A token solution to a seventeenth century dilemma June 27, 2012 IF TODAY was a morning in London 350 years ago, and you wanted to catch up on the latest news, market information and gossip, rather than picking up a copy of City A.M. you would have gone to a coffee shop. In coffee shops you would find the latest pamphlets and printed news, and met [...]
Should the UK create an industrial strategy to guide its future economic development? June 27, 2012 YES Vicky Pryce The UK needs a strategy for industry and it must be better than what has gone before. All too often, our industrial policy has been reactive and incoherent. It has responded to lobbying and failed to offer consistent and equal support to sectors of industry. Good industrial policy must provide the tools [...]
RAPID RESPONSES June 27, 2012 Hester is not RBS [Re: Useless PR has turned NatWest’s woes into a corporate nightmare, yesterday] Having gone through James Hutchinson’s piece on the RBS computer failures, I was very surprised that all his attacks were directed on the person of Stephen Hester rather than the bank itself. I believe Hester has handled the situation [...]
Employee freedom: Olympics and beyond June 27, 2012 AS WE head towards the Olympic Games, many companies have been making contingency plans for the anticipated congestion that this will cause in London. According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), almost three in ten employers say they will try and accommodate requests from employees to work from home, 17 per cent [...]
A workspace is not a workplace: A mobility strategy is crucial June 27, 2012 DIRECTOR UK ENTERPRISE, CISCO Q What are the key drivers behind a mobility strategy? A The workspace is no longer a workplace. Successful businesses are reducing their dependence on expensive office property and enabling a mobile workforce to be productive wherever they are most effective. A business is only as good as its people. Retaining [...]
OLYMPICS BY NUMBERS June 27, 2012 10.8m ticketholders (8.8m Olympic, 2m Paralympic). 200,000 people in the workforce. Including 6,000 staff, 70,000 volunteers and 100,000 contractors. 1500 UK firms have won over £6.3bn of Olympic Development Authority contracts. LOCOG has awarded a further £1bn. 118 overseas teams have signed pre-games training camp agreements in communities across the UK. 1m pieces of sport [...]
Regulatory hurdles for the UK financial sector to consider June 27, 2012 THE Olympics Delivery Authority (ODA) predicts 20m trips by spectators during London 2012, including some 3m on the busiest day. The resulting inevitable transport chaos is prompting businesses and employees to look closely at how best to keep operating efficiently, in particular working from home. Many financial services sector staff work in Docklands and the [...]
Microsoft shows business social networks are big news – which one is right for you? June 27, 2012 Microsoft is no stranger to throwing huge amounts of money at markets it wants to break into – it did it with the Xbox and it’s in the process of doing it with its new Surface tablet. But even in this context, the $1.2bn it has agreed to pay for enterprise social network (ESN) Yammer [...]
SOCIAL NETWORKING IS EASY, RIGHT? June 27, 2012 MySpace It may still be running but it would take a particularly deluded kind of optimist to claim it has been anything but a disaster for News Corp, which bought it do $580m in 2005. This is how not to do it. Google Buzz It was heralded as the next generation of social networking but [...]
Barclays fined £290m in Libor settlement as Diamond loses bonus June 27, 2012 Barclays bank will pay at least $450m (£288m) to US and British authorities to settle a probe into manipulation of the Libor interbank lending rate. Regulators have been investigating allegations that several banks, including Barclays, sought to manipulate the London Interbank Lending Rate (Libor), which underpins trillions of dollars of derivatives contracts worldwide and is [...]
