meek-investor

HSBC is a solid, and perhaps staid, bank. It rode the financial crisis reasonably well and generally stays out of the headlines. Surprising then to see it on top of the financial news for the last five days thanks to a messy succession saga. Here's what happened. Successions in HSBC are very orderly. The Chairman retires to tend to his garden somewhere in the English countryside. The CEO becomes the Chairman. The senior most executive being groomed for years, takes over as CEO. All very dignified and solemn. The Board congratulates itself over many glasses of the finest bubbly. The money continues to pour in and all is well in the world. This time the script went wrong. Stephen Green , the current Chairman, had indicated in May that he wanted to retire in a year's time. A search firm was duly appointed to recommend that there were no suitable outside candidates so that the pesky shareholders can be told to keep quiet. But suddenly Stephen Green was asked to join the UK cabinet ...

Business Leaders who can see far far ahead are an extreme rarity. Usually a business leader’s definition of long term is the next quarter. Occasionally, there comes a business leader who plans for the next couple of years. Rare is the leader who sees decades ahead. Two such examples are the subject of this post. The surprising thing is that their names are completely unknown – I don’t think there are more than half a dozen people who’ll even recognize their names. After all, business has short memories and business history is virtually an unknown science. As a demonstration of this, can any of you recall who was Jack Welch’s predecessor at GE – he was a titan in his own right; honoured with the title of the Businessman of the Decade; but who remembers him now. Back to these two men. One was the Chairman of this famous company in India , a subsidiary of a global company headquartered in the UK. He was chairman only for three years or so until ill health forced him to return back to th...

I read an interesting and short piece on leadership styles in Tom Peters’ blog – a nice post by Madeleine McGrath. Click here – it’s a lovely little post. What do you think ? This is classic Theory X and Theory Y. Can one leadership style exist to the exclusion of the other and promote excellence in the long run ? I am firmly in the camp of “yes, only one style really works in the long run”. But this post set me thinking. What do you say ?