belief that businesses needed to adopt an ethical approach. But he managed to write a successful book on the subject, How, in 2007, without banging on endlessly about ethics. LRN now has around 300 employees worldwide, and has an impressive list of corporate clients.

Dov is different – free-thinking and original. He is a Davos regular, and is much quoted by the New York Times’ Tom Friedman (and me). Today we had a vigorous hour-long conversation, during which time he raised any number of interesting and important points. Here are two of them: