What makes a great manager? What are the components that go to make a great leader? Academics at business schools around the globe have expended great effort in trying to answer these questions. A recent case study undertaken at Harvard Business School looks at the most successful football manager in history - Sir Alex Ferguson. Much as it pains me to admit this, but Ferguson is a great manager. You can read what the HBS case study found here. Ferguson also gave a class at HBS, which was apparently very compelling (click here). Thankfully none of the MBA students received the infamous 'hairdryer' treatment from Fergie! My hope is that there will be a similar HBS case study on Brendan Rogers in 2038. I can but dream!
As an undergraduate, I was taught about the failure of Herstatt Bank in 1974 and Herstatt risk. This bank was only the 35th largest bank in Germany at the time so why would anyone be interested in studying its failure? Herstatt failed because of its involvement in risky foreign exchange business. When it closed its doors on 26 June 1974, counterparty banks (mainly in New York) had not received dollars due to them because of time-zone differences - this is known as settlement risk. The cross-jurisdictional implications of its failure resulted in the Bank for International Settlements setting up the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and Herstatt's failure was a key reason for the establishment of real-time gross settlements systems, which ensures that payments between two banks are executed in real time. The Bank of England's Ben Norman has an interesting post on Herstatt over at the Bank's new blog ( Bank Underground ). As well as giving an excellent overview of