Steve Morris: Lost gurus of the 80s – Jan Carlzon (Part 1: Moments of Truth)

  Jan Carlzon’s book Moments of Truth comes from the depths of the 1980s. It is both prophetic and deeply inspiring and as fresh and relevant now as it was when he wrote it. Carlzon was the young and dynamic president and CEO of Scandinavian Airline Services (SAS). He faced (...)

Philip Booth: Subsidiarity Post-Covid

  “[i]t is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.” (Quadragesimo anno, 79).   In the current crisis, there is much talk of “policy reset”. Some of (...)

Steve Morris: The Homespun Wisdom of Robert K Greenleaf

Steve Morris continues his series on lost management gurus It is 1969 and campuses in the US are alive with revolt and turmoil. The anti-Vietnam protests are getting serious and America looks like it might fracture. It was time for a little-known educator, born in 1904 in Terre Haute, Indiana, (...)

Andrei Rogobete: A High Savings Ratio is Nothing to Cheer About

On the surface, one of the few bright spots of the second quarter of this year was a sharp rise in the UK’s savings ratio. But though an increase of 29% sounds like good news, in reality it’s quite the opposite. More than anything, the surge in saving signals an (...)

Steve Morris: The lost wisdom of John Harvey-Jones

Steve Morris continues his series on lost management gurus There is something infinitely sad that the great classic books of the late John Harvey-Jones are now available for one penny on Amazon. Indeed, every book Harvey-Jones ever wrote is out of print. Harvey Jones has been written out of history (...)

Lord Griffiths: Will Covid-19 kickstart inflation?

Last August, in The Spectre of Inflation, I argued that the remarkable stability of prices in the past 25 years was due to central banks having operational independence and conducting monetary policy with a fixed inflation target of two per cent. While respondents and others put forward a variety of views, (...)

Chasing After the Wind

By Brian Griffiths

This was first published as part of the “Personal Reflections” series for Christian Responsibility in Public Affairs (CRPA). As we approach a second possible lockdown to deal with the coronavirus crisis – but this time with different local, regional and national characteristics – it reminds me of my experience of (...)

Steve Morris: Lost prophets of the 80s – Charles Handy and The Age of Unreason

  Steve Morris recalls interviewing Charles Handy and reflects on one of his books I once spent a very pleasant day with Charles Handy at his home in Wimbledon, London. In fact, the day just flew past as we talked about organizations and life and goodness knows what else. I (...)

Philip Booth: Taking and Returning Liberties

JP Taylor wrote in his Oxford History of England: “Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman…He could travel abroad or leave his country forever without a passport or any sort of (...)

Richard Turnbull: The Ethics of Working from Home

One of the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic is a shift in attitudes and practices of remote working at least some of which are likely to be permanent. A survey undertaken by the Institute of Directors of around 1,000 firms found that 74% plan on maintaining or increasing the amount (...)

Andrei Rogobete: Britain faces a savings crisis — what can be done?

This was first published in The Article. Brian Griffiths’s recent article The Spectre of Inflation examined the nation’s record on controlling inflation, and also the dangers of returning inflation. This is, at least in part, driven by the staggering increase in public spending as well as the UK’s money supply growth since (...)