These articles illustrate why leadership matters. Few great businesses are built without inspirational leadership and we can all learn from the people in the news who are doing this well. What can you learn from the people described in the articles below?
It’s not just what you do but when you do it. If your business doesn’t change, as the world changes around you, it is very unlikely that you will be as successful in the future as you are today. You might think that is a very obvious statement, but many businesses don’t change, they leave […]
If only Joe Lewis would manage my pension fund. Joe Lewis, one of Britain’s most successful entrepreneurs and the 7th wealthiest person in the UK, who is rumoured to have made more money than George Soros did when the £ was forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, is in the news again. […]
Unfortunately, you can’t just wish your way out of a recession, or work harder, you need to innovate. The truly, truly, truly, wonderful recent idea, that Greece’s economic problems would somehow be improved if people worked on Saturdays, is perhaps the most ridiculous of the myriad inane comments that our political leaders have come […]
It looks like Roger White, the CEO of AG Barr, is onto something. There will be many of you reading this who have never tasted Irn-Bru. Well, the advert opposite may help you better understand its market positioning and many of my friends say that the lady’s reaction demonstrates very clearly what some feel about […]
You need complete control to make the most of any business. I once worked for someone who one day shouted at me across his rather palatial office “I will, never, never, never, never, do a joint venture!” in response to my suggestion that it might be worth considering doing one. I’d never done one, so […]
Being the biggest isn’t of much economic value if others can do what you do just as well. Vestas, the Danish company that can proudly claim to be the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturer, is struggling. It announced 2335 job cuts earlier in the year and it has just announced another 1400, from its […]
Being too much of a specialist is a burden when faced with radical change. If you had been in the railway business, when the first aeroplanes took to the air, you had a choice: you could have carried on playing with your train set and seen a lot of transportation dollars move to aeroplanes […]
Is Cargill suffering more from poor leadership than it is from the failure of its trading instincts? Yes, there is a place called Minnetonka; in Minnesota, predictably enough. It sounds like the sort of place that John Steinbeck would, perhaps even should, have written about; perhaps he did, because in East of Eden, which […]
Can Manganese Bronze fend off Nissan? Have you ever wondered how New York ended up with its yellow cabs? I’m taller than most, so I may be speaking just for the lanky, but does anyone actually fit in a yellow cab comfortably? I guess they are as iconic as London’s black cabs but as far […]
Aren’t utilities supposed to be boring? Surely, not even William Shakespeare could have made up such a fanciful tale as this. Wouldn’t you have thought that running a water utility would be fairly straight forward? You turn on the tap and the water comes out, right? Not much has really changed in how that works […]
