John Kay

The decline of GM is as instructive as its rise. The challenge of how to reconcile professional management with a culture of innovation remains for ever a central issue for management thinkers.

Liberal democracies of the modern world based on lightly regulated capitalism acknowledge two mechanisms of accountability – the marketplace and the ballot box.

Power is a duty, not a prize, is probably the most important reason why some countries in the world are rich and others poor. The point needs to be brought home in equal measure to legislators, chief executives and bankers.

Values of integrity, of public service, and of responsible stewardship of the money of others can never be replaced by rules or imposed by regulation.

Typically reasons given for judgment are rationalisations after the event, the consultation is a formality rather than a sincere search for opinions, and the accountability is a matter of extensive paperwork rather than a genuine appraisal of performance.

The crippling consequence of inability to admit error is the impossibility of learning from past mistakes.

The best answer would be more Europe – an effective pan-European regulator and a single Europe-wide scheme for protecting depositors.

The major beneficiaries of investment banking in the past decade have not been the customers of investment banks, or even investment banks themselves, but the investment bankers.

No one wants bank managers to be replaced by civil servants. But there are a lot of perfectly competent bank managers out there, even if there are a lot of incompetent bank executives.

We trust the pharmacist not because we bank on his or her self-interest, but because we are confident that it will be tightly restrained. In part, we rely on the long-run self-interest of the pharmacist in protecting his or her own reputation.