Monthly Archives: August 2010

The Economist has a review of Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble’s book The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge. The book has just come out and looks like it is well worth reading. Organisations often put huge resources into producing ideas … Continue reading →

Ron Ashkenas wrote a piece on conflict avoidance for the Harvard Business Review earlier this week. Conflict avoidance, together with its pernicious twin, embarrassment avoidance, is behind a lot of the dysfunctional behaviour in organisations. Most people will go to extreme … Continue reading →

Financial Secretary to the Treasury Mark Hoban crashed and burned on Radio 4 this morning. When asked whether he had conducted a formal study of the impact of the government’s spending proposals on disadvantaged groups, he didn’t have a clue what … Continue reading →

Something unusual happened yesterday; this blog had a lot more comments than it normally gets. That’s surprising for this time of year, given that many people are on holiday. Over the last year or so, I have noticed two seemingly … Continue reading →

This is a Taiwanese view of the government’s Spending Challenge and some of the bonkers ideas people have come up with. Hat Tip: Liberal Conspiracy

The government is coming under increasing pressure from business to drop its immigration cap, as I predicted in a somewhat flippant post back in May. Now the Law Society has waded in saying that City law firms might relocate if they can’t recruit the … Continue reading →

It was open season (again) on management consultants this weekend after it was revealed that the NHS spent £313 million on them last year. The Independent’s Johann Hari climbed aboard the bandwaggon with this amusing polemic which seems to have been based on … Continue reading →

Good news from the Office for National Statistics; the first significant reduction in government borrowing since the start of the financial crisis. Borrowing in July 2010 was £3.8bn compared to £6.1bn this time last year. So how has that happened? … Continue reading →

Today, George Osborne did one of those verbal tricks where you say that your opponents fall into one of a number of categories, then you shoot down each of those positions, thus showing that all your opponents are stupid: There seem to … Continue reading →

By now, everyone and his cat must have seen Philip Green’s response to questions about his tax status, posted on Twitter by City AM political editor David Crow and retweeted by, well, everyone and his cat. The appointment of Sir Philip … Continue reading →