Meet our City A.M. PA Awards Judges – Lucy Chamberlain November 11, 2019 Lucy Chamberlain is the founder of C&C Search. In what ways do you deliver socially conscious business? We have a mission to give back, think locally, minimize hard, reduce our carbon footprint and collaborate with likeminded businesses and organisations. Its also about how we do business every day, it is about making choices aligned with [...]
Meet our City A.M. PA Awards Judges – Alice Scutchey November 11, 2019 Alice Scutchey is a Senior Executive Assistant at Citi and the founder and director of the Canary Wharf PA Club. What made you decide to set up the Canary Wharf PA Club? I launched an internal network a couple of years ago but decided to expand on this idea when I returned from maternity leave [...]
Floating on Airbnb: We meet the founder who is taking the hassle out of hosting November 11, 2019 When James Jenkins-Yates rented out his London home via Airbnb while he went on holiday to Rome, it was a complete disaster. “Everything went wrong,” he tells me. “I had three back-to-back bookings over the week and guests were everywhere — I received calls at 3am, one guest couldn’t get in through the gate, cleaners [...]
Want healthy, happy staff? Treat them like plants November 11, 2019 When imagining a tech company’s office, the first thing that comes to mind is not usually a bright, green, collaborative working environment. If you think about cyber security, the associated images are even worse. Who doesn’t immediately picture a faceless hacker with their hood up, typing on a keyboard in a poorly lit basement room? [...]
Top tips for negotiations from Sir Richard Branson November 8, 2019 Israel is famous for its savvy negotiators. So to launch the new Virgin Atlantic route from London to Tel Aviv, I went head-to-head with its residents to put my skills to the test — and I had to bring my A-game. It was no easy feat. The people of Tel Aviv know how to drive [...]
Changing the childcare system is the answer to closing the gender pension gap November 7, 2019 The average monthly cost of childcare in the UK is more than the cost of the average mortgage, which serves as a stark reminder of the financial burden facing many families. Childcare costs can be so enormous that it often makes financial sense for one parent to take a career break or work part-time to [...]
Can business models like Wework’s really work? November 7, 2019 Flexible businesses can, by their very nature, roll with the punches and evolve as their customers do. But the recent pace of change at WeWork has shown that even the most flexible of businesses can be at risk. Those of us in the property industry cannot fail to have noticed how WeWork has become central [...]
Not all engineers wear hard hats and high-vis jackets November 6, 2019 What do prosthetic limbs, cosmetics, clean water, YouTube, and biodegradable plastic alternatives have in common? None of them would exist without engineers – but that would likely come as a surprise to most people. Unfortunately, we suffer from narrow and outdated stereotypes of what engineers do and the role they play in society. And this [...]
DEBATE: Was MacDonald’s right to sack its chief executive for a consensual relationship with an employee? November 6, 2019 Was MacDonald’s right to sack its chief executive for a consensual relationship with an employee? Martin Townsend, a partner at communications consultancy Pagefield, says YES. “You can’t help who you fall in love with” is one of the great romantic clichés. Unfortunately, if you are the £12.3m-per-year boss of McDonald’s, this is not an excuse [...]
Is the concept of the ethical CEO too good to be true? November 6, 2019 “A fish rots from the head down.” It’s a worn cliché, perhaps, but one that resonates strongly in a world where increasing scrutiny is being placed on those at the helm of global companies. Investors, customers, governments, and even chief executives themselves, are finally starting to take real action based on the idea that unethical [...]