Late Learning Centre
"Look what happens when great brands do nothing as the world changes around them.” One of my fundamental building blocks of a great business is to “stay different”. This implies…
The articles below illustrate the importance of risk management. Businesses often end up taking much bigger risks than they intended and you should learn something from that and not do what they do. The future is always uncertain; take small steps forward so you can at least survive if things go wrong.
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The Best Buy Uncertainty Principle[1]
"You can’t sustain profits whilst investing in radical change." Having just spent the last two weeks in the United States, where I am working with clients and also starting an…
Del Boy at the Speed of Light
How BATS was hoisted with its own petard. In case you don’t know, a “petard” was a small bomb used for blowing-up fortifications. Sometimes they went off prematurely, injuring the…
Being Emma Watson
“Is Stagecoach Theatre Arts just ’resting‘ and waiting for the ’squeezed middle‘ to recover its spending power?” Stagecoach Theatre Arts started trading in 1988 and now it operates the largest…
Goodbye Game Group
“How can a market leader go out of business?” The Game Group, a video games retailer with more than 600 stores in the UK and Ireland, and nearly twice as…
Why Does NED Have So Little To Say?
Do non-executive directors (NEDs) make much of a difference to a company? Or are they just there for show? A non-executive director, like Edward opposite, is a member of a…
Markets Aren’t Efficient After All
What witches, alchemists, fortune tellers and bankers have in common. Well, well, Martin Wheatley, head of the consumer and markets business unit at the Financial Services Authority, has jumped on…
Vince’s Big Idea: Shuffle the Chairs
FTSE directors taking 100x the average wage is just too much, for most of them. Thankfully, Britain is a pretty stable place to live. It’s one of the benefits of…
Rogue Gambler
How the "sport of kings" became a traded commodity. In the great scheme of things the £600m that a Betfair punter could have lost on the Christmas Hurdle at Leopardstown…
Failure Can Be Harder Than You Think
The “world’s greatest salesman” knew how to fail, do you? Thomas John Watson, Sr. was the chairman and CEO of IBM who oversaw that company's growth into an international force…