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?
“Mouchel is just the latest in a long line of businesses who take on too much risk in order to grow.” Mouchel has come an awfully long way since 1877 when it was founded, in Briton Ferry, by Louis Gustave Mouchel. He arrived in the UK from France with a license to use the new […]
“Have you ever wondered why economists don’t always seem to make much sense?” I have always had a nagging doubt about economics and economists. For many years I just thought I wasn’t smart enough to understand what often, on the face of it at least, never made much sense to me. I was also […]
“You need to change your style of leadership as you grow.” There is no doubt that Chesapeake Energy, an oil and gas company located in Oklahoma City, USA, has done rather well for itself since it was founded by Aubrey McClendon and Tom Ward in 1989. It now owns over 15M acres of hydrocarbon licences […]
“If you want to change the world, start by changing yourself.” In my blog post on 6 January this year I decried Footsie directors being paid one hundred times the average wage. I argued that we needed a new dialogue if we wanted to make a significant change to British society and that halving this wage […]
“I have five fundamental principles that I believe underpin most successful businesses, rarely do I come across a company that flaunted them all.” Someone told me once that businesses tend to be run in a way that reflects the century the industry was formed and I think there has been, over my working life at […]
“There is much to be learned, about the future of retail, from the high street toy shop The Entertainer.” Over the last few months I have written a lot about the demise of the UK high street. As its importance as a shopping destination has declined several of my blog subjects have become market leaders […]
“Isn’t it about time Hewlett-Packard had a strategy?” In spite of what people often claim about supertankers, they actually turn quite quickly; stopping though is another matter altogether. Hewlett-Packard has demonstrated this quite well recently as its new leaders have thrown the wheel from side to side in the hope of finding clear water […]
“Being in more than one business at a time can be a distraction.” Conrad Hilton once said “you can make a lot of money from a hotel as long as you don’t build one”. Well, Accor, the French hotel group, seem to believe the same thing, in fact, they are going further and giving […]
“Little deals often signal bigger things to come.” The other day I heard a young author saying that book publishers had it all wrong, they spent too much time publishing new books and not enough time selling the ones that they had already published. Well, while I tend to agree that book sales are often […]
“So, how should they go about recruiting a new CEO?” There has been so much discussion recently about the performance and remuneration of CEO’s that I thought that it would be interesting to contemplate how Aviva, now in need of a new boss following the ignominy of a company general meeting, of all things, […]
