Falconbury Blog & Industry Comment

Great Leaders

The harsh challenges of Covid-19 have seen an epic struggle for survival by large and small businesses and those in charge have faced a long-running trial of their abilities.

Working in such a cruel commercial climate, in conditions detrimental to economic wellbeing, has brought to my mind the mythic advertisement placed by Ernest Shackleton for his Endurance expedition to the Antarctic before...

Protecting & improving profit in today's Covid world

The pandemic continues to wreak havoc across hundreds of thousands of businesses across the world. With a need to constantly display agility, and in some instances re-invent their businesses, leaders need to also think about profit as much as maintaining cash flow.

There are only three fundamental means to legally improve a firm’s profitability. Most leaders will use a combination of the...

Business: some lessons from the past 12 months

1. It’s never what you think is going to happen that actually does
   Brexit dominated our thinking, then along came COVID-19 proving business plans and budgets are largely fantasy
2. The highly leveraged and indebted company is not a good model
   Even if interest rates are low, debt is an accursed burden when a business is facing financial challenges.
3. Long leases and upward only rent reviews cannot...

HR jobs of the future

A report came out earlier this year entitled 21 HR Jobs of the Future (Cognizant) and it then featured in the Harvard Business Review in a snazzy graph, which had dates from 2020 to 2050 as the horizontal axis and ‘Level of tech-centricity’ as the vertical one from Low to High. The predicted roles were peppered across the different quadrants.

I thought it would be interesting simply to list...

Led in the wrong direction

One of our distinguished speakers and authors, Mark Thomas, has identified what he has called ‘The Squeezer Leader’ and, not surprisingly, he finds them ill suited to be running successful businesses in these challenging times. See more on this at: http://www.futureworkforum.com/what-future-for-the-short-term-focused-squeezer-leader/

We can now see, in the drama being played out at Arcadia,...