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How to change Executive Pay How to change executive pay?  These words are, frankly, less of statement preceding a solution than a plaintive cry.  We have arrived at a point where pretty much everyone agrees that there is a problem.  However, it’s a bit like London house prices where everyone recognises the issue but no one is...

In the good old days one could usually rely on August to provide a steady stream of seasonal silly stories. The long, hot month served up nothing but ephemeral flotsam and jetsam which could happily be ignored.  One could set aside newspapers for a few weeks in the sure knowledge that nothing of significance would settle on the idle...

Summer is over, annual leave has ended, Autumn is upon us, and it’s back to work. Despite the summer break it is all too easy to settle back into the same old routine and roll downhill to Christmas. All those dreams and ambitions of the summer, the wistful feelings of another way of living, all land with a bump when real life comes...

Regular reader(s) of this blog will know that I find work fascinating. Like Jerome K Jerome, I can look at it for hours. And for a while I’ve been interested in how we organise ourselves to jointly create (*) goods and services that provide a value for society. It has always seemed to me that, given the opportunity, in most case...

May you live in interesting times, says the famous Chinese curse.  Well, it certainly feels as if we’re all cursed at the moment.  Social, political, and economic turmoil, coupled with growing environmental issues, are all combining to such an extent that we’re seemingly suffering from corporate discombobulation. Every day ther...

I used to think that I was good at change; after all, I coach people and organisations on embracing change and even call myself a change agent.  But, as Bob Dylan said, things have changed.  And I don’t think I’m alone in finding it all rather wearisome.  I sense that one of the chief outcomes of the political, social, environ...

As cheesy romcoms go, You’ve got mail is on most lists.  We all remember the visceral excitement of getting our first emails: the sense of communion, and of being part of a brave new digital world.  20 years later and perhaps we have hit peak email.  Few work-related issues seem to stress people out more than the size o...

When the then UK Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan, was asked what could blow his government off its course he famously replied: “Events, my dear boy, events.”  Things rarely go in a straight line, shit happens (as the phrase goes), and few strategies stand the test of time.  This conflict of strategy meeting reality was probabl...

The majority of M&A, it seems, end in failure.  They simply don’t produce the expected results, destroying rather than creating value.  And yet every year companies continue down the path with their eyes wide shut.  Books have been written and lectures given but still lessons are seemingly ignored. Sometimes it is because M&...

  Use-by dates creep up on you. It comes to everyone, of course.  The old year passes and the new one reminds you that time and tide aren’t waiting.  Over the decades one has been through the cupboards of one’s parents, surreptitiously discarding all those items clearly past their use-by dates.  And then it happens to ...