Philippa Thomas, 34, works as Washington correspondent for the BBC. She is married to State Department reporter Richard Lister. In her spare time the pair can be found ‘kayaking in Alaska, driving sled dogs over frozen lakes on the Canadian border, and falling down quite a lot of ski slopes.’ She says life as a
Evan Davis is the 37-year-old economics editor of Newsnight, the BBC television current affairs programme. We asked him about the challenge of presenting mainstream economics on television
Sally Muggeridge is management development director for media giant Pearson plc, which own well-known brands, including Penguin books and the Financial Times. She is based at Pearson’s London headquarters, but makes regular visits to the US where the majority of the group’s 22,000 employees work
Roxanne McMeekin, 24, is a reporter for financial magazine FT Mandate. She started as an editorial assistant at Reed Elsevier, publisher of science journals, before moving to The Financial Times business division
Laura Hamilton-Wargent has wanted to be in TV since she was 15. Since August she has been working as a runner at Channel 4, whose trainee scheme has been so popular it is already completely oversubscribed. She gives her perspective on how to break into a fashionable but crowded arena
John Fitton, 23, works for The Lab – the experimental low cost TV production unit set up by LWT in January 1999. Fitton is a graduate of St Catherine’s College, Oxford, where he gained a first class honors degree in English. He gave us a few tips on how to break into the industry
Toby Watson left Oxford University, where he was a blue in rugby, to balance playing professional rugby for London Scottish, while holding down a full-time job at Deutsche Bank. He was recently headhunted from there by global investment bank Goldman Sachs. We interviewed him about his recent move and how to succeed at the highest level
What is your current title? Client group head, which is a title unique to Coutts. What it really means is that I run one of the client-facing divisions within the bank. Coutts has segmented its client base, so rather than a private banker dealing with a property owner in the morning, the chairman of a
Nicola Donnelly, 22, has worked as a graduate trainee for Flemings bank in London since receiving her degree from the University of Durham in 1999. We profile a graduate success and show you how to get your foot in the corporate door.
Sarah Allatt, 22, received a first class degree in Chemistry from the University of Oxford. After doing an internship whilst still an undergraduate, she joined PricewaterhouseCoopers as a postgraduate trainee.
Adrian Cornwall, 24, is a graduate trainee institutional stockbroker with private UK bank Robert Fleming & Co. He works in their European Equity Sales team. The bank is in the throes of change with US banking giant Chase Manhattan in the process of consolidating a takeover
Summary It makes good business sense for firms to make their staff feel good. This new study warns that firms who do not implement a ‘work-life strategy’ – defined as ‘helping people to combine work with family and personal life’ – actually lose competitive advantage to firms who do.
Summary The core theme of this book is Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, otherwise referred to as TOC. Goldratt argues that manufacturing has for too long focused on producing, ignoring what is demanded by the market place, i.e. demand and capacity. Goldratt believes that one should balance flow through a system to meet the demand of
Summary Navigating Complexity collects together for the first time the ideas and language of a recent development in management theory – complexity theory. The command and control approaches to management ‘no longer hold true’, complexity theory asserts. The theory states that any system contains built-in unpredictability, that every system is comprised of many components and
Freud first coined the term ‘wrecked by success’ to explain the recurring phenomenon of people who appear to throw away their best chance of happiness through self-inflicted damage. Maximum Success, written by two Harvard business psychologists and executive coaches, cleverly elaborates 12 different patterns of self-defeating behaviour and ways of tackling them. Take the hero
Summary Handy’s book is a groundbreaking philosophical and practical guide to the inevitable changing ways of organizing work and the workforce. Handy starts from the viewpoint that radical change is not only desirable but essential, if economics and society are not to be irreversibly damaged. The book focuses on the necessity of becoming more creative
Summary Management consultant Bob Garratt told us that he wrote his latest book as ‘a counterblast to myopic thinking’ among senior managers in the quest for company efficiency. Garratt shifts the focus away from the current vogue for downsizing and cost cutting, towards a value-system that preserves and encourages employees at all levels. Get employees doing
Summary Jack Welch Speaks is precisely what its title suggests: a collection of quotations from the chairman of General Electric Corporation (GE), one of the biggest companies in the world. These quotations are arranged by subject and deal partly with his own life, but mainly with his competitive, ruthless style of management, making it a
Summary The academic and consultant Andrew Brown has selected six key elements of leadership that, he believes, illuminate the secrets of great leaders. Illustrated with countless examples of leaders from history and today, The Six Dimensions of Leadership, first published in 1999, tackles in 200 racy pages the six qualities in turn: heroism, acting
Summary Goffee and Jones – the BBC director of human resources – reject the assumption of some business books that the character of a corporation is a uniform, single concept. They see it as complex and multiple-faceted. Every firm is composed of several cultures, they explain. These are fluid, liable to change, and are sometimes
