Week Ending: Black swans on the radar & more
SO it’s Chinese new year and the Year of the Goat, but in business speak Week Ending has noticed that another creature, the black swan, is all the rage.
In successive meetings with leading regional corporate financiers from Zeus and KPMG, there was talk, in duly reverential tones, of their quests to identify the next big deal from left-field, the ‘black swan’,
Business has always liked animal-related terms – hawk, bull, bear, not to mention the rather too descriptive ‘dead cat bounce’, so I guess it’s no surprise that the black swan is suddenly all the rage.
What’ll be next though? Suggestions welcome below.
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HE just can’t seem to get too much right at the moment can he? If he’s not putting the backs up of leading business lights such as Sir Stuart Rose, then Ed Milliband is getting an earful from traditional Labour voters on the shopfloor at BAE Systems in Lancashire.
If a business was floundering less than three months ahead of a vital event under the leadership of an earnest but frankly weak CEO, shareholders would surely act decisively and change the man at the top.
Will the Labour Party do it? Probably not. Should they? Unquestionably.
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With politics in mind, where have all the outstanding operators gone? In the 1980s and 1990s there were some truly heavyweight figures – Ken Clarke, Heseltine and the like, who even if you didn’t agree with, you respected.
Maybe it’s a age thing, but when you look at the three main party leaders, they are all pretty much three shades of grey – men from similar privileged upper middle-class backgrounds who went into politics pretty much straight from university.
The fact that UKIP’s Nigel Farage is so unlike Cameron, Clegg and Milliband, must account for a large part of his personal popularity – it certainly can’t be his policies anyway.
