Keynes referred to them as the ‘madmen in authority’, referring to the policy makers and top financial and business executives, who rule our world. Maybe ‘madmen’ doesn’t quite capture their essential characteristics today. After all, mainstream economists would argue they are not mad, but wholly rational in their unwavering pursuit of self-interest without regard to [...]
Management scholar, Sumantra Ghoshal, accused mainstream business schools and university departments of teaching ‘bad management theories’ that were ‘destroying good management practices’. His arguments were persuasive, both as to how bad the theories were and how effective they had been in destroying good management practice. The bad theory was that management had no other social [...]
Professor Gary Hamel’s new book is ‘What Matters Now: how to win in a world of relentless change, ferocious competition, and unstoppable innovation’. Hamel is a breathless optimist. He sees the world changing and he encourages and motivates managers to achieve near impossible ends. He believes in the potential greatness and goodness of industry and [...]
Peter Mandelson, writing in the New Statesman (‘Mind the gap’,20.2.2012), expresses the problem for the UK left in one plaintive sentence: “We still have to have faith in the basic model of an open and competitive market.” Well, no we don’t! Misplaced faith in such broad generalisations is what got us into this [...]
During the initial phase of industrialisation, Adam Smith argued that a nation’s supply of ‘wants and conveniences’ depended mostly on the ‘skill, dexterity and judgment’ of its workers and the extent to which they were employed. His example was the pin factory in which, through specialisation of work tasks, productivity could be multiplied many thousand [...]
Eras of rapid change come and go. Schumpeter, Kondratiev, Piatier and others, studied waves of fundamental innovations. We are in the middle of the 4th wave at the moment (comprising ICT, electronics, internet, biotechnology, molecular engineering and the applications of quantum mechanics, etc), still with new innovations being developed, some still growing, some already maturing [...]
The pattern of technological progress has been found to be surprisingly consistent. New technology has to clear various hurdles before attracting funds for its commercial development. A successful project that gets fully exploited grows fast, all the time getting detailed improvements and added features. Eventually, progress begins to slow, returns from further R&D diminish and [...]
The economic mainstream has flowed on its capital oriented way with relatively little deviation despite its manifest limitations, errors, omissions and downright falsehoods. And despite the occasional disasters to which it gives rise.
In the middle of last century, J M Keynes corrected some of the more apparent errors of the classical model, but his aim [...]
As Nobel laureate Paul Krugman pointed out ‘a country is not a business’. So why, he asked, do politicians think it is sensible to ask a successful businessman for advice on running the country? Why, for example, is David Cameron asking Sir Philip Green for his input? His views are clear and predictable, and of [...]
The corporate monster is destroying the world, tearing up its soil to gobble up its precious resources, fouling its air, polluting its water and damaging its climate, while rewarding the few with untold riches, but leaving the masses in poverty. That’s how things work, unless they are prevented. Free-market ideology is having a hard time [...]
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