Prudential CEO Tidjane Thiam has just learnt the hard way that he is accountable first and foremost to his shareholders. His climb down over the £24.6 billion proposed bid for AIA now looks set to cost his company £450 million and might yet cost him his job. We care partly because the Pru has for decades been the watchword of, well, prudence. Read on ›

Here’s the second in my trilogy on the Stockholm Accords. This one deals with the Accords themselves, following part 1’s examination of their definition of terms. Read on ›

In 1994 Tony Blair promised to turn the UK into a “stakeholder society” when he declared New Labour, New Britain. It was the cornerstone of his “Third Way” politics. But nobody’s talking about either term in the current UK General Election. Maybe the wheels will come off the “stakeholder” rhetoric in business too.   Read on ›

When local boy Roman Geiser, Burson-Marsteller’s Swiss CEO, was catapulted into the stratosphere as Chief Operating Officer for EMEA, I just had to make the twenty-minute train ride to Zurich to interview him. Read on ›

If we want a glimpse of where PR might go over the next ten years, we should examine Japan. The world’s second-largest economy’s property bubble burst 20 years ago. Since then deflation, recession and reality have broken the country’s commitment to consensus building, as Leo Lewis argues in “Japan’s harsh new reality” in today’s Times. Read on ›

Clay Shirky argues in his controversial article “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” that because the barriers to entry in the industry have fallen close to zero, the future of newspaper-type journalism looks bleak in the internet age. I beg to differ. Read on ›

The Financial Times’ management columnist Stefan Stern and others have been assessing the point and meaning of this year’s Davos. Much of it comes to the need for capitalism to express itself differently. Read on ›

Yesterday Barclays Bank won the vote to endorse its billions of Arab fund-raising. Its board was attacked from all sides, even by those voting for the deal. Welcome to the world of recession business. Clients are going to have hard cases to sell. That’s our real job. It’ll be exhilarating. Read on ›

There’s an arctic snow storm outside. Even my Dachshund refuses to leave the house. So whilst we’re gratefully holed up in my Swiss home I’m going to write about those losing theirs in the UK. Naturally, I’m interested in the explanations given by the institutions which are turfing them out. Read on ›

London’s latest shopping extravagnza, the Westfield London Centre, was planned in a boom in another century and opens at the beginning of a recession.

Oh doom, oh gloom, oh glum. Thank goodness, Boris says that view’s nonsense. Read on ›