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I must confess I have been avoiding the Leveson enquiry; too many characters, too many twists and turns, too many unbelievable accusations and, ironically, too many celebrities. I was waiting for the box set instead. For years, media regulation has sat in the too difficult category. But help is at hand – I have been asked to chair the last in Fishburn Hedges’ series of events with the Ins...
Kerry Katona, Charlie Sheen, Fred Goodwin. How all our national treasures fail us. And is there any difference between them? We create them. We build them up. We give them honours. And then we seem to want to destroy them. But to punish the wicked, or appease our sense of guilt and remorse? We voted in droves for the government and for the economic model that culminated in Fred Goo...
Dear Susan Rice You are the Managing Director of Lloyds Banking Group Scotland. You were quoted today in the Financial Times commenting on a good new initiative you have championed, with all the banks pledging to commit to a new ethical code of conduct and a new “Chartered Banker Professional Standards Board”. The idea is to impose new commitments, and complement the many other initiative...
It’s wonderful when you read a single insight and it helps you understand why in so many areas the Coalition is struggling to implement its policies. I offer four: The tuition fees: the government cannot afford the number of universities that want to set the maximum fee. But apart from the obvious desire to maximise their income, this is about branding, about positioning and prestige: every un...
There is a classic Economist commercial (produced by our parent AMV BBDO) which features a business traveller turning left boarding a long haul flight and finding, to his horror, that he is seated right next to Henry Kissinger. The petrified-looking man realises his conversation may not be up to an eight hour flight next to the great man. The implication is clear: you should have read the Econom...
Do you remember Tony Blair's "Big Tent"? It was a way of describing an all-inclusive, everyone-likes-me, pre-coalition way of governing; it lasted a long while, before becoming, under Gordon, "goats" (government of all the talents) which was a ruse for bringing outsiders into the bear trap of government in return for a bit of ermine and a brief headline. The talented ones baulked most and baled fa...
One week. Two crises. Different approaches. Here, John Williams, one of Fishburn Hedges' founders, gives a perspective. There’s a case still in reputation management that sometimes, perhaps only rarely, less is more. The lesson from the one training course I ever attended that involved the legendary Harvard Business School marketing case studies was that sometimes the most profitable stra...
With MPs’ expenses back in the headlines, we are all watching closely for any further political fallout. Here John Williams, one of Fishburn Hedges’ founders, gives a perspective on the reputational lessons that any organisation could learn when caught in the eye of the storm. Now that MPs are safely returning from their holidays, it is a good time to pause and reflect on the lessons of the ...
