Does capital have a home?
Last year the French conglomerate LVMH, known for its Louis Vuitton luggage, Moët et Chandon champagne, and Hennessy cognac, acquired t...
Obliquity
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 of Privatisation
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.
A lost cause?
The notion that effective management and free intellectual inquiry are incompatible derives from the belief that if you give people aut...
Technology and wealth creation: where we are, where we’re going
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.
The Management of the University of Oxford…. Facing the Future
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.
Mastering Strategy: Regulated Industries
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.
Mastering Strategy: Resource Based Strategy
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.
The Third Way
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.
The Role of Business in Society
The view of business as necessarily selfish, narrow and instrumental, is, as it always has been, nonsense. Business which is selfish in motivation, narrow in outlook, and instrumental in behaviour is rarely successful business.