Simon Caulkin



Profile:
Full name: Simon Caulkin

Area of interest: Business and management

Journals/Organisation: The Observer

Email: [mailto:simon.caulkin@observer.co.uk simon.caulkin@observer.co.uk]

Personal website: http://simoncaulkin.com

Website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/simoncaulkin

Blog: http://www.simoncaulkin.com/blog

Representation: contact

Networks: https://twitter.com/#!/nikluac | http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/simon-caulkin/a/b54/9a8



Biography:
About: "Simon Caulkin is a writer and editor who for 16 years was the Observer’s management columnist, writing on subjects ranging from rock ‘n’ roll to the banking crisis. He has contributed to the Economist, the Financial Times, and many national and international business magazines. He edited the UK monthly Management Today from 1986 to 1989" - http://www.simoncaulkin.com/index.php?pg=2&k=www.simoncaulkin.com

Education:

Career: Management Today: writer since the early 1970's and editor 1983/1986; The Observer: created and edited the Management column in ‘The Business’ section of The Observer 1993/2009 Current position/role: management editor


 * also writes/has written for: contributed articles on the theatre for the Economist, the film industry for the New Statesman, men's health (Men's Health), birds and wine (Country Living), photography (Company)

Other roles/Main role: Member of the advisory council of TWIN, the Fair Trade organisation, and a Fellow of the think-tank ResPublica Simon Caulkin, Management Thinker and ResPublica Fellow

Other interests:

Disclosures:

Viewpoints/Insight:

Broadcast media:

Video:

Controversy/Criticism:

Awards/Honours: Industrial Society: journalist of the year, 1997; The Management Consultancies Association: Best Article on management ('Business schools for scandal'), 2005

Scoops:

Other:



Books & Debate:


Latest work:

Speaking/Appearances:

Current debate:Learndontlearn: SiCo: The Simon Caulkin tapes (podcasts) 

The Observer:
Column name: *column ended June 2009*

Remit/Info: management issues

Section: business news & features

Role: management editor

Pen-name:

Email: [mailto:simon.caulkin@observer.co.uk simon.caulkin@observer.co.uk]

Personal website:

Website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/simoncaulkin

Commissioning editor:

Day published: Sunday

Regularity: Weekly

Column format:

Average length:



Articles: 2009

 * with a last word on the blunder years'' - As management evolved, finance annexed reality, cost ousted value, the means became the end - 14th June
 * service must not follow GM's road to ruin'' - Services should not be industrialised; they need well-organised humans, not computers - 7th June
 * to the Puritans, not business schools'' - As Larry Elliott noted in the Guardian recently, since the 1960s the liberal state has been stood on its head - 31st May
 * can banish the downturn blues'' - There are no titles or conventional lines of command at Gore. The only way of becoming a leader is to attract followers - 24th May
 * simply stamp 'Private' on the Royal Mail'' - Everyone is aware it's credit crunch time for Royal Mail; the only question is what kind of crunch - 17th May
 * an idea: don't offer prizes for suggestions'' - At first sight, getting worked up about Lord Darzi's NHS suggestion scheme might seem over the top - 10th May
 * rich cried wolf. Now they deserve to be bitten'' - For a start, we can begin to query facile identification of 'top talent' with 'top pay' - 3rd May
 * mad world of New Labour's efficiency drive'' - John Locke defined a madman as someone 'reasoning correctly from erroneous premises' - 26th April
 * the chance to make banking dull again'' - The nightmare that is finally ending is the 30-year neoliberal project to make humanity safe for markets - 19th April
 * time to explode the myth of the shareholder'' - Does anyone seriously think that assurances about "better bonuses" will stem this tide of outrage? - 29th March
 * isn't an abstract problem. Targets can kill'' - Even where targets don't kill, they have similarly destructive effects right across the public sector - 22nd March
 * as usual while the foundations crumble'' - Underneath all the frenetic activity, the remarkable thing is not how much underlying assumptions have changed, but how little - 15th March
 * the payroll means unhappy dividends'' - This is the first recession since economists began taking happiness seriously - 8th March
 * We need local heroes, not local elections - Amidst the global financial crisis, localism will be the new political battleground - 1st March
 * However good the pay, it doesn't buy results - Simon Caulkin discusses the difficulties the financial sector has got itself into over pay incentives - 22nd February
 * Inside every chief exec, there's a Soviet planner - The most remarkable thing on show at last week's banking hearings was the capitalists' naivety about capitalism - 15th February
 * We can't afford to give bosses a blank cheque - If incentives don't work, what does? Simple. Pay people well and fairly - 8th February
 * Big banks have failed. The solution? Big banks... - Are today's mergers busily creating organisations that are too big to save? - 1st February
 * We must decide to keep the red flag flying here - What was Sir Fred Goodwin thinking when he committed Royal Bank of Scotland to the fateful £48bn takeover of ABN Amro? - 25th January
 * Darwin's theory turned bosses into dinosaurs - Is there a case for saying that the credit crunch is all down to Charles Darwin? - 18th January
 * It's got so horrible that we ought to be revolting - Banks, jobs and money in colossal quantities have disappeared with barely a murmur of dissent - 11th January



Articles: 2008

 * Be efficient, please customers, cut costs... that's it - Management editor Simon Caulkin finds wisdom in an old poem inspires his advice for companies on how to survive the recession - 28th December 2008
 * A senseless system graduates without honours - Simon Caulkin: RAE s a classic example of the self-defeating performance-management overwhelming the public sector - 21st December 2008
 * Social care is Stalinist. That's not an insult, it's a fact - After social workers, it's Ofsted's turn to come under fire - 14th December 2008
 * Too many mistakes means too many managers - As their finances go into meltdown, companies are scrambling to cut costs across the board - in every place but the right one - 7th December 2008
 * Blame bureaucrats and systems for Baby P's fate - Simon Caulkin: Heads should probably roll over the awful death of Baby P, just not the ones most people think should roll - 23rd November 2008
 * Guess what? Self-interest is bad for the economy - Common sense suggests a number of reasons why self-interest-centred commerce is a flawed a model - 16th November 2008
 * Heaven-sent chocolate, with profits to match - Divine Chocolate, a deliberate counter to Reaganomics, celebrates its 10th anniversary - 9th November 2008
 * Hot prospects for a company with a conscience - Eaga has made bold, entrepreneurial decisions to help Britain's 3.5m fuel-poor - 2nd November 2008
 * Gore-Tex gets made without managers - Hi-tech pioneer WL Gore is weathering the crunch well, says CEO Terri Kelly, because it is mercifully free of bureaucracy. Simon Caulkin talked to her - 2nd November 2008
 * When it came to the crunch, MBAs didn't help - Simon Caulkin: What part have business schools played in the implosion of the world's banking system? - 26th October 2008
 * High earners need to be brought down to Earth - Simon Caulkin: If, after 30 years of effort, the only solution on offer to a problem is to 'try harder', you know there's something wrong with the premise - 19th October 2009
 * ‘Trust me, I'm a manager.’ Doesn't work, does it? - Simon Caulkin: Company executives have not only forfeited society's trust; they don't trust each other - 12th October 2008
 * It's all gone quiet on the management gurus' side - Why aren't management experts being more vocal on the credit crunch? Because they don't want to admit the real, human cause (Business blog) - 10th October 2008
 * Stock exchange: a casino where the rich can't lose - The banks have been hijacked by a tiny officer class of top executives - 5th October 2008
 * Economic model for sale: several careless owners - Simon Caulkin discusses the importance of corporate ownership in the current market meltdown - 28th September 2008
 * It's a fine mess you've got us into; now get us out - Simon Caulkin: The crisis is primarily one of the Anglo-Saxon model: 'Washington consensus' is on trial - 21st September 2008
 * In Tarzan v Jane, Tarzan gets the bigger bonus - The subject of women in management evokes the same stifled groans these days as feminism - 14th September 2008
 * Why size doesn't matter in deciding bosses' pay - Pay for performance in shareholder terms is probably unachievable and often counterproductive - 7th September 2008
 * Now we see it: the free market isn't always right - Simon Caulkin: It is tragically the case that after all the frantic activity of the past 11 years, public services are still as much in need of reform - 31st August 2008
 * Workplace skills are hard to find at head office - Simon Caulkin: The consequence of living in an organisational economy is that management matters - 10th August 2008
 * If you want to be productive, get disorganised - The system for training and employing the UK's junior doctors was always a bit of a black box - 3rd August 2008
 * How to make $4bn without really managing - You can love Google or hate it, but you can't deny its extraordinary effectiveness - 27th July 2008
 * Why power-sharing beats the traditional plc - Asked to name employee-owned firms, most people would have difficulty getting past one finger of one hand: John Lewis - 13th July 2008
 * The price of dubious advice - £100bn a year - Consultancies have a Macavity-like ability to vanish from the scene of the crime - 6th July 2008
 * In a world of league tables, compassion loses out - Targets lead to a regime that is not just uncaring and uncompassionate - it is systematically so - 29th June 2008
 * It ain't what you change, it's the way that you do it - Although management has achieved much, it has now ossified into a barrier to change - 22nd June 2008
 * Europe is out to get the fat cats Labour strokes - Soaring executive pay is high on the European political agenda - 15th June 2008
 * Ask the audience to get a million pound answer - Experts are often wrong and are nearly always outgunned by a large group of non-experts - 25th May 2008
 * We can still defuse the ticking care timebomb - Adult social care, on which the Prime Minister has just launched a public consultation, is widely considered a financial timebomb - 18th May 2008
 * Full Marx if you can see history repeating itself - To piece together the fragments of today's worldwide crisis is to grapple with a sense of deja vu - 11th May 2008
 * Labour's public sector is a Soviet tractor factory - The government is locked in a nightmare cycle in which each round of reforms makes things worse - 4th May 2008
 * Supply chains should be kept on a short leash - Boeing is embarrassed on announcement of major delay to 787 Dreamliner project as firm's global supply chain cracks up - 27th April 2008
 * Only a new brew can save pubs - 20th April 2008
 * A century on, the MBA still has lessons to learn - According to the Financial Times, this year 500,000 will graduate globally with the coveted degree, 30,000 of them in China - 20th April 2008
 * Blood ties can result in Murdoch - or murder - According to one calculation, two thirds of the world's businesses are family firms, contributing the same proportion to GDP - 13th April 2008
 * Placebos that musn't be swallowed by the boss - As in medicine, confidence, even if misplaced, makes people perform better - 6th April 2008
 * Painful truth behind the Revenue's slipped disk - It's disappointing that after three generations of IT outsourcing, organisations still make the same mistakes - 30th March 2008
 * Capitalism's too important to be left to capitalists - On trial in the credit crunch is not the 'banking system' but the fundamentalist model of management by which our institutions are governed - 23rd March 2008
 * We're getting choice, wether we want it or not - The only incentive choice provides for suppliers is to cut corners and costs - 16th March 2008
 * 198 reasons why we're in this terrible mess - Companies in the private sector act as chips tossed around by high rollers in the City supercasino, while the public sector is in the grip of a central planning regime of rigidity and incompetence - 9th March 2008
 * Greedy City is eating away at Britain's backbone - In his witty column last week, my colleague William Keegan recalled Gladstone's description of finance as 'the stomach of the country, from which all the other organs take their tone'. Well, that stomach currently being convulsed by binge-induced indigestion and nausea, and the tone set for the other organs (which means for us) is a throbbing hangover, the effects of which are likely to get worse before they get better - 2nd March 2008
 * Our apprentices should be able to join the dots - Launch of the government's 'world-class apprenticeships' scheme has evoked a curiously muted response - 24th February 2008
 * Police bureaucracy that needs to be arrested - The policeman's lot is not a happy one - 17th February 2008
 * The rule is simple: be careful what you measure - If there's one management platitude that should have been throttled at birth, it's 'what gets measured gets managed' - 10th February 2008
 * There's life yet beyond the British super-casino - 'Speculators may do no harm on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes a bubble on the whirlpool of speculation' - 3rd February 2008
 * Show Keen the money and we win Olympic gold - Peter Keen, the eager young performance head of UK Sport is charged, among other things, with bringing home Olympic bacon at this year's Beijing and, even more so, at the 2012 London games - 27th January 2008
 * For the worst of all possible worlds, press '1' now - Responses to last week's piece on surveillance and outsourcing management to computers yielded much food for thought - mostly depressing - 20th January 2008
 * Why Big Brother makes an uneasy workmate - More than half of all UK employees - 52 per cent - are now subject to computer surveillance at work... - 13th January 2008
 * Thank you, readers. I couldn't have done it alone - Let's start 2008 with a tribute to those without whom this column could not exist - you. When I began writing it 13 years ago, my elation at landing the job was quickly tempered by the realisation that, like cooking in a restaurant, a column was a regular obligation - 6th January 2008



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