John Kay

Markets are not a well oiled physical machine: they are a constantly changing, adaptive biological system.

The Reform of Banking Regulation
We should spend less time trying to ensure that our regulators can regulate financial behemoths with turnovers bigger than the GDP of many countries and more on trying to redesign the financial services industry so that regulation focuses on the interests of the public as consumers of financial services.
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Strange as it may seem, overcoming geographic obstacles, winning decisive battles or meeting global business targets are the type of goals often best achieved when pursued indirectly. This is the idea of Obliquity. Oblique approaches are most effective in difficult terrain, or where outcomes depend on interactions with other people.

Twenty years after it all began, the meaning of privatisation is now clearer. Privatised businesses have fared better than nationalised ones but most have not thrived in the private sector. And the plc model does not work for monopoly services.

The notion that effective management and free intellectual inquiry are incompatible derives from the belief that if you give people authority to fix Iris Murdoch’s bookshelves they will soon start telling her what to write.   This fear should not be discounted completely  – there are people like that – but there are also ample means [...]

The interrelationship of technology, economic advance, and social and political systems, has many ramifications. The last ten years, in economic terms, have constituted an American decade. But the way in which the American decade comes to an end is probably the most important issue for the world economy today.

John resigned as Director of Oxford University’s Said Business School in July 2000. A year and half later, he breaks his silence to talk about some of the frustrations of attempting to help the university face up to the challenges of the twenty first century.

Regulated businesses face almost all of the strategy issues which confront conventional firms, and some additional ones that are specific to their own environment. As deregulation spreads across Europe, the gap between those firms which handle these specific issues effectively and those which respond to regulation and regulatory changes with hostility, complacency or defeatism will widen rapidly.

The resource based view of strategy has a coherence and integrative role that places it well ahead of other mechanisms of strategic decision making. After thirty years or so, the subject of strategy is genuinely acquiring what can be described as a paradigm – to use the most overworked and abused term in the study of management.

Is the third way simply an eclectic compromise which offers to drop any unpalatable bits from the familiar ideologies of far right and far left? I argue that if there is a third way, this is not where we will find it.