Management Today

Matthew Gwyther MT Editor Prisons are pretty grim places at the best of times and those in the UK are currently enduring the worst of times. A short spell actually spent inside, even if only as a visitor, is usually enough to revise the opinions of the most enthusiastic members of the ‘hang ’em and flog ’em’ brigade. Our jails are currently filled to bursting and rife with violence and drug-taking. And, with 48% of individuals imprisoned reoffending within a year of release, they can hardly be said to be fulfilling one of the critical roles for which they exist in the first place. Prisons have always interested me and I’ve visited about 10 including a mother and baby unit at Styal, which housed drug ‘mules’. (The Stansted Airport transparent…

ROONEY ANAND CEO OF GREENE KING I was a deep disappointment to my parents because I didn’t want to be a doctor like them. I’m still squeamish. Studying construction probably wasn’t the smartest decision, but it did allow me to run £20m building sites at 19. Being a graduate in that industry was quite tough. Being an Asian graduate was… character building. My parents had to struggle a bit more because of race, but it wasn’t an issue when I was coming through. You want people from different backgrounds for a richer company culture, but too often the debate about diversity is dominated by conversations about gender. The discussion should be framed around merit and opportunity. After doing an MBA, I joined the marketing department of United Biscuits, then went…

How many times since you arrived have you been told: ‘That’s not how we do things here’? This place needs shaking up, it needs… a culture of innovation. You mean ideas? Ideas are just the starting point. ‘Innovation is an outcome, it’s the end result – not an activity in itself,’ says Cris Beswick, author, speaker and strategic adviser on innovation. And it’s not just about new products and services. ‘Innovation is about solving problems and finding new approaches, in any facet of an organisation whether that be the business model, logistics or recruitment.’ Be inclusive. ‘It’s hard to predict who or where or when innovation will come from,’ says Matt Kingdon, co-founder of innovation consultancy ?WhatIf!. ‘Innovation can take any form and come from anybody in the organisation –…

Is the Swedish streaming star a saint or sinner? You decide Formative years Stockholm, 2006, and disillusioned former dotcommers Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon decide to save the music business from annihilation by iPod (remember those?). MP3 piracy had driven the industry to the brink, but the pair reckoned music fans were not crooks at heart and would do the right thing, if that thing was also better and more convenient. Thus was streaming service Spotify born. Only one snag – their ‘freemium’ online music library, with millions of songs funded by advertising and subscriptions, relied on persuading the big labels to give away the stuff that punters had traditionally paid them for. Not easy, but as Ek himself noted of the time, ‘The industry was in the shitter. What…

The government wants to boost productivity by increasing the quantity and quality of apprenticeships. It aims to create three million of them by 2020, funded largely by a new apprenticeship levy that started to apply in April. Employers with a wage bill of more than £3m have to pay an annual levy of 0.5%, which operates effectively as a tax with the organisation paying and reporting it to HM Revenue & Customs on a monthly basis. The levy will go into a central fund, which employers can then seek to access for use on apprenticeship training and assessment via an online portal. Businesses within scope of the levy should budget for the additional cost and urgently liaise with their payroll department or provider about the practicalities of complying. They should…

From the age of five, I wanted to be a software programmer. Prior to that I wanted to be a fighter pilot, but I am colour blind. Then when the internet came along in the 90s it was like software but way better. You could make something and a million people [at that time] could see it. I knew it was the thing for me. My passion project has failed twice, and each time we managed to salvage something different out of it. The first time was with a group of people doing a really interesting social game. It had a bad name – Game Neverending – and it’s hard to describe because it wasn’t about combat or beating up people. But the technology was really cool. I was in…