David Rubenstein, co-founder of The Carlyle Group, the private equity investor, has defended his industry’s management style in an interview with Wharton business school’s private equity club:

The techniques that private equity developed have helped to make companies more efficient. They do make workers more motivated and they do produce the kind of returns that I think enable the system to move forward…. if you give a manager a large piece of a business, if you have people who are investing in the business, putting their own money at risk, and if you can operate in a private setting to a large extent, you can create value.

But does that add up to much without colossal slugs of debt? Michael Gordon, the global head of institutional investment at Fidelity International, says it hasn’t so far. In a recent article for the FT, he declared that the turbo-charged returns delivered by private equity investors before the credit markets seized up were almost exclusively the result of leverage, not the superior accountability or incentivisation of owner-managers. “Private equity as we have come to know it is all about debt - lock, stock and sinking barrel,” he claimed.

With the Société Générale and Northern Rock sagas, it is a good time to be in the business of advising errant companies on how to restore their lost reputations. Leslie Gaines-Ross (left), chief reputation strategist at PR firm Weber Shandwick, has just written a book on the subject entitled Corporate Reputation, 12 Steps to Safeguarding and Recovering Reputation. She braved Monday’s storm to give me her opinion on how ceos should apologise when they or their organisations make mistakes, while also addressing topics such as whether or not a company should engage with hostile bloggers. Listen to the 8-minute audio interview here.

Continuing with the theme of SocGen and angry bloggers, the French bank features in a rant from tompeters!, the management guru we knew as Tom Peters in a more conventionally punctuated age. Writing from his farm in Tinmouth, Vermont, tom has just used his blog to have a pop at Daniel Bouton, the bullet-headed SocGen chairman who is somehow still hanging on to his job after the Kerviel affair. It’s part of a broader tirade about executive pay. Other ceos who feel his wrath include Boeing boss Jim McNerney and Fidelity’s Peter Lynch. This is tom’s understated conclusion:

I don’t want The Law to muzzle exec pay. But I would like common sense to prevail, or at least make the occasional appearance. The 500 Fortune 500 CEOs are no more flawless, genius, etc., than my dog Dodger, who, trust me, via his own sort of Excellence, can reverse the tide and part the waters by producing a fart that carries on the wind from Tinmouth VT all the way to Wall Street.