John Kay

As the commercial market is being transformed, anyone who thinks that the policy challenge is to restrict internet piracy has missed the point.

Crime often depends on a state of mind. An individual can be dishonest, or intend to kill. But to attribute these characteristics to a business, as distinct from the individuals in a business, is a metaphor too far.

When an industry model is broken, the best business strategy may be to manage its decline.

People in the middle of events often know less about them than those watching from the outside, which is why interviews with senior business figures inform us about what these people think rather than what is happening.

The financial world used to have a diversity of corporate organisational forms – listed company partnership, mutual. Most partnerships and mutuals became listed companies, a change that was not usually for the better.

In the regulation of business affairs, from dress codes to rules on takeovers, it is always tempting to try to translate general principles into specific rules. But the world is rarely sufficiently clear and certain for this to be possible, and if it seems so today it will have ceased to be so tomorrow.

No one loves the bearer of bad news. But short sellers, Wikileaks, accountants who mark to market, and even rating agencies, should be applauded for telling people the news they do not want to hear.

A business secretary should focus on issues that enable business to improve how it serves the public. He should not act as a super lobbyist collating the suggestions of the chief executives and public relations consultants constantly banging on his door.

At the medieval courts Shakespeare described, the exercise of power was not a means to an end, it was itself the end. The political and economic environment has been transformed. But human nature has not, and the factors that drive powerful men today are little different from those that drove them five centuries ago.