Read my March 2017 Management Today review of Utopia for Realists, by Rutger Bregman, here

Like a bubble sluggishly rising through murky waters, corporate governance is climbing the political agenda. Everyone intuits that something is wrong – including Theresa May and Donald Trump – but neither of them has an inkling how wrong. One glaring testimony: May’s unaccountable failure to cross-reference her governance and industrial policy Green Papers, as if there was no link between how companies are run and what they actually do. Another is her treatment of exorbitant pay as a standalone issue rather than as the outward symptom of the dry rot that is consuming the system from within.

The big thing she doesn’t get is that corporate governance isn’t a private matter for companies and directors. As the FT’s Martin Wolf has put it, ‘Almost nothing in economics is more important than thinking through how companies should be managed and for what ends’. This is because growth, productivity and employment – the macroeconomic big three – aren’t destiny, an impersonal economic force imposed on us from outside. All three are the aggregate of ‘what companies actually do’, and what companies do is the result of decisions about how to allocate resources by corporate managers and directors. Managers’ motivations matter. Corporate governance is therefore a macroeconomic, and also political issue.

Take February’s aborted $143bn run at Unilever, the UK’s third largest company, by US group Kraft Heinz. This isn’t a boring accounting exercise, albeit one expressed in stratospheric numbers. It’s capitalism’s clash of civilisations. The outcome of mega-deals like this could set the course of our economies for years to come.

Managerially, philosophically but also in terms of their practical outputs, Unilever and Kraft Heinz are, well, soap and cheese. Anglo-Dutch Unilever (2016 turnover €52.7bn, net profit €5.5bn, 168,000 employees) is avowedly about long-term environmental and social sustainability. CEO Paul Polman has pledged to ensure Unilever survives for another century. On his appointment in 2008 he invited shareholders who didn’t share his long-term aims to place their money elsewhere. Mostly they do: 70 per cent of shareholders have held their stake for upwards of seven years, against the global average of five months.

Polman was ‘appalled’ at the Kraft Heinz approach, and his no-uncertain-terms response was instrumental in provoking the bidders’ sharp retreat. Not surprising. Unilever is one of the last representatives of what economist William Lazonick has termed the ‘retain and reinvest’ school of resource allocation, under which firms keep most of their profits to reinvest in factories and human capital in the long-term interests of all stakeholders. This is precisely why it is attractive to Kraft Heinz, its exact opposite – a fiercely private-equity driven, shareholder-value obsessed serial acquirer that operates on the reverse principle of ‘downsize and distribute’. Instead of reinvesting in the business it distributes profits to shareholders in dividends and stock buybacks to lever up the share price. It doesn’t do innovation; its route to superior margins and returns to shareholders is fierce cost- and particularly job-cutting – all of which makes Unilever, with its lower margins and enormous headcount, a juicy target.

To understand what this might portend, consider Kraft Heinz’s back story. Its creator and the driving force behind it is Brazilian private-equity group 3G Capital. 3G has form, having already done a job on global brewing industry. Starting with a Brazilian brewer in 1989, 3G has steadily consumed its way up the brewing drinks chain, culminating in the 2008 purchase of the world’s No 1 and and in 2016, in a $100bn deal, No 2 brewer to form AB InBev, a classic giant rootless ‘corporate citizen of nowhere’. AB InBev accounts for nearly one-third of all the world’s beer sales, and almost half its profits.

As described by Fortune magazine, 3G Capital’s ‘hard driving’ management philosophy is simple: buy, squeeze, repeat. Growth is not organic – it depends on identifying ever larger acquisitions to wring efficiencies out of. ‘It’s like the shark that has to keep on swimming,’ as one competitor put it. Unfortunately, that means the model eventually peters out when there are no more fat targets to eat or squeeze, or when even today’s feeble regulators say enough. That’s exactly what has happened in brewing. In other words, the model is inherently unsustainable. Which is why, in partnership with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, Kraft Heinz has been set up to repeat the roll-up in Big Food.

It’s hard to overstate the significance of this. Unilever – once described by a previous chairman as a fleet of ships, ‘the ships many different sizes, doing all kinds of different things, all over the place’ – is hardly the Muhammed Ali of multinationals, neither as nimble nor as hard-edged as some rivals. But what it ‘got’ – and was implicit in the retain-and-reinvest model that it still adheres to (albeit fraying at the edges: since the bid Polman has launched an urgent review of the group ‘to accelerate delivery of value to benefit our shareholders’) – was that jobs, far from being a necessary evil to be eliminated as far as possible, were an essential part of what made the model work: a vehicle for the redistribution of wealth and social mobility and thus the wider sustainability that Kraft Heinz and 3G airily ignore in pursuit of their narrow financial interest. In that sense, the latter are free riders on the remaining Unilevers of the world, which do care about their wider responsibility, on which they prey. No wonder Buffett is coming under fire from some quarters for the business methods used by his PE sidekicks, even if he keeps his distance himself.

Have no illusions that Kraft Heinz and 3G Capital have been despatched for good. They’ll be back – their model doesn’t give them a choice. When that happens, the issue they will want to focus on is benefits to shareholders. But behind that lie wider questions about how they do it, and at what cost to jobs, growth and long-term sustainability, and deeper ones about why, ie the motivations of those making the decisions. Those are at the heart of, respectively, industrial policy and corporate governance. A government with sovereignty on its mind should consider if we want to decide such matters ourselves or allow an Orwellian ‘UKH’ combination, or something similar, to do it for us. It may be our last chance.

Read my article in FT Business Education, 29 January 2017. here

Shaking off the doomy prognostications of mainstream economists, stock markets on both sides of the Atlantic have surged since the Brexit vote in June and Donald Trump’s election as US president, hitting high after high. Why?

The conventional reading mentions receding fears of recession in the UK, while in the US after initial caution businessmen are supposedly experiencing a rush of animal spirits at the prospect of tax cuts and infrastructure spending ‘setting off a virtuous circle of economic growth and rising confidence’, in the words of former Treasury secretary Larry Summers.

Dream on. Joining the real world, a more cynical reaction would be that it’s a sigh of jubilant relief as business as usual is restored, with a vengeance. Trump and Theresa May are of course correct to sense that there’s something very wrong with their respective economies – the resulting discontents are what brought them to power. But far from altering current trends or models, their current proposals rev them up.

In the UK, May, echoed by a chorus from the press, evokes an ‘all in it together’ spirit and calls for boardroom restraint to be exercised through the usual suspect, greater control for shareholders.

But shareholders, in cahoots with top management, are already in far too much control. ‘Dividends dwarf pension deficits,’ shouted a recent front-page headline in the FT, above an article reporting that FTSE 100 companies last year paid out five times more in dividends to shareholders than in contributions to pension funds – even though half of them, according to the research quoted, could have cleared their deficits in a single year by reversing the payout ratios. And this, note, understates the grotesque disproportion in stakeholder treatment. It takes no account of share buybacks, which directly affect the share price by reducing the number of shares in circulation.

As usual, what happens in the UK is a pale reflection of goings on across the Atlantic, where combined dividends and buybacks of the largest companies have reached extraordinary proportions. The figures compiled by researcher Bill Lazonick are astounding. Over the 10 years to 2015, firms in the S&P 500 spent 3$3.9tr on stock buybacks, equal to 54 per cent of net income, with another 37 per cent going on dividends. In both 2014 and 2015, according to other research, buybacks and dividends of publicly traded companies actually exceeded net income – in the latter year they reached 115 per cent.

Delving more deeply into the tight link between buybacks and CEO pay, Lazonick made another eye-popping discovery. If the stock-option portion of CEO pay (running at above 80 per cent in the US) is calculated not by value at the time of the grant but by value actually realised on exercising the option, the CEO-to-median-worker rockets from the 300:1 commonly quoted – which is shocking enough – to an astronomical 1000:1.

Hardly surprising that appeals to self-interest on this heroic scale are not often resisted – they are not supposed to be – nor that they decisively mould the decisions on what and what not to invest in. As Lazonick spells out, trillions of dollars that could have been spent on innovation and job creation have instead been diverted into share buybacks for the purpose of manipulating stock prices. ‘As a growing body of research demonstrates, actual realised gain on stock options and stock awards can incentivize executives to do buybacks, price gouge, offshore, lay off workers, do financially driven M&A deals, dodge taxes, engage in false financial reporting, and so on, all for the sake of boosting the company’s stock price’ – a process in which those making the resource-allocation decisions are themselves the prime beneficiaries.

In this context, as Steve Denning has pointed out, even managers of ‘good’ companies, who know the behaviour to be wrong and in the long term self-destructive, have succumbed to the buyback syndrome. Personal temptation, the argument that ‘everyone else is doing it’ and/or the attentions of shareholder ‘activists’ (raiders, to give them their more accurate name) make the pressure almost irresistible. Apple, which in Steve Jobs’ day blithely ignored special claims of shareholders, is a case in point.

In these circumstances – if corporate behaviour is responsible for the economic ills that are spilling over so spectacularly into politics – then as an FT commentator pointed out, ‘there are policy levers to pull. It would be time to stop thinking about corporate governance and executive pay as equity matters and to regard them instead as a macroeconomic problem of the first rank.’

Which, of course, they are. But there is no sign that a UK government under May perceives them this way, still less the incoming administration in the US, where the barbarians and vampire capitalists are not just at the gate but comfortably ensconced around the cabinet table.

So if, as promised in the election campaign, US corporate taxes are reduced and the estimated $2tr of corporate profits stashed abroad are brought back home, expect a round of share buybacks and dividend increases that will make even current levels look puny. As Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins (with around $60bn to repatriate) obligingly made clear, investment in plant and job-creating innovation was the last thing on CEOs’ minds: Cisco, he said, planned to use the money for ‘a combination of dividends, share buybacks and M&A activity’ – that is, on financial engineering to bolster the stock price.

That’s why stock exchanges are jubilating.

Yay, the music’s still playing, boys! Trebles all round!

The algorithms are coming, if not to your place, then to somewhere very near you. It’s happening faster than you, or probably anyone else imagined – and it doesn’t bode well for you or your job. Whatever that is.

Over Christmas, a White House report on automation and artificial intelligence suggested (among other things) that almost all delivery and driving jobs would in due course succumb to automation, with the loss (in the US) of more than 3m jobs. Right on cue, here’s a news item describing how Rio Tinto is already using robotic drills, house-sized autonomous trucks and driverless trains to boost productivity and slash the need for human employees at its Australian mines. The trucks are controlled by operators 750 miles away. The trains, also controlled remotely, will ultimately load and unload themselves. Going driverless is 15 per cent cheaper than using humans. ‘We’re going to continue as aggressively as possible down this path,’ says a company official.

White-collar jobs have so far been more resistant to automation (although software is already making inroads in the media and low-level legal work). But don’t count on it staying that way. One Japanese insurance company is this month replacing 34 claims assessment workers with an artificial intelligence system. This is one of the first (and certainly not the last) commercial applications of IBM’s celebrated Watson, a ‘cognitive technology’ that can make sense of unstructured material whether in text, audio or video form. The Watson-based system will check treatments against insurance contracts and decide payouts on the basis of medical histories, length of hospital stay and other data. The company is paying $1.7m for the system, plus maintenance, and expects to post a return on the investment in two years. Watson’s first and best-known application has been in medicine, but its analytic prowess is now also being brought to bear in finance, legal and retail fields.

We’re sort of used to the idea of couriers and Uber drivers being managed by algorithms. But in ‘When your boss is an algorithm’ the FT’s sharp Sarah O’Connor points to what many have missed: in the gig economy, it’s not the workers who are replaced (although they are engaged in a race to the bottom on pay) – it’s managers who would have done the scheduling and logistics. And as managers, algorithms are remorseless and impartial in a way that hasn’t been seen since the days of scientific management a century ago. ‘For Jeremias Prassl, a law professor at Oxford university, the algorithmic management techniques of Uber and Deliveroo are Taylorism 2.0,’ O’Connor writes. “Algorithms are providing a degree of control and oversight that even the most hardened Taylorists could never have dreamt of,” he says’.

Don’t think it’s just low- and middle-level logistics managers whose jobs are on the line. The world’s largest hedge-fund firm, Bridgewater, is busy trying to enshrine its unorthodox management system in software that would ‘dole out GPS-style directions for how staff members should spend every aspect of their days, down to whether an employee should make a particular phone call’, according to the Wall Street Journal. Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio, who is behind the project, believes that humans are like machines; successful managers, he has written, ‘design a “machine” consisting of the right people doing the right things to get what they want’.

Meanwhile, a Silicon Valley outfit (of course) has developed a ‘virtual management system’ called (of course) iCEO. iCEO automates complex tasks by breaking them down into chunks and assigning the micro-tasks to workers on platforms such as Mechanical Turk, Lyft or Uber. The company admitted at the time of writing that the programme was relatively crude – but that was a year ago, and a year is an eternity in AI and robotics. And although it was still considering what to do with it going forward, it’s not hard to imagine what the powers of iCEO and Watson might be if they could be harnessed together. There’s no doubt about the direction of travel, however. Warns futurist Devin Fidler: ‘It will not be possible to hide in the C-Suite for much longer. The same cost/benefit analyses performed by shareholders against line workers and office managers will soon be applied to executives and their generous salaries’.

Further out (but probably not very much), Fidler notes that corporations are themselves a technology, one that developed in the 18th century to maximize scale and minimize transaction costs. ‘Now that structure is being disrupted by the advent of technologies which can accomplish many (if not most) of the projects we associate with corporations. With traditional organizations no longer necessary to create many things at scale, they are likely to be challenged by a new generation of alternative technologies for getting things done’.

Such as that embodied in Work Market, perhaps. Work Market is a kind of amalgam of work platforms such as Task Rabbit, Uber, eLance and the like, and its boast is that using it large companies can compile and coordinate ‘labour clouds’ of all the skills – full-time workers, contractors, vendors – it needs to get things done just in time. It believes it has built a platform that enables just the kind of radical shift that Fidler envisages – from a world of traditional corporate employment to a one where every worker acts as ‘an enterprise of one’, competing for projects on skills, reputation and ability to generate good outcomes.

To emphasize, this is all happening, and it’s happening fast. Last year more was invested in robotics start-ups than ever before. This is terrible news for jobs and the billions of people who according to Gallup yearn more for good jobs than anything else in the world – more even than peace, security and family. It is true that, as the White House report emphasizes, technology is not destiny. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but rather within a framework of policies and institutions that influence the choices of entrepreneurs, workers and investors that together shape technology outcomes. Unfortunately, the paper doesn’t mention the factor that most directly conditions those choices: incentives that directly reward CEOs and others making resource-allocation decisions for cutting costs rather than innovating – that is, for not creating new jobs and for eliminating existing ones. Unless states summon up the courage to disarm these detonators of job destruction, the extraordinary technological revolution now under way could end up triggering another one, of an altogether more violently disruptive kind.

Deliveroo or Analogic. In two words at the 2016 Global Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna in November, Columbia Business School’s Rita McGrath put her finger on the fault-line running straight through today’s business economy.

Both companies are worth about £1bn. One of them, Analogic, is 40 years old, modestly profitable and employs 1,500 people worldwide making highly-rated medical and security equipment. The other, Deliveroo, a UK-based food delivery internet start-up, is three years old, made a loss of £18m last year on undisclosed sales, and uses 6,500, 13,000 or 20,000 couriers (take your pick) to deliver restaurant meals to home diners. Deliveroo’s couriers are ‘independent contractors’, not employees. Amid criticism of ‘Slaveroo’ conditions, its UK riders are campaigning for union recognition and the minimum wage.

What the world wants is more companies like Analogic. In Vienna Stanford’s Jeff Pfeffer quoted Gallup surveys – ‘one of the most important discoveries Gallup has ever made’ – showing that, where in the past they desired peace, freedom and family, today above everything else most people in the world want good jobs for themselves and their children. A good job (not a great job) is a steady 30-plus hours a week for the same employer and a pay packet. In another finding, Gallup observes a ‘perfect correlation’ between good jobs and economic wellbeing: the higher the percentage of employees with steady full-time employment, the higher the per capita GDP.

What the world is getting, meanwhile, is Deliveroo. As a variety of management big cheeses lined up to lament at the Forum, big companies these days are effectively on innovation strike. In so far as they invest at all, they prefer predictable efficiency gains (those that reduce headcount) to more speculative longer-term entrepreneurial efforts that might generate new markets and industries – and jobs. ‘Companies start out as equity end up as bonds,’ as Roger Martin put it.

This is not an accident. The mechanism is crystal clear: financialisation has decoupled corporate growth from job creation, with the consequence that new-economy companies like Google, Facebook, WhatsApp and others can be radically large in reach, market share and market capitalism but radically small in headcount. ‘Under our current conditions,’ concludes Michigan University’s Jerry Davis in a recent paper, ‘creating shareholder value and creating good jobs are largely incompatible. Corporations are “job creators” only as a last resort’.

For some in Vienna and the wider world, especially, Silicon Valley, the decline of of corporate employment is a cause for celebration. They see the end of wage slavery as the forerunner of a truly entrepreneurial economy in which every individual is empowered to become anything they want to be. For MIT Professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee predictions that technology will lead to a workless future are false. The internet of things and 3D printers will enfranchise a new generation of entrepreneurs – human ingenuity and tastes are boundless. In the same vein, ‘The entrepreneurial society is going to happen,’ Tammy Erikson told Drucker participants enthusiastically. ‘Artificial Intelligence will take over our jobs. Organisations will shrink as transaction costs diminish. We can’t stop it… There’s a fabulous opportunity with great technology to transform the world of work.’

Before we reach entrepreneurial nirvana, however, there are two giant roadblocks to navigate. The first is that, as Gallup documents, while entrepreneurship may appeal to those with social and intellectual capital to leverage, it’s not what most people want. ‘I feel very uncomfortable with [the notion of the all-embracing entrepreneurial society ,’ said Maëlle Gavet, herself an internet entrepreneur of repute. She noted that there will be a large proportion of people who are unable or unwilling to be entrepreneurs – and that is not necessarily their fault, or indeed a fault at all. ‘We welcome and encourage disruption, but we need to remember that disruption disrupts real lives.’ In the absence of measures by governments to think innovatively about distributing risk and the increasing flimsiness of societal safety nets – ‘The UK hasn’t a clue what the state is!’ declared Sussex University’s Mariana Mazzucato – it’s hard to argue that the overriding desire for employment is anything but rational.

The second awkward reality is that even if people were keen to embrace entrepreneurship, this is actually not the current direction of travel. Economies like the US and UK are becoming less entrepreneurial, not more. Companies are getting older, more concentrated and less dynamic. Investment and productivity are lagging. In the US, home of Silicon Valley, the rate of new business formation has dropped by 50 per cent since the 1970s, Pfeffer pointed out. Corporate deaths outnumber births. Bureaucratic, industrial-age assumptions about people and organisations still rule. ‘The innovation engine is disappearing in the US,’ said über-guru Clayton Christensen. Curt Carlson of R&D institute SRI, while adamant that innovation and entrepreneurship can be learned and taught, acknowledged that ‘we’re doing a pretty terrible job at the moment. There are thousands of billion-dollar opportunities out there waiting to be taken’.

Instead, we have Uber, Airbnb and Deliveroo; and any number of Tindrs, Grindrs and Tumblrs. ‘We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters,’ as entrepreneur Peter Thiel has caustically observed. The first two are disrupters all right, but as the McKinsey Global Institute has pointed out they create less value than they destroy. Defenders trumpet the benefit to consumers from the increased efficiencies, less so the losses to the same people as workers. On the evidence so far, the idea of maximising consumer value, as some are beginning to advocate, is as unlikely to lead anywhere good as maximising shareholder value.

None of this is inevitable. As the forum heard, cities and self-confident states that don’t deny themselves the opportunity (as the UK or the US do) can do a great deal to foster innovation (see Singapore and Israel respectively). In the private sector, it also heard about the thriving German ‘Mittelstand’, a large cohort of medium-sized, often family-owned companies harbouring a disproportionate number of ‘hidden champions’, below-the-radar world beaters that are quintessential providers of good jobs and community glue, often over generations. German manufacturing still accounts for 22 per cent of GDP, 10 points more than in the US and UK.

All this, let’s underline it, is the result of choice – choice about the way companies are run and governed, and crucially about their responsibilities and obligations to the wider society too. In other countries, companies like Analogic still hang in there – just. But even if manufacturing, once lost, will be difficult to reproduce, the management principles that sustain these customer and community-focused firms are known, proven and available to anyone to use. Is management going to bridge the social gaps that have opened up to admit the current monsters, or widen them? Analogic or Deliveroo?

Read my article in FT Business Education on Brexit and British management here

Brexit and now Trump are the delayed detonations of the unexploded bombs left behind by the Great Crash of 2008-2009. It seemed clear then that the financial meltdown was the logical end-point of a fundamentally flawed version of capitalism that had for ideological reasons inverted the real order of things, placing finance and shareholders as the centre of the universe round which the productive economy revolved, and patronisingly advising everyone else to wait for the benefits to trickle down. Brexit voters and the half of Americans who are worse off than they were in 1999 – and barely better off than in 1967 – have decided the wait is over.

The explosion didn’t go off in 2009 because an equally petrified left and right, despite rhetorical ferocity over marginal differences, united to assure their followers that despite the glaring flaws there was no alternative to the restoration of bankrupt ‘business as usual’, on both political and economic fronts. As in the 1930s (think Weimar Republic) it was a hopeless failure. ‘Quae non possunt non manent’ – things that can’t last, don’t. It’s the borrowed time of the previous consensus, based on the easy assumptions of social and economic liberalism, that has just come come to a noisy and vituperative end.

It’s been too glibly assumed that liberal social attitudes – to race, gender and sexual orientation, immigration, welfare, crime and punishment – which are now under such attack in the US and much of Europe, go hand in hand with democracy. Only up to a point. They are much more, perhaps only, sustainable in a healthy, balanced economy in which jobs, income and new resources funding some kind of social safety net, ease the pinch-points that aren’t caused by, but are blamed on, social liberalism. As we know to our cost, austerity is sooner or later death to tolerance and fellow feeling along with economic wellbeing, and best friends with resentment and anger over what’s felt to be lost, fear of the other and of what’s to come.

This is why real economic change is now both the priority and a possibility. As Paul Mason has noted, ‘It is entirely possible to construct a humane pro-business version of capitalism without…austerity, inequality, privatisation, financial corruption, asset bubbles and technocratic hubris’ – provided we go beyond defeatist determinism that sees the middle and working classes as victims of inevitable globalisation and technological advance, as if these were ineluctable forces of nature over which we have no agency. This is simply false.

It wasn’t abstract economic flows that caused the the derivatives bubble that led to the Great Crash, but catastrophic management decisions, bent by unrealistic assumptions about human nature, about what companies are for, and how they should behave. In exactly the same way, it’s not globalisation itself that is (in part) responsible for stagnant wages and lack of good jobs, but what financialised, short-termist companies and managers have done with it. As former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis expressed it recently on the radio, globalisation in the shape of the international movement of goods, capital and people is one thing; globalisation as the ability of giant corporations to play hide-and-seek with international profits, arbitrage tax regimes and domicile, and lobby for international treaties allowing them to sue countries for actions that damage their profitability, is something that no one signed up to.

It’s no use economists vaunting globalisation and free trade as ‘goods’ in the abstract. They are only good if they are designed to be. Perhaps it’s that conditionality that J. M. Keynes, not noted as a narrow thinker, had in mind when he wrote in the 1930s: ‘I sympathise with those who would minimise, rather than those who would maximize economic entanglements among nations. Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel – these are things that of their nature should be international. But let goods be homespun wherever it is reasonable and conveniently possible, and above all, let finance be primarily national.’

Similar considerations apply to technology, perhaps even more so. The reason for pessimism over the current direction of technological travel does not lie in the nature of technology itself, nor in the belief that no other direction is possible. Precisely the contrary. It is that the world is experiencing the first great wave of technological advance to take place under a regime in which managers who make resource allocation decisions are enjoined, not to mention highly incentivised, to privilege investments that benefit shareholders (among them themselves), whatever the consequences for other stakeholders. This is why they favour low-risk efficiency gains over less certain but potentially much higher returns from more ambitious and expensive innovation. Consider in this context the ‘sharing’, or better, ‘gig economy’. If you thought it appeared by virgin birth out of the blue of cyberspace, think again. Following logically on from downsizing, outsourcing, offshoring and the end of career, task-based employment, or the end of the job, is just the latest efficiency-driven, technology-aided manifestation of managers’ ongoing determination to bring market mechanisms into the company, in the (wrongly) presumed interest of shareholders.

Peter Drucker believed that corporations were far too important for the health of the wider society to be under the control of any one interest. He also believed that when institutions and beliefs outlive their founding assumptions, as they do, they become afflictions, threatening the whole of civil society with upheaval and unrest. Which is why innovation and entrepreneurship – ‘pragmatic rather than dogmatic, modest rather than grandiose’ – ‘are needed in society as much as in the economy, in public-service institutions as much as the economy’. No one can fail to see the relevance to the events of today. This year’s Global Peter Drucker Forum has as its subject ‘The Entrepreneurial Society’, its subtext the need for self-renewal drawing on the combined practical capabilities of state, civil and private sectors. Never has a major conference theme been so apt or so urgent.

Read my article ‘Umm-onomics: the golder age of dithering’, in Professional Manager, October 2016, here

Read my article ‘The wrong choice’ in FT Business Education, 17 October 2016, here