When the global economy is presenting daily gloom and doom, issues like the structure of boardroom power seem less urgent. But business as usual will be resumed one day. The questions raised by Stuart Rose’s desire to be both executive chairman and CEO at the British retail giant Marks & Spencer (M&S) would persist even without the recent poor results that have weakened his defenses against angry investors.
The ins and outs of this rumpus are symptomatic of deeper developments in top management. Once, Rose-style one-man bands were the norm. Today, his move flouts majority opinion among Britons who care about corporate governance. It’s mostly a phoney war, of course. Many CEOs blessed (or cursed) with chairmen still dominate management internally.
In the great crunch, the cult of the CEO survives, even though the allied cult of shareholder value has been well and truly rubbished by the bear market. Banks as well as shareholders are licking the wounds created by the latest lunacies; money overlords who once financed governments may now depend, like Barclays bank, on the huge wealth of “sovereign funds.” The future of many deals is stuck today in the hands of “private equity.” The public company is being partly eclipsed by good old private ownership.
Compared with the CEO cult, privacy is more compatible with the New Management as practiced by the digital entrepreneurs. Their freestyle methods and success provide a template for an era in which the CEO is just one of the boys, or girls. These heretics don’t rush into recessionary cost-cutting, even in gathering gloom.
The ideal 21st century company generates ideas as readily as breath, bottom-up rather than top-down. The ideas will be devised, designed, disseminated, perfected and developed in never-ending, rapid cycles dominated by customer needs. Recognition, promotion and rewards will be dominated by achievement as seniority is kicked out of the window.
Alas, this transformation hasn’t occurred widely, though many non-digital CEOs have suffered from falling behind the pace of change; their own job tenures have shortened as open criticism of their performance (see Rose) has risen. Moreover, the search for short-term gains, so long despised by professional managers, is the driving force of private equity — the new capitalism.
Under the name of “venture capital,” the original privateers made key contributions to the New Management. As relative midgets, the venturers sought out guys with good ideas, fed them with moderate borrowings and supported technological strengths with imported managerial talent. Without the combination of idea-rich technology and able managers, miracles like Apple, Digital and Intel couldn’t have happened.
Apple outlived growing pains to spawn massive wealth: on Fortune’s latest reckoning, Steve Jobs and his cohorts lead the world in “power and innovation.” The top 25 powerhouses, however, include a non-digital trio: GE, Procter & Gamble and Boeing, whose leaders (Jeff Immelt, A.G. Lafley and James McNerney) aren’t personally noted as innovators.
Their companies were lauded as management champions half a century ago. GE’s stability and strength contrast with the disappearance in Britain of its arguable equivalent, GEC. Yet UK engineering can still produce as many as 109 candidates for the annual MX Awards given by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. The overall MX winner is Wrightbus, the Northern Irish enterprise whose diesel buses give it the European lead. The founder, William Wright, is still on the board at 83.
That may sound old-fashioned; but the partnership mode of the hedge funds and the highly personalized leadership of Silicon Valley reflect qualities long attributed to the “family-owned and family-managed” business. In the days when M&S had uniquely grand managerial and business kudos, that is how its boardroom was seen. And, if the glories are to return to Rose’s public company, the lasting private virtues, as everywhere, have a crucial part to play.
AIR SUPPORT: The Ministry of National Defense thanked the US for the delivery, adding that it was an indicator of the White House’s commitment to the Taiwan Relations Act Deputy Minister of National Defense Po Horng-huei (柏鴻輝) and Representative to the US Alexander Yui on Friday attended a delivery ceremony for the first of Taiwan’s long-awaited 66 F-16C/D Block 70 jets at a Lockheed Martin Corp factory in Greenville, South Carolina. “We are so proud to be the global home of the F-16 and to support Taiwan’s air defense capabilities,” US Representative William Timmons wrote on X, alongside a photograph of Taiwanese and US officials at the event. The F-16C/D Block 70 jets Taiwan ordered have the same capabilities as aircraft that had been upgraded to F-16Vs. The batch of Lockheed Martin
GRIDLOCK: The National Fire Agency’s Special Search and Rescue team is on standby to travel to the countries to help out with the rescue effort A powerful earthquake rocked Myanmar and neighboring Thailand yesterday, killing at least three people in Bangkok and burying dozens when a high-rise building under construction collapsed. Footage shared on social media from Myanmar’s second-largest city showed widespread destruction, raising fears that many were trapped under the rubble or killed. The magnitude 7.7 earthquake, with an epicenter near Mandalay in Myanmar, struck at midday and was followed by a strong magnitude 6.4 aftershock. The extent of death, injury and destruction — especially in Myanmar, which is embroiled in a civil war and where information is tightly controlled at the best of times —
Taiwan was ranked the fourth-safest country in the world with a score of 82.9, trailing only Andorra, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar in Numbeo’s Safety Index by Country report. Taiwan’s score improved by 0.1 points compared with last year’s mid-year report, which had Taiwan fourth with a score of 82.8. However, both scores were lower than in last year’s first review, when Taiwan scored 83.3, and are a long way from when Taiwan was named the second-safest country in the world in 2021, scoring 84.8. Taiwan ranked higher than Singapore in ninth with a score of 77.4 and Japan in 10th with
China's military today said it began joint army, navy and rocket force exercises around Taiwan to "serve as a stern warning and powerful deterrent against Taiwanese independence," calling President William Lai (賴清德) a "parasite." The exercises come after Lai called Beijing a "foreign hostile force" last month. More than 10 Chinese military ships approached close to Taiwan's 24 nautical mile (44.4km) contiguous zone this morning and Taiwan sent its own warships to respond, two senior Taiwanese officials said. Taiwan has not yet detected any live fire by the Chinese military so far, one of the officials said. The drills took place after US Secretary
RSS