John Kay

Commercial decisions often reflect policy-based evidence, not evidence-based policy. Doing the deal is what matters; justification comes afterwards.

Effective banking reform should aim at structures, not at intensified supervision. Resilient systems are simple ones.

The argument that we need the best and latest is powerful in political decision making, even among people who would never behave that way in their everyday lives.

Casinos attract greedy people with deficient ethics: the fear this engenders frames regulation, the obligations we impose on executives and the culture we expect from operating companies. Perhaps banks should operate to standards as high as those of casinos.

By the time Stephen Byers could slip from one cabinet post to another without taking responsibility for any of the blunders that seemed to happen wherever he was in charge, ministerial accountability had been replaced by T.S. Eliot’s cat: “When a crime’s discovered, then Macavity’s not there.”

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.

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.

Today’s managers are victims of the tyranny of the quarterly earnings report. And that is why yesterday’s cost-savings are so often today’s corporate crisis.

The modern cult of the heroic chief executive is at the root of the problem. Greater shareholder activism may help, but the most valuable restraint would be more effective checks and balances within the company itself.