John Kay

One of the paradoxes of modern business is that firms have never had so little need of capital or so much involvement with capital markets.

The British retailer John Lewis, owned by an employee trust and long a favourite of metropolitan women, has now become a favourite of their politician husbands.

Modern titans derive their authority and influence from their position in a hierarchy, not their ownership of capital.

A small fraction of the ingenuity devoted to the construction of complex financial instruments that no one should want could advantageously be applied to the construction of less complex instruments that meet the needs of the Big Society.

The substitution of transaction-oriented dealings for relationship contracting added to profitability in the short run; but in the long run it eroded relationships that had been the underlying source of much of that profitability.

If you aim to create a dynamic, successful business, a state-owned utility is not the place to start.

The benefit of road improvements is principally the reduced time and strain on private motorists, not the economic advantages to road transport operators: that lesson should influence the way we plan our road networks. Fast roads for light traffic are much cheaper to build than superhighways.

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.

I do not think children should be taught that greed is the most powerful human motivation. The people who are most successful in business in the long run are people who are passionate about business, not money.

Few things corrode business efficiency and effective markets more insidiously than the discovery that it is more profitable to win the favour of politicians than to win the approval of customers.