Long term thinking: Lessons from Xi
If you thought your AGM was tedious, spare a thought for the 5,000-odd delegates to China’s annual Two Sessions meeting, where the national legislature and party apparatus meet to approve government policies over 10 days of speeches, votes and a palm-numbing amount of clapping. Look behind the bureaucracy, though, and you’ll see a masterclass in […]
What Retail and Consumer Boards are talking about….
Like therapists, headhunters wouldn’t get very far if we didn’t know how to listen. What chairs, CEOs and senior executives raise in our discussions remains private of course, but as they articulate their problems – ultimately seeking a future colleague with the right mix of skills, experience and cultural aptness to help solve them – […]
Will Trump kill TikTok – and should we care?
I don’t do TikTok, you’ll be unsurprised to hear. No sassy dance videos or pictures of baby hippos around here. But many consumer facing brands absolutely do: it’s a vital channel for marketing and increasingly sales, particularly among younger people. This investment seems jeopardised by the prospects of an intensified US-China trade war, particularly as […]
Why culture fit is a dangerous but essential concept
A month or two back, actress Saoirse Ronan did a rare thing, silencing a panel of celebrities in full flight on the Graham Norton Show. Eddie Redmayne had just explained how he had been trained how to defend himself with a phone, for his role in The Day of The Jackal. So far, so banter. […]
7 contrarian retail trends for 2025
Catching up with Anusha Coutiganne of Vogue Business last week, we started talking about how the best retailers are always just a little ahead of their time. Gordon Selfridge, Jack Cohen and Ingvar Kamprad didn’t merely extrapolate the latest trends, they saw the glimmer of a compelling future and made it a reality for their […]
Can executive shake-ups save an ailing fashion or retail business?
With little regard for maritime traditions, the retail and fashion industries rarely allow captains the opportunity to go down with the ship. Walking the plank is a far more common fate. As one Chair put it to me “my job is to recruit an excellent board, ensure everyone’s voice is heard, particularly during strategy formulation… […]
Is it time to be more optimistic about the UK?
Whoever picked D-Ream’s Things Can Only Get Better for Tony Blair’s 1997 election campaign soundtrack, deserves a medal. Even now, the early days of New Labour embody a spirit of optimism and renewal encapsulated in that song. With Barack Obama, it was a chant that captured the mood. Yes. We. Can. Keir Starmer and Rachel […]
Never Knowingly Undersold: A great way to refocus the John Lewis brand
You really appreciate good slogans when you see a bad one. Among my favourite disasters are “nothing sucks like Electrolux” (vacuum cleaners) and “cheat on your girlfriend, not on your workout” (an unsurprisingly short-lived Reebok Germany campaign in 2012). Never Knowingly Undersold was always a great slogan, classy rather than catchy, and speaking to a […]
Assessing Labour’s first two months in office
Indeed, the key early task for Keir Starmer and his Cabinet is to set the tone for what will follow, communicating through actions as well as by words. So how have they done so far? Objective 1: Being bold Governing a country, like running a business, invariably involves strategic balancing acts. For Starmer, the […]
Will D&I make a comeback?
The business response fell somewhere on a spectrum from genuine reflection and commitment to change, through to panicked bandwagoning. Some said that they couldn’t see the business benefit to justify hiring a D&I (or, if you include ‘equity’, DEI) professional, but they largely kept that to themselves. D&I boomed, particularly in large corporates. But as […]
