Category: Strategy/ops

Even prison managers sometimes fiddle

October 20, 2009 7:34 pm by Ravi Mattu

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”

Posted in Career/skills, Leadership, Management, Managing others, Strategy/ops | Permalink

Benoit Mandelbrot talks to the FT

October 1, 2009 4:22 pm by Ravi Mattu

If you haven’t seen it already, I would highly recommend our Future of Investing series. There are a lot of interesting contributions (yes, I would say that, but check out the list of people involved – Martin Wolf, Mohamed El-Erian, Andrew Lo, Gillian Tett, Robert Shiller etc – and tell me if I’m wrong) but especially good is today’s fascinating interview with the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, which considers why ‘efficient’ markets collapse and why we need some new theories on markets.

It’s also worth highlighting an article Prof Mandelbrot wrote with Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb three years ago, for the FT’s Mastering Uncertainty series. They argued that how business approached uncertainty was the wrong way round. Risk models focused too heavily on the norm rather than the exceptions. So, just because something is correct 95 per cent of the time doesn’t mean that should predominate when the remaining 5 per cent are important enough that they could bring down the whole system.

As you would expect, they explain it much better than I do.

Posted in Finance, Hard times, Strategy/ops | Permalink

State of play

September 23, 2009 12:49 pm by Ravi Mattu

If you haven’t seen it already, do check out “State of Play”, our excellent series of interviews with chief executives of some of the UK’s biggest companies.

Leaders so far: Francis Salway of Land Securities; Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP; Warren East, Arm Holdings; and Michael Smith of Mind Candy.

Tomorrow: Justin King of Sainsbury’s who has some interesting things to say on how consumer behaviour may well have changed for good as a result of the recession.

Posted in Hard times, Leadership, Management, Marketing/sales, Strategy/ops | Permalink

Ending the healthcare malaise

August 18, 2009 1:40 am by Stefan Stern

All this angry shouting about healthcare reform must be really bad for people’s blood pressure. But it is no joking matter. “Health is wealth”, as they say. Nothing could be more serious.

In the heat of the debate taking place in the US, little light is being shed on what really matters: outcomes. But while the funding of healthcare is not a matter for this column, the management of it is. And it turns out that the task of introducing better healthcare for all is fundamentally a management challenge.

The Brits know this better than anybody. The UK’s National Health Service was founded, in the face of bitter opposition, more than 60 years ago. It has been a vast, living experiment, and a monument to managerialism, good and bad.

The remainder of the article can be read here. Please post comments below.

Posted in Management, Strategy/ops | Permalink

Are women a help or a hindrance in the boardroom?

August 6, 2009 7:41 pm by Ravi Mattu

I can’t claim to know the answer – is it really knowable? – but there certainly seem to be divergent views on the issue.

New research suggests more women on the board can improve governance but has a negative effect on profitability. In the words of Daniel Ferreira of the London School of Economics, one of the report’s authors: “This is a complicated picture.”

That may well qualify for understatement of the day but a few of recent pieces highlight just how complicated – and current – the issue is.

In today’s Lombard column, Andrew Hill points out that the authors are not coming out against female directors but do “warn that about forcing the issue with quotas, Norwegian-style, and then expecting automatic improvements in performance”.

A few weeks ago, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, a consultant and co-author of a book called Why Women Mean Business, wrote: “There is a convincing business case for designing organisations that attract and retain women to the top.” Further, she argued, “having a greater proportion of women in decision-making roles improves business performance and profitability”.

A few weeks later, our own Lucy Kellaway, who also happens to be a non-executive director, took a different view, describing the so-called “asset-to-oestrogen” ratio as “total twaddle”.

Who’s right? Comments welcome.

Posted in Career/skills, Corporate culture, Leadership, Management, Strategy/ops | Permalink

The rules of engagement

August 4, 2009 1:29 am by Stefan Stern

When it comes to battling with the competition, where do you draw the line? Is all fair in love, war and business?

The key text for believers in ruthless competition is probably Hardball: Are you playing to play or playing to win?written five years ago by Boston Consulting Group’s George Stalk and his ex-BCG colleague Rob Lachenauer.

For these two, a hardball approach means “creating discomfort for others and tolerating it in yourself”. Not that you should consider doing anything illegal – of course not. But there is a moral and legal grey area (a “caution zone”) which, the authors argue, is “rich in possibility”. A smart leader will recognise where to draw a “bright line” in this zone. He or she “lets everybody know when they’re getting close to it, and takes corrective action as soon as anyone steps over it”.

The remainder of the article can be read here. Please post comments below.

Posted in Leadership, Management, Managing others, Strategy/ops | Permalink

Change the way you work

July 28, 2009 1:18 am by Stefan Stern

THUMP! THUMP! THUMP! went the music and WAH! WAH! WAH! went my baby daughter. A party a few doors down was getting out of hand. It was 1.15 in the morning and time to take action.

“Wimbledon police station?” I asked, after dialling the number in the phone book. “Well, we handle their calls,” a man answered, slightly mysteriously. (Great: a call centre, just what I needed.) But no, sorry, they didn’t deal with this sort of thing. Try the local authority and its environmental health department instead.

I did. I pressed “3” to opt for help, and was put through to a tired-sounding person on the night shift. “Let me take a few more details from you, and somebody will call you back,” he said. “Can’t you deal with this?” I whined. “That’s not how it works.”

The remainder of the article can be read here. Please post comments below.

Posted in Innovation/tech, Management, Strategy/ops | Permalink

Get your strategy right now before the dust settles

July 21, 2009 1:04 am by Stefan Stern

We need to talk about strategy.

Now there’s a sentence guaranteed to crush the spirit of any senior management team. But business leaders ought to recognise, as they catch their breath after months of turbulence, that the strategy they were pursuing until recently is unlikely to be right for today.

It’s not just that markets have changed. Your organisation has changed. You may have all been through a near-death experience. Even if you avoided calamity, it is unlikely that colleagues are the same carefree people you remember from a year or two ago. Most businesses have been making serious cutbacks. Co-workers may be doing their best to look calm and positive. But they can see unemployment rising and know that sustained recovery is a long way off.

So, before even attempting to work out a strategy for changed times, leaders first need to acknowledge that their people feel differently about the jobs they are doing. This is not the same thing as bland reassurance, however. Virginia Merritt, managing partner of the London-based consultancy Stanton Marris, said last week: “One company chairman asked me: ‘How can I convince them that things will get back to the way they were before?’ I had to tell him that this was not the right way to come at the problem.”

The remainder of the article can be read here. Please post comments below.

Posted in Management, Strategy/ops | Permalink

World exclusive interview with Google!

July 8, 2009 2:32 pm by Ravi Mattu

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.