Category: Ideas

The science of happiness at work

Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

Google canteen
An enticing display at the Google canteen

Compare and contrast.

At Google, social science researchers have been engaged to advise on the optimal conditions in staff canteens:

“Researchers found that the ideal lunch line should be about three or four minutes long—that’s short enough that people don’t waste time but long enough that they can meet new people. The tables should be long, so workers who don’t know each other are forced to chat. And, after running an experiment, Google found that stocking cafeterias with 8-inch plates alongside 12-inch plates encouraged people to eat smaller, healthier portions.”

Meanwhile, at the recently completed corporate headquarters of a large media organisation, staff complain that their catering facilities are not fit for purpose:

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The value of culture lies in its capacity to enrich lives

Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

The National Gallery drew large crowds during the Second World War for recitals by Myra Hess
The National Gallery drew large crowds during the Second World War for recitals by Myra Hess

Organisations of all kinds face a new challenge: to demonstrate that they create value for society and not just for themselves.

A reckoning has been a long time coming after the financial collapse of 2008. But it’s arrival is unmistakable – not just in the mood music of the party leaders as they compete to compose the best tune on moral capitalism. It’s evident in the furore around the aborted bonus of the RBS chief executive, Stephen Hester, the broadly sympathetic hearing given to the Occupy protestors at St. Paul’s, and the public revulsion over the phone hacking scandal which brought about the Leveson Inquiry into the role of the press.

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The role of business schools in society

Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

business school
Business school lecture: a force for good or harm?

Book review: Confronting Managerialism: How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance by Robert R. Locke and J.-C. Spender

One of the striking characteristics of the debate about the economic crisis is the ease with which the epithet “anti-capitalist” is used to describe even the mildest critique of the status quo. Even David Cameron (a fleeting champion of “moral capitalism”) was at it last week, condemning as “anti-business” people who argue that the bosses of large corporations should restrain themselves from accepting obscene pay awards when the performance of their companies has been poor.

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How social media support social value

Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

Eurostar: slow to board the social media bandwagon
Eurostar: slow to board the social media bandwagon

Book review: Who Cares Wins: Why Good Business is Better Business by David Jones.

Who Cares Wins by David Jones is the latest contribution to an increasingly crowded publishing niche focussed on how business can do well by doing good.  Jones, who is chief executive of the advertising agency Havas, shares the view of us here at Vogel Wakefield that the rise of social media is an important driver of social responsibility in business. He points to a tweeter using the name @BPGlobalPR who outpaced the official BP Twitter account in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon spill.

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Ethics are rising up the business agenda

Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

About to become a mainstream subject?

Two different articles highlight the importance of ethics and integrity as corporate considerations.

Anthony D’Angelo, writing in Business Week, analyses the curious lack of attention paid to reputation management in business schools:

An analysis of highly ranked MBA programs by the Public Relations Society of America showed that only 16 percent offer a single course in crisis and conflict management, strategic communications, public relations, or whatever label one chooses to describe management of a precious organizational asset: reputation. Even that course is likely to be an elective. So glaring is this omission that it’s typical for MBA-holding executives to assume “reputation management” or “public relations” is the black art of spinning an alternative version of reality, as though that works in today’s wide-open, relentlessly scrutinized, electron-speed information environment.

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More to business than shareholder value

Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

Andrew Hill writes in the FT about the way opinion is turning against the idea that businesses should focus primarily on maximising shareholder value.

He is reviewing a book by a Canadian academic, Roger Martin, which appears to be a polemic against linking CEO pay to company share price.  But it’s interesting also for the background on how the tide has turned on the shareholder value movement:

Prof Martin’s central concern is that the pursuit of shareholder value “simply fails as a unifying theory to produce value in business”

Given that even Jack Welch, the high priest of shareholder value creation while chief executive of General Electric, has since dismissed its strategic primacy as “the dumbest idea in the world”, this argument sounds a little out of date. But Prof Martin is right that the theory continues to distort corporate strategy and that chief executives need to step off the consensus earnings treadmill. “I do think there’s room for leaders to lead, not to be led by the nose-ring by analysts,” he told me recently.

The idea that companies’ principal aim should be to maximise profits for owners came from Michael Jensen and William Meckling’s 1976 paper on the “principal-agent problem”, caused by chief executives allegedly enriching themselves at shareholders’ expense. But Prof Martin’s own research has shown that in the 20 years before 1980, when the shareholder value movement took root, CEO compensation per dollar of income earned at the biggest US companies actually fell. Between 1980 and 1990, it doubled and between 1990 and 2000, when Mr Welch and others were in their pomp, it quadrupled. Returns for shareholders, meanwhile, were better before 1980.

Hill highlights some interesting recommendations from Martin on improving the role of directors:

Recast board directors (who are as susceptible to the principal-agent problem as chief executives) as public servants. Encourage companies to rebuild the civil foundations of business for the mutual benefit of society. Readjust priorities to focus on customers over shareholders.

Cynics may roll their eyes at such prescriptions. But one of the insidious effects of the quest to hit quarterly targets is that it distances executives from the real reasons they are in business. In Prof Martin’s words, it makes them “indifferent to their communities”.

In praise of silence

Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel


Harry Eyres writes in the FT on our aversion to silence:

“We have developed into a society or culture that is afraid of silence. The noise is now so great in many public places, partly because of all the mobile phone conversations conducted in them, that I am surprised people can actually hear the others they are phoning.

“Constant noise appears to be reassuring, or at least to be thought so. That is why music or muzak plays in shops, restaurants and on aeroplanes when they are about to take off or land. But what happens when noise is so loud and ubiquitous that you can no longer hear yourself think?

“Then the thought occurs that the whole point of all this din is to stop people thinking, or confronting themselves. The scary thing about silence is that you are left with yourself; the mirror which might have been conveniently darkened or blurred is now uncomfortably clean and unforgiving.”

He’s writing in response to A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland, which I’ve not read. His article resonated with my own increasing appreciation of silence.

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The meaning of cycle rage

Martin Vogel2 Comments

By Martin Vogel

Cyclist, Theobald’s Road

My trusted advisor tells me my blog posts are “very eclectic”.  I don’t thinks she intends this as positive feedback.  She’ll be unimpressed, then, by this tangent into the world of cycling.  Bear with me.  It’s a tale of incivility, self-delusion and reluctance to accept responsibility.  An exploration, if you will, of the banes of modern life.

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Why do people turn to the arts?

Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

The Angel of the North, Gateshead

Arts companies seem to be developing a healthy interest in the intrinsic benefits of the arts, if this week’s annual conference of the Arts Marketing Association is a guide. This seems slightly counter-intuitive. At a time when many companies are feeling the loss of public funding, you might expect the arts to intensify their focus on the public policy objectives which secure grants – such as their economic impact. Possibly, the more challenging financial environment is freeing the sector to think outside the box.

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