Skip to main content

Lessons of Leadership

According to Andy Haldane, the Bank of England's chief economist, bad managers are partially to blame for the UK's poor productivity statistics. You can access his speech here and press coverage of the speech is available here and here. I'm convinced that as the nature of companies, human capital and technology changes, there is a need for post-industrial approaches to management and leadership.

On Friday past I stepped down as Head of Queen's Management School. (This means that I will be able to blog more than I have been doing over the past 3 years!) During my tenure, I've spent much time thinking about leadership and how to manage talent. I now want to share those insights in a series of three posts over the next month or so. The three areas that I will be covering are (a) Managing Talent; (b) Managing Yourself; and (c) Managing Creativity. The lessons which I have learned are applicable to those outside the university sector - any organisation which needs talent, relies on creativity and is operating in a very competitive environment is akin to a university - think banking, management consulting, IT, biotech etc. 


Popular posts from this blog

Bitcoin Bubble?

According to Robert Shiller , speaking at Davos, Bitcoin is a perfect example of a bubble - story here . Shiller sees Bitcoin as a backwards step in the evolution of money.   George Selgin , a free banker, takes an opposing view - click here .  Although he doesn't believe that Bitcoin is money, he sees its development as a fascinating turn in the evolution of money. In particular, he lauds the fact that Bitcoin production is constrained and cannot be infinite. There is a short video below where Bitcoin explain how it works.

How Valuable Are Connections?

Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, Amir Kermani, James Kwak and Todd Mitton have written a paper on whether firms connected to Timothy Geithner benefited from these connections. They do so by looking at how stocks of these firms reacted to the announcement that he was a nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008. They find that there were large abnormal returns for connected firms. Below is the paper's abstract and the full paper is available here . The announcement of Timothy Geithner as nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008 produced a cumulative abnormal return for financial firms with which he had a connection. This return was about 6% after the first full day of trading and about 12% after ten trading days. There were subsequently abnormal negative returns for connected firms when news broke that Geithner's confirmation might be derailed by tax issues. Excess returns for connected firms may reflect the perceived impact of relying on the advice of a small ne

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles, co-authored with my colleague Will Quinn , is forthcoming in August. It is published by Cambridge University Press and is available for pre-order at Amazon , Barnes and Noble , Waterstones and Cambridge University Press .