Tag: Ownership

You can be responsible to people to whom you are not accountable; and you can deal with interlocking and conflicting responsibilities. Why do so many thoughtful people fail to realise this?

Great size is a warning of trouble ahead in the banking industry; and the trouble may be for the taxpayer as much as the shareholder.

We talk about companies being 'owned' by their shareholders. But what does 'ownership' really mean? In this talk John highlights fundamental differences to ownership of a very different kind - that of an umbrella!

The management and governance of LIFFE is not an easy job. Exchanges are natural monopolies, and provide benefits which are valuable only in what they make possible.

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.

There is a clear distinction between businesses whose characteristic is to develop a professional service in order to serve all its stakeholders and businesses whose focus is mainly to maximise shareholder return. Which is likely to be more successful?

“Ownership” is not a simple concept. I own my umbrella, and companies are owned by their shareholders. The word means different things in different situations.

Dalglish arrives at Newcastle and Horlick moves to ABN Amro. The common theme: do teams, or individuals, capture the returns to outstanding performance?

Does it matter if all of Britain's electricity generating companies are owned by Americans? Neither laissez-faire nor chauvinism is the appropriate response to foreign ownership.

The Bank of England should get on with the job of setting interest rates and other monetary activities, and be held accountable for how well it performs. Instead, everyone wants to retain control over decisions while shedding responsibility for outcomes.