Whether it’s CEOs, political leaders and business elites – across the world, key decisions are still made by tiny coteries of people. With enough talent, elan and hard work any of us can join them. So, we are told… Follow key rules: Be transparent. Defer to bosses and clients. Take responsibility. Feedback is everything. Do these things brilliantly and the top job can be yours. But can it? Douglas Board’s new book Elites breaks radical new ground. It shows why, paradoxically, meritocracies create glass ceilings. We end up with a society-wide misallocation of respect in favour of a few at the top, which hurts us all. In this exclusive interview, I speak to Douglas Board about the reality of ‘elite status’ in our society, and why we need a more humane world in which organisations and individuals hold in better balance the ordinariness of society’s extraordinary achievers, and the extraordinariness of ‘ordinary’ men and women.

Thought Economics

Professor Gary Hamel is one of the world’s most influential and iconoclastic business thinkers. He has been on the faculty of the London Business School for more than 30 years and is the director of the Management Lab. Hamel has written 17 articles for the Harvard Business Review and is the most reprinted author in the Review’s history. His landmark books have been translated into more than 25 languages. Fortune magazine describes Hamel as “the world’s leading expert on business strategy,” and the Financial Times calls him a “management innovator without peer.” Hamel has been ranked by The Wall Street Journal as the world’s most influential business thinker and is a fellow of the Strategic Management Society and of the World Economic Forum. For over a decade, Gary has been researching how bureaucracy can be replaced by something better. In his forthcoming book Humanocracy, he lays out a detailed blueprint for creating organizations that are as inspired and ingenious as the human beings within them… organizations that are anchored around motivation, models, mindsets, mobilization and migration. In this exclusive interview, I speak to Gary Hamel about how we can dismantle the bureaucracy of the industrial age and replace it humanocracy – a management system fit for the future and fit for human beings.

Thought Economics

As Captain of Manchester City and of the Belgium National Team, Vincent Kompany has achieved huge success on the pitch.   Like many of his peers Vincent has immersed himself in playing football and being the best on the pitch- but perhaps most interestingly, he has also taken a deep interest in the business of football itself. I caught up with Vincent to learn more about the business of football, and what he learned doing an MBA.

Thought Economics

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