“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”

Bill Gates Read More

Can Marissa Mayer save Yahoo? If she does she’ll be hailed as a great leader, in demand to turn around the next struggling digital media business, or maybe she’ll make a leap into another sector that needs her touch. If Yahoo doesn’t make it, well, it’s probably not her fault. There are lots of factors working against her, not least timing – it might just be too late. Do you see the logical fallacy here? Read More

It’s hardly the end of capitalism, but the horsemeat scandal is showing large food retailers and manufacturers how it feels to be a banker. Meanwhile consumers – or people, as we might style ourselves – don’t know who we can trust. Marketing is seen as manipulative, and delivering profits is represented in the media as exploitation of customers. Sam Laidlaw of Centrica announced decent but hardly sensational results last week – and had to explain to John Humphreys on the Today programme why they hadn’t forgone profits for the sake of “the squeezed middle”. Read More

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Read More

I’m always on about the importance of having a clear business purpose – not necessarily the lofty do-good type that P&G, Unilever and co now seem to think they must have, just a reason why an enterprise exists, what it’s there for, in terms that its customers would recognise and value. This Harvard academic thinks so too, and makes the case brilliantly in this pithy book. It’s an accessible, human approach to business strategy development, Read More

According to the service profit chain theory, satisfied employees deliver satisfied customers, which means sales will rise and profits will grow. So in a service business, if you focus on keeping employees happy and motivated, that’s job done. Who could disagree with that? I can.

I once worked with a contact centre business in the US mid-west which had the happiest employees in the state, and probably in the entire contact centre industry in the USA. Read More

“It’s not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It’s the customer who pays the wages.”

Henry Ford Read More

Jeanette Winterson wrote in her autobiography that her mother despaired of her, saying, “Why be happy when you could be normal?” Mrs Winterson saw conformity as a virtue. In her worldview, Jeanette’s job was to fit in rather than be fulfilled by being herself. Jeanette couldn’t help it though – she wasn’t trying to be different, she was different from the sort of girl her mother expected her to be. Accepting the status quo wasn’t an option for her. Read More

“Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.”

Gloria Steinem, American journalist and political activist Read More

Syed wanted to know why his neighbourhood in Reading produced so many top table tennis players. The clue is in the book’s subtitle, “the myth of talent and the power of practice”, and you probably feel you know what’s in it – yeah, yeah, the 10,000 hours it takes to be a virtuoso musician or a world class tennis player. But that’s just one chapter. If you’re a parent you have to know why praising effort is so much more important than praising achievement (and read about the Polgar sisters, Read More