ft.com/managementblog

When members of the United Auto Workers union travelled to Washington DC to lobby on behalf of the three Detroit-based car giants, they did not fly in on private jets. But their pleas were no less urgent than those being made by the companies’ chief executives.

The UAW fears the consequences of a collapse of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler. As many as 3m jobs could be lost, they say. The pension and healthcare benefits of 1m retirees, spouses and dependants would be cut, with the state left to pick up the bill. Thousands of other businesses – car dealers, autoparts suppliers and many more – would be threatened.

The union is right to be worried. When high-quality manufacturing jobs disappear the prospects for employees can be grim. Recently published research from the Work Foundation, a London-based think-tank, and the Birmingham Business School, has revealed what happened to the workers who lost their jobs when the last volume British carmaker, Rover, closed in April 2005.

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

I should add that a late-breaking publication -

Grown Up Digital - how the net generation is changing your world

by Don Tapscott, McGraw-Hill, US$27.95, £15.99, 368 pages

is a terrific new book by the author of Wikinomics.

Tapscott explains in great detail why members of Generation Y (he calls them the “net generation”) act and respond in the way they do. They think differently. They are “bathed in bits”, he says. They are “digital natives”, not “digital immigrants”. Thought-provoking. (Full review to be published in the FT on 11.11.08.)

When Markets Collide: Investment Strategies for the Age of Global Economic Change
By Mohamed El-Erian
McGraw-Hill Professional £15.99, 304 pages
Winner of the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award 2008. El-Erian’s serious analysis of the new economic world order has won admirers in every major financial market. As we struggle to work out what the “new normal” will look like, El-Erian provides readers with market-tested insights.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness
By Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
Yale University Press £18, 293 pages
The policy wonks’ favourite, this treatise by two Chicago economists has proved highly influential. Top-down government diktat is proving less and less effective, they argue. People cannot be told what to do. For better outcomes, “nudge” them: make suggestions, use peer pressure. Less convincing on what happens when nudging isn’t enough.

The Logic of Life: Uncovering the New Economics of Everything
By Tim Harford
Little, Brown £18.99, 288 pages
The FT’s undercover economist comes out into the open with an entertaining look at behavioural economics, and the rational motivation behind our apparently quirky and unexpected actions. Does going Dutch at a restaurant make economic sense? When is it right to bluff at cards?

A Sense of Urgency
By John Kotter
Harvard Business Press £11.99, 208 pages
One of the world’s leading gurus of change, Kotter revisits his eight steps of change theory and focuses on its most important element: a sense of urgency. Managing change successfully really does come down to that. An elegantly written book that proves you don’t have to drone on endlessly to make a point.

Continue reading "Best business books of 2008"

Today’s Financial Times included its annual ranking of European business schools, based on aggregate performance across MBAs, executive MBAs, executive education and masters courses.

The top ten are listed below, with their 2007 rank in brackets (note that there are ties in fourth and eighth position):

1. (1.) HEC Paris
2. (2.) London Business School
3. (3.) Insead
4. (5) IE Business School
4. (4) IMD
6. (7) ESCP-EAP European School of Management
7. (6) Iese Business School
8. (9) EM Lyon
8. (8) Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University
10. (16) Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School

Check out the full, interactive ranking and the accompanying special report.

• Defensive and proactive strategies for a downturn;
• A “hyper-tangled wholly mangled world”: a quotation from Bob Dylan’s poetry or an entertaining rant by Tom Peters?
• Local can beat global;
• How to make the transition from running a unit to running an entire organisation.

A new web-based service called Rypple is offering workers private, anonymous feedback from colleagues and bosses.

Members use the site to ask their peers how they performed in a specific task, or how they are doing in general. The peers write down what they think and these opinions are returned to the feedback-seeker without their names attached.

This nameless character assassination dispassionate evaluation enables members to work on their weaknesses on a rolling basis, instead of having to wait for their annual career appraisal, the company says.

Continue reading "If you are paranoid now, wait until you join Rypple"

BBC Radio 4 broadcast an ostensibly light-hearted programme that made me grimace yesterday. It was about punctuality and time management and featured a factory that docked the pay of workers going to the toilet outside scheduled breaks.

Punctuality may be important but too much oversight eliminates those informal interactions that make work more productive as well as more bearable. Who hasn’t picked up a useful snippet of work information from a colleague during a moment of impromptu down time?

I’d almost forgotten about the programme when a couple of hours later I came across an illuminating profile of Ikujiro Nonaka, the Japanese management guru, in the new edition of Strategy + Business, the house magazine of Booz & Company.

Continue reading "Clock-watching bosses need to discover the Japanese concept of ‘ba’"

Here are a few headlines that I read on the same day in this newspaper last week:

“Deutsche Bank job cuts focus on New York and London”

“BASF to cut output by 25 per cent and reduce hours”

“Fidelity set to axe hundreds of UK staff”

“Babcock & Brown unveils radical sell-off plan as it slashes 850 jobs”

“Collins Stewart cuts staff amid mid-cap refocus”

You get the picture. There is not much good news out there at the moment. Revenues are falling, and jobs are going. Management has to act responsibly and think about the long-term health, and survival, of the business.

The talk is all of hard-headed realism. So when I received some news about a corporate programme called “Employees First”, I presumed that it must refer to some sort of harsh but honest cost-cutting measure.

The remainder of the article can be read here. Please post c0mments below.

This piece was published in Saturday’s FT. It was a huge pleasure to meet the great man.

Do note Tom’s assertion that “management is not getting harder”.

What do you think?

I had the great pleasure (and privilege) of meeting Narayana Murthy, founder and now chairman of the board of Infosys, the Indian IT giant, in London this week.

Now 62 years old, he is officially retired from any executive role. But he has become “chief mentor” at the business, and is available to offer advice, experience and guidance to anyone at the company who seeks him out.

It is a rather Indian concept – not unlike the extended family in which Mr Murthy grew up. His parents and in-laws helped him and his wife bring up their own children. Now Mr Murthy is there like a parent (or grandparent!), looking over his old business.

I asked him: what explains the success of great Indian businesses such as Infosys, Wipro and the Tata group? Mr Murthy believes there are some culturally specific qualities, but also some universal ones, that lie behind the achievements.

Continue reading "The Indian advantage"