KNOWLEDGE. Finance. ORGANISATION. One Country, Two Revolutions. CAPITALISM. ELITISM. EU. Eurozone crisis – a handy alibi for faltering UK economy – but its false | Business. It may be convenient to blame the eurozone crisis but Britain's economic woes are home-grown. Photograph Jens Buettner/EPA Once again, it's make-or-break time for the eurozone. Wednesday's summit represents the latest, and almost certainly the last, opportunity to put Europe's sovereign debt crisis to bed before it precipitates a global slump. It is hard to be optimistic about the outcome. The incompetence shown last week, when Sunday's meeting was put back for three days owing to a rift between Germany and France, was entirely consistent with the strategic blundering that has been in evidence since Greece first announced that it was in deep financial trouble.
Throughout, the response has been late, timid and wrong, but convenient for George Osborne, David Cameron and Sir Mervyn King because they can now blame Britain's slide into a double-dip recession on events on the other side of the English Channel. King's speech in Liverpool last week was a case in point. This simply won't wash. Clay Christensen: 5 observations on innovation. The late American jobs machine « Consider the Evidence. The U.S. labor market is in bad shape. The great recession and its aftermath are the chief culprits, of course, but the sputtering began earlier.
In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s employment increased so rapidly that our economy was sometimes referred to as the “great American jobs machine.” In the early and mid 2000s that ended. Richard Freeman and William Rodgers were among the first to draw attention to the shift. In 2005, well into the recovery following the 2001 recession, they noted the anemic job growth relative to prior recoveries and wondered if the labor market had changed fundamentally. Here are some revealing indicators. During the growth phase of the business cycle, from 2002 to 2007, the number of people employed increased less rapidly than in previous upturns.
The employment-to-population ratio gained no ground over the 2002-07 upturn. Rising employment is particularly important for those at the low end of the labor market. Wall St Journal Video: Does America Really Need More Jobs? China wants to break the ultimate taboo and buy into Western companies such as Apple, Boeing and Intel. China states price for Italian rescue. Guardian's ninth annual sustainability report - 15 minute digested read | Sustainability. It's rare in the world of business for a company whose core product goes from strength to strength to also be struggling to make ends meet. But this is the position that Guardian News & Media (GNM) is in as the media revolution continues to throw up enormous opportunities as well as challenging financial roadblocks. GNM's ninth annual Living our Values sustainability report highlights the extraordinary success of our journalism over the past year, with exposés ranging from Wikileaks to the Palestine Papers and Ian Cobain's examination of British involvement in the torture of terror suspects detained overseas.
In the UK, we exposed the phone-hacking scandal at News International and the undercover policing of the environmental movement as well as putting our resources into reporting on the impacts of government cuts, particularly on marginalised communities. Financial pressures In common with most other newspapers, circulations are in long-term decline and paper costs are continuing to rise. Future-proofing needs collaboration, innovation, education and inspiration | Guardian Sustainable Business. Make no mistake, the transformation from a firm of the past to a firm of the future is challenging, especially while operating amid of a perfect storm of social, economic and environmental volatility. Successful transformation requires courage, not fear. The more we understand and explore our own business environments and wider business ecosystems (as well as our own inner motives and values) the more we find pathways for success – learning through doing, growth through experience, success through failure.
Looking around us in nature and human nature, we find enablers to assist us; catalysts which aid and optimise the transformational journey. Four primary catalysts for transformation are: collaboration, innovation, education and inspiration. Let's explore each in turn: Collaboration There has been much written recently about collaboration and co-operation.
Martin Nowak with Roger Highfield, Super Co-operators. Innovation Education Inspiration We are entering uncharted waters. Slow Business: A Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Lives. The business world was thrown into a tizzy in 2009 when Gmail and Google's news site were reported as "sluggish" for "about an hour. " The BBC swiftly cited pundits proclaiming that the temporarily slow Google was "bad news for Google's efforts to build up Apps, and to a less extent, Gmail, as critical business tools. If the mighty Google can stumble, then who can be trusted? " Erm — since when did an hour's outage of anything, except maybe oxygen, become a major issue? It's time we slow the heck down, people. At our agency, The Change, we were doing well, despite the recession.
Poised to enter another stage of growth — presumably just what every business wants — when we said, "woah, slooow down" — and we did the opposite. We stepped back to a core team, adopted a worker-ownership structure, and began talking about ways to make our lives, both the work and personal dimensions, richer and more enjoyable. We don't think this is about loving work less — it's about loving it more.