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Performance Related Pay – Expensive, misguided and ineffective

Tweet    PERFORMANCE RELATED PAY Performance related pay presents expensive, counter-productive practical problems. It also offers a superficial concept of reward and recognition and a profoundly misguided understanding of the personal and social value of work. It denies and rejects the extraordinary power of unity and self-motivation in a common cause so inspirationally demonstrated during […]

BBC The Apprentice – The Final: Ricky gives them what Thor.

Tweet        The Apprentice – The Final: Ricky gives them what Thor.   Professor Michael Sandel*, in his excellent new book What Money Can’t Buy – The Moral Limits of Markets makes some very useful distinctions. Both professional Economist and Philosopher, Sandel remarks: “without quite realizing it we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. […]

BBC The Apprentice (7) – Smelling What’s Selling Azhar: falls short.

Tweet      BBC The Apprentice (7) – Smelling What’s Selling “You have sent a message to Britain” – Lord Sugar on his favourite task in The Apprentice. The achievement this praise recognised was that 10 bright young people had fetched up at a general wholesale warehouse, bought £150-worth of randomly selected merchandise and then flogged […]

Banks, Bonuses and Capitalism – Full text of letter published in the London Times Tuesday 31st Jan 2012

Tweet  Banks, Bonuses and Capitalism The concept of the bonus is the problem, not its size. It fosters lazy management, indiscriminate sales, bad salesmanship and is irreducibly divisive; hostile to teamwork and destructive of team spirit. The bonus is based upon a cynical contempt for people: that they can only be motivated by greed and cannot take […]

The Apprentice – Week 1 – Schadenfreude returns.

Tweet The Apprentice – week 1 – Schadenfreude Returns Funny, sarcastic, satirical, hilariously silly, scabrous, outspoken and great great fun. No, give me a break, not the actual battle of the bullsh***ers – but Adrian Child’s great little follow up – The Apprentice –You’ve Been Fired – where the week’s firee is affectionately mocked before […]

TV – The Apprentice – I think big – therefore I am, the big I-am

Tweet Against my will and better judgement I started watching this very popular, very strange programme – and got hooked – for the worst of reasons. I will post my journey through the programme as it did raise interesting business and philosophical issues. If you didn’t see the programme the issues may be of interest, […]

In Good Company – business as unusual

Tweet In Good Company – Paul Weitz They say many movies nowadays are pitched on a 5 line synopsis. It is beginning to show. In Good Company is a pleasant, undemanding, night at the movies. But it is a slither of an emotional idea whose uncomfortable facile build-up takes longer than its more satisfying, though […]