The news that the head of HMV, Simon Fox, is heading the list of candidates to become the next boss of ITV has left some cheering. But I’m not so sure I’m equally elated. The schtick is that ITV desperately needs some fresh thinking after the old boy Michael Grade has seen it go down the tubes. The broadcaster has been keen to find someone young and dynamic to embrace the digital age. It bought Friends United for £175m amid general sniggering from those in the know, and is currently struggling to offload it for £15m. There can be no more cock-ups of this nature.

So what they need is a digitally literate bright young thing. Another front-runner is apparently Pascal Cagni, the French head of Apple in Europe. (He’s bound to be well versed in the latest plotline of Coronation Street.) One analyst, quoted in the FT, described the prospect of appointing Cagni as daring and bold. Quite so. But also possibly hugely misguided, with the potential for une grande catastrophe. Most Euro heads of big US tech firms tend to be sales and marketing types, because the innovation all happens over there.

Fox is a retailer and no doubt possessed of considerable talent. We’re good at retail in Britain. But it may be worth recalling what happened when star retailer Andy Hornby was parachuted into HBOS to crank the stuffy bank up with the benefit of his retail expertise. Fox may be a member of the Magic Circle, he may be a turnaround master but he doesn’t have any experience of the sawdust and tinsel of showbiz. He used to shift fridges and washing machines at Comet before he went to HMV.

Sawdust and tinsel, critics and shareholders shout, is precisely what Michael Grade has in abundance – and look where that got the organisation. He may have had Tarbie, Eric and Ernie plus even Arthur Askey as guests at his first wedding, but that was then and his touch was long gone. However, ITV’s board need to be careful. Television - despite the throttling it has received at the hands of new media - is still an odd animal. Sui generis.

The truth is that it requires special skills to be a leader of a creative organisation. ITV needs to find some half-way decent ideas and make programmes from them. That requires imagination. It requires having the courage to chuck out the crappy, formulaic, tawdry rubbish and come up with something new. It’s daft to expect the CEO of ITV to be coming up with ideas for the next X Factor or The Wire, but he or she has to have an intimate understanding of, and ability to work with, those within creative organisations who can. I’m just not sure someone who knows how to shift iPods or tumble driers is the right person.  I may be wrong, and Fox and Cagni could be ITV’s saviours – the next Jack Warner or Sam Goldwyn. And if the board goes after someone with a telly track record, the trouble is that nobody with any serious senior management talent in TV wants to go anywhere near the job.

The one thing it would be priceless to discover is what Rupert Murdoch has to say on the matter. He’s a major shareholder via Sky, currently looking at a value which is so far underwater since he bought in that you can hardly see the bubbles. But he also has a good track record in TV of letting those who understand the medium get on and run the show. I wonder who he would choose.

In today's bulletin:
Spending forecast grim as City tax take shrinks
Microsoft and Yahoo to agree tie-up at last?
Editor's blog: Who should run ITV?
Email is an offensive business
HMRC gives one more chance to tax dodgers

Huge amusement all round with the news that BSM, the UK’s largest driving school, has dumped GM’s Vauxhall Corsa and is switching to the painfully trendy Fiat 500 as its workhorse.  It’s yet another blow to GM because – according to BSM – about 70% of learners who pass the test buy the model of car in which they learnt.

Fiat has signed a deal to supply 14,000 of the Polish-manufactured cars to BSM over four years, in a marketing deal that will attempt to inject a bit of Italian-style bella figura into the dowdy BSM brand (which incidentally is owned by a German private equity group, so it’s not very British any more). Those who pass in the Cinquecento will qualify for a £500 discount on the uber-trendy runabout. 

One hopes that despite the fact that they will be learning in a Cinqucento, BSM’s customers don’t adopt any dodgy Italian driving habits. It was PJ O’ Rourke, the American essayist, who wrote, ‘I've had to do my share of driving in the Third World. In Mexico, Lebanon, the Philippines, Cyprus, El Salvador, Africa and Italy. (Italy is not technically part of the Third World, but no one has told the Italians.)’

The stereotype of the Italian driver as an excitable, aggressive, high speed Narcissus in Gucci loafers and a dented Fiat Punto has been around for years. The truth is that their accident statistics are marginally better per kilometre covered than other Southern European olive belt countries. One reason for this is the Italians’ superb system of autostrade. Never mind that most motorways probably cost twice their original budget after all the necessary kick-backs have been paid, or that, in the South, a number  have a good few bodies six feet down fixed in concrete – the motorways get those Alfas, Lancias and Cinquecentos from Como to Calabria fast.                    

BSM will also presumably teach all pupil drivers that Italy is a country in which spectacle and gesture rule supreme. So Cinquecento novices will also have to learn a series of hand signs with which to insult each other. Besides the notorious cuckold gesture – which should always be deployed with great care – another is to extend the left arm horizontally out of the window and lower the palm towards the tarmac. This indicates your belief that the other driver is of low intelligence. Both gestures are subtler and altogether more effective than the crude American middle finger.    

And then strictly to be avoided are Italian attitudes to driving under the influence. Many years ago I was hitching along the Northern coast of Sicily and was pleased, after a long wait, to be picked up by a couple of lads in a old Renault 5. No sooner were we under way - with The Doors ‘Light My Fire’ blasting from the cassette player - than one of the pair removed the light fitting in the plastic ceiling, took out a sizeable lump of cannabis and began preparation with his Rizlas. Within minutes not only were we swaying all over the road - the driver having succumbed to a fit of the drug-induced giggles - but forward visibility was severely compromised by clouds of dope smoke.  Through the haze I saw a carabinieri road block up ahead and had grim visions of spending the night in a Palermo police cell with some member of the Gambino family. Luckily our driver escaped with an on-the-spot fine for a bald tyre.

What BSM won’t be telling customers is that the Fiat 500 is both built on the platform of but inferior to a standard Fiat Panda. And you won’t have to wait three months for one, or pay the daft premium to be a Notting Hill fashion victim.

In today's bulletin:
UKFI rudderless as Kingman jumps ship
BP profits halve on lower oil prices
Editor's blog: BSM picks Fiat and gives Vauxhall the boot
Broadband adverts exaggerate shocker
'Our bank is putting our entire business at risk'

Alan Milburn’s report yesterday about UK social mobility – or the lack of it – has been met with a mixture of sighs, sage nodding and raspberries. 'Birth, not worth, has become a key determinant of people’s chances,' observed Milburn, who dragged himself up by his bootstraps. He should know, because the unavoidable conclusion is that despite trumpeting 'Education Education Education' until the cows came home, the New Labour experiment with schools has failed pretty miserably. If, after 12 years, the Government still cannot do better with state education, then something remains very seriously wrong.

Last summer, fewer than half British children left school at 16 with five 'good' GCSEs, including the key subjects of English and Mathematics, the minimum demanded by most employers and universities. With the massive increase in funding, this is disgraceful. In no other area of life, public or private sector, would such failure be tolerated. There has to be some sort of market-based voucher system introduced, or otherwise poor schools who fail their pupils just carry on regardless. 

When I spoke to the deputy headmaster of a major public school recently, he pointed out that his organisation was desperate to attract poorer but able pupils into the establishment via free places. (It had done so up until the 1980s when local authorities sponsored assisted places.)  He knows the heat is on from the likes of Gordon Brown who is possessed of a nasty animus against public schools – along with Oxford and Cambridge - and threatens repeatedly to remove their charitable status. They had a large bursary fund in place but when it came to filling the places it ran into serious problems. They applied to several London boroughs to be allowed to attend state primary schools to talk about the free place scheme, but were not allowed in. They were the enemy, and their Trojan horse was barred entry. In the end they were reduced to bizarre marketing exercises such as taking out ads in the Crystal Palace Football club match day programme.

If private schools are good at what they do – and they ought to be with all the advantages they possess - what is the point of trying to attack and dismember them? Why attempt to drag them down to some miserable mediocre mean? Why, when middling-income parents make the sacrifice to send their children to independent schools – because they find what the state offers unacceptable - and thus pay twice for their kid’s education, should they then accept active discrimination against their kids when it comes to the most desirable university places? After forking out a hundred and seventy grand in fees over a decade and a half to be told that their child can’t have a place at medical school, because a rival with worse A-level grades who comes from a less privileged background has taken it, is pretty hard to swallow. Small wonder that growing numbers of kids are going to university in the States, from where they are unlikely to return once they have their degrees.  

The whole issue depresses one’s spirit almost more than the economy, because it involves so much wasted potential among those too young to vote. The fact that this problem afflicts us in the UK more profoundly than our rivals in the Western World is painful. It’s not just money and education here that count – UK social mobility is a horribly complex beast with grim roots in the class system. There are some who place the blame at the door of those who abolished grammar schools, but no political party currently shows any sign of re-adopting them as a potential solution.  

In today's bulletin:
No full recovery for UK until 2014, says NIESR
No Jobs crunch at Apple as sales rise 12%
Editor's blog: Private school-bashing and social mobility
Sven Goran Eriksson goes into turnaround
Size isn't everything for today's recruits

There are few friends to be won these days by defending bankers. Or banksters, as some are now calling the Masters of the Universe from Canary Wharf to Wall Street. I’m as furious about their behaviour (and envious of their wedge) as you are. There seems little doubt that they hold the prime responsibility for the global economic mess we’re all wading through at the moment. Revolutionary fervour is in the air as Goldmans eat their cake and the rest of us struggle to find a mouldy crust in their refuse bin. Even Mammon’s mouthpiece, the Wall Street Journal, expressed some moral concern about the Goldman Sachs profits this week.

But, while there may be a few worthy suggestions within the Walker Review on policing bankers published yesterday, one has to question the value of turning the sans-culottes on the boys in the bespoke suits and marching them off to Madame Guillotine by parading (and then snipping-off) their bonuses.

The FT leader on the subject today is entitled 'Perils of populism on bankers’ pay' and the pointy-heads from the Pink 'Un do indeed have a point. Walker's proposal that the details of top bankers' salaries and bonuses should be made public is wrong-headed. It’s pure, cynical Brownism: a kind of naming and shaming favoured by the spit-flecked, rabble-rousing News of the World when trying to enact 'Sarah’s Law' and provide its readers with the names and addresses of paedophiles so the righteous can pop round and put the nonce’s windows out.

If a non-publicly owned bank is making pots of money by virtue of its slickness in the casino of modern-day finance, and if it’s doing so by legitimate means and then paying its taxes, what right have the rest of us to demand to know how much it is paying its below board-level staff?

Doubters will say: 'Yes but when they get it wrong and screw up they come to the taxpayer to bail them out. So we need to know'. But can you really tell if a bank is in peril by the size of bonuses paid to its staff? You certainly couldn’t deduce that Goldman Sachs was about to go bust because it paid a couple of million in bonus this week to some testosterone-dripping wild animal on its trading floor. Quite the reverse. I’d be more worried about the dupes who bought/sold from the Goldman guy – the one who wasn’t the smartest guy in the room. It’s simply perverse to suggest that because an organisation is paying out big bucks it’s about to go tits-up. It’s all much more complex than that. Anyway, I’m not convinced that Walker thinks remuneration lies at the heart of the problem. It just plays well to the gallery. 

Everyone has nodded that Walker's recommendations about beefing up the role and training of non-execs on bank is terribly sage. They can’t have known what was going on, and even if they did they were lily-livered. This is now an age-old chestnut. But as Robert Peston has pointed out, the non-execs at RBS were hardly a bunch of kids in shorts with the milk wet on their cheeks. The RBS line-up of non-execs, Pesto writes: 'included three former bankers, an erstwhile treasury official whose responsibilities included financial regulation, the one time boss of an insurance giant, and the titular head of Goldman Sachs in Europe. At the time, these were not individuals who would have been described as either ignorant of finance, shrinking violets or nincompoops. Some have alleged that the non-executives were terrified of the steely chief executive of the time, Sir Fred Goodwin. This, I have to say, is less than compelling. I know some of these non-execs. And I can tell you that they are materially tougher and less pliable than old boots.'

Of course something has to be done – not just to placate public opinion but to make sure the whole finance edifice doesn’t come crashing down again any time soon - but I’m just not sure Walker knows what. Neither do I really. But I’d be very careful about slaying the now-reviled golden goose.

So to end, a couple of questions. What exactly do we want banks to do? Is it really in anyone’s interest that banks do badly by making small profits? Especially those institutions in which we the tax-payers have such huge stakes? Do we want our economy to be less reliant on and dominated by the financial services industry? And if so, what alternatives are currently being proposed for Uk plc? Making cars? Wind farm accessories? The next Google?

We need to be careful what we wish for. One almost certain result of any draconian legislation that arises from Walker will be that banking’s London-based high fliers will simply think enough is enough and decamp to New York, Frankfurt or Shanghai. They’ll be making the decision and leaving the rest of us to get on with it and cope alone with our medicocre prospects.

In today's bulletin:
Battered BA seeks £600m cash after record loss
Editor's blog: It's no time for a lynch mob
Recession makes us drink less
Why disengaged employees are costing UK plc billions
Coping under pressure, with YouTube

Say what you like about Goldman Sachs but it has an appalling sense of timing. Yesterday the bank announced a record pay-out for its staff, after setting aside $11.4bn in compensation for the first six months of the year. Today we hear that UK unemployment has risen to 2.38 million, a rise of 281,000. That’s two hundred and eighty one thousand more packets of human misery for those individuals and their families.

You don’t have to go the whole hog and denounce Goldman (as the recent famous Rolling Stone feature has done) as 'a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money' to feel somewhat queasy about this.  

It’s no longer just the Polly Toynbees of this world who are getting seriously steamed up about such amazing profits during the worst banking crisis since the 1930s. Have we all been conned? Made to look like fools? Over in the States, politicians are livid. Jon Tester, a Democrat on the senate banking committee, has yelled: 'They can’t continue along these lines or there will be outrage'. Even Lex in the FT speculates that 'the government could yet opt to cut this sucker down to size. Calamari anyone?'

But what exactly does Tester want Goldman to do? Be worse at their jobs and screw it up like Lehman Brothers did? Hand over a majority of its profits to those who have come unstuck with their sub-prime mortgages? Those who work there do it because they are in love with money, and the rest of us hope for a little 'trickle-down'. Goldman’s corporate tax-rate is apparently set at about 31%, compared to last year’s single digits - and its employees should be handing over income taxes of some $4bn should their first-half accruals turn into hard cash.

Alistair Darling can keep repeating until he’s blue in the face that very high City bonuses helped bankers to make reckless decisions that led to the credit crisis. But there’s no evidence in these Goldman results that they've been making any reckless decisions lately. Quite the reverse. They appear to understand risk better than their competitors, and so make better decisions. They seem to know where the money artery is, and are past masters at sucking as much cash as they can out of governments and companies now desperate to get bond issues away to raise badly-needed finance.

But this still leaves a moral revulsion that goes way beyond envy. The problem that Goldman has is that its sense of reality bears little resemblance to that of the rest of us in the real world. That’s partly because they are very publicity-shy and hate being in the spotlight. What they do is arcane and complex. If it were open and simple, we’d all be joining in. They just want to be left alone to make their vast piles of cash in peace, try to find some time to spend it and then worry later about squeezing through that needle-eye when they get carried out of the office, having suffered a stroke in front of the Bloomberg terminal.

I’m glad I’m not their PR man, which much be the most thankless (if hugely well-rewarded) of tasks. They badly need to get their head above the parapet and explain exactly why their alchemy is good for all of us. Even if, in their vampire squid’s heart of hearts, they actually believe what they do is really just good for them.

In today's bulletin:
Biggest jump in unemployment since records began
Goldman in new bonus row as profits soar to $3.4bn
Sunshine puts fizz in Britvic sales - but melts Thorntons' hopes
Editor's blog: Goldman Sachs and moral revulsion
No more shock treatment for Chinese web addicts

More misery heaped on the BBC today. First, its prodigal son and ex-journalist Ben Bradshaw, the new Culture Secretary, has accused BBC chiefs of showing such ‘wrong-headed’ leadership that they have lost the confidence of many of their senior staff. Bradshaw - who now has his own political axe to grind - says that the corporation’s complete rejection of sharing out a portion of the £3.6bn licence fee had left many senior staff demoralised.

He told the Financial Times: ’There are plenty of people within the BBC that do not feel it is a well-led organisation and that is almost for me the most worrying thing. And they don’t feel they are being well led on this issue. It fits into a pattern. It is not the only issue. There is almost a feeling of despair among a lot of highly respected BBC professionals.’

All this on the day when, in an attempt to regain the moral high ground, the Beeb has announced that it is suspending bonuses for the 10 most senior staff indefinitely. However many measures it takes to placate the forces which would do it ill, nothing is ever enough. They always want another turn of the rack. 

At some point the BBC is going to have to put a line in the sand, regroup and then get back on the front foot. There’s only so much punishment an organisation can absorb before morale seriously starts to head South. It’s all very well to say that most Beeb staff are safe in their jobs and are unlikely to jump ship to ITV or Channel 4 as both are in a dire state. That isn’t the point. If they are made to feel unremittingly bad about themselves and their employer then their output is inevitably going to suffer.

The damage done will not be mendable. They aren’t churning out widgets – it’s a creative organisation and requires some self-belief and encouragement to function. It requires some heroic leadership.  It’s only a confident organisation like US rival HBO that will, for example, take a risk and make The Wire rather than believing the box-ticking Inspector George Gently will do. 

Sooner or later we have to realise that, for all its faults, we’re fortunate to have the BBC. Life would be a reduced business in Britain if it weren’t around – just ask the foreigners who envy it and find it utterly baffling that we spend so much of our energy beating it up.

I pay two thousand quid a year for the privilege of living in the London Borough of Lambeth for which I get my bins emptied weekly and precious little else. Three grand of my tax has gone to bail out RBS and Lloyds. God alone knows how much I’m going to have to splash out to replace Trident or divvy up my bit for the National Identity Cards fiasco. A year’s worth of Sky costs £675… 

For £140 a year the BBC seems a bargain and I don’t even resent my contribution to Bruce Forsyth’s bottle of Krug to celebrate his 80th birthday.

In today's bulletin

Inflation drops below 2% target at last

Boom time ahead as French car workers threaten to blow up factory

Editor’s blog; Auntie must go on the offensive

McDonald's Euro HQ burgers off to Switzerland

Woolies collapse drags high street down

Anything that brings Twitter, Icarus-like, back down to earth with a thump is fine by me. MT readers will know I am no fan, Twitter is mindless twaddle IMHO - as they like to put it  online – and will pass as sure as night follows day, in the footsteps of the likes of boo.com to the oblivion it deserves.

The latest piece of ack ack that threatens to punch a hole in Twitters feathery fuselage comes from an unlikely source – a teenage intern at Morgan Stanley’s European Media Analysis Unit. Rather than being put in a corner with a Kit Kat and a company brochure for a week, the youth in question, Matthew Robson, was actually asked to write down a few ideas about his ideas on the current state of the media.

What he turned out has caused a minor sensation in the generally sensation-free world of investment bank media analysis and they published it. (No doubt after it had been through the spell-checker four times.)  One of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen, mused Morgan Stanley’s Edward Hill-Wood. (Which kind of begs the question why these people don’t drag themselves away from their Bloomberg terminals for a couple of hours every now and then and actually go and ask kids what they like?)  

Twitter does not impress young Robson. ‘Teenagers do not use twitter,’ he wrote. ‘They realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless.’ When you’re on a pricey pay-as-you-go option on your mobile it costs too much to update anyway. No, Twitter is, as we always suspected, for helpless PR and Marcoms-types short of an original idea to promote themselves and their clients.

But before anyone in old school media starts crowing…Just hang on a minute. It gets worse. Twitter may not be ideal for teenagers’ needs but the print medium is utterly redundant to them. Robson said he hardly knows anyone who reads a newspaper since his mates  ‘cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text.’ They prefer light summaries. Neither do they have any time for advertising which they find little more than an irritation – ‘extremely annoying and pointless.’ 

So what do they like - besides laying around, emptying cans of foul-smelling deodorant over themselves  and splatting their spots into the bathroom mirror? Well, Robson reckons advert-free music on websites, cinema and concerts. Which is exactly why those money-hungry lizards at AEG thought they’d cattle-prod the recently late Michael Jackson to perform 50 times at the O2.

If my own observations of teenagers are worth anything one thing that does wildly amuse them is The InBetweeners, a truly profane but pretty funny online Channel 4 2009 version of 80s favourite Grange Hill. The first episode I watched made me laugh so much I almost tweeted about it. Not.

In today's bulletin

We're all £11bn poorer thanks to RBS and Lloyds

Gas producer Venture snuffs out £1.3bn Centrica bid

Jaguar Mulls summer shutdown while GM saga rolls on

MT Expert’s top 10 tips: coping with redundancy

Editor’s blog: Teenage kicks aimed at Twitter

I’ve watched two programmes on TV this week: ‘Inside Nature’s Giants’ and ‘Gerry’s Big Decision’ both on the beleaguered Channel 4. (That’s a lie actually, I switched on the test match when I arrived home last night just in time to see not one but two Aussies getting their hundreds within minutes of each other. It’s going to be a long, hard Summer for Strauss and his boys.)

Anyway, ‘Giants’ was an amazing documentary featuring a pint-sized female American academic in protective goggles, Dr Joy Reidenberg, using a very sharp knife to eviscerate and then clamber inside a beached whale. She explained with compelling enthusiasm during a lengthy autopsy how the animal evolved and the way in which it lived. It even had a cool commentary from the heroic Richard Dawkins. It was dramatic, informative and even found the long-lost vestigial hind leg among the blubber at the back end of the unfortunate beast, a throwback to when it walked on land.  

Gerry Robinson’s programme is big on evisceration but is really a lot less good. It’s an idiot’s blend of ‘The Apprentice’ and ‘Dragon’s Den’ in which Sir Gerry journeys around in his Jag having a look at the entrails of failing business and deciding whether he wishes to save them from rotting on the beach by investing his hard-earned millions. All over Britain companies are going bust…but now one man wants to help. 

The only way telly people these days feel it is possible to portray business is as middle-brow drama, otherwise all the couch potatoes switch off. Real drama is far too expensive in this straitened times, so Gerry with a bit of slap, swagger and synthetic jeopardy is the best they can come up with. The vast majority of business coverage now uses the reality TV device with us all hanging on the edge of our seats until the final dénouement when Gerry decides whether he’s going to flash his cash or not...

Sir Gerry is an old mate of MT’s, so I’m not going to slag him off too rudely. I hope he regards it as a bit of fun and he’s good at telly.  The old twinkle is still there and he does the full gamut of emotion rather than the monotonous, one dimensional irritability of Alan Sugar.  

But the point is that reality television is a fundamentally dishonest medium – both actively in what it chooses to portray from a complex story and passively by glaring omissions. Watching Gerrys’ show anybody with even a GCSE Grade C in Business Studies is going to be shouting Hang on a minute. What about…. At the screen.  In its endless and tiring efforts to stoke up a sense of dramatic tension everything is  repeated ad nauseam between the endless commercial breaks.  All at the expense of elucidation.

Last night’s edition featured a long-established but failing family furniture business, HJ Berry from Lancashire. It was a basket case with Sir Gerry eventually deciding on screen - after a lengthy, tear-soaked dramatic pause - to invest the not inconsiderable sum of over a million quid for 60% of the outfit.  But, as usual, the detail and explanation of what this involved was entirely absent.

It won’t have escaped the shrewd Robinson’s notice that the company appeared to own most of the village in which it operated.  So plenty of assets there if the whole thing goes chair legs up at some point in the future. Gerry always was one for bagging a bargain. Just how much more there is to the story than meets the eye can be seen by this statement which sits on HJ Berry’s website this morning. Whilst we were delighted and flattered to receive an offer of investment from someone of such caliber, (sic)  who had obviously seen the great passion & potential we have within our unique company. However we also have to consider the finer detail and long term consequences of acceptance before the board can make their final decision. Finer detail and reality TV just do not mix.

In today's bulletin

Is it cos I is white? South Africa not keen on Anglo’s new chairman

Wanna start a dotcom? Maybe Brent can help

Does motherhood cost too much?

Editor’s blog: reality TV has no bite

Not answering the question, with help from YouTube

So little Bernie Ecclestone has put his big foot in it again. In one of the most ill-advised interviews he’s ever given – and there have been many – Bernie told The Times that he preferred totalitarian regimes to democracies and even praised Adolf Hilter for his ability 'to get things done'. Slipping ever downwards in the hole he was digging for himself, Bernie went on to muse that his equally wilful friend Max Mosley, the departing president of the FIA, was a great example of a strong leader who would make an excellent Prime Minister. (It’s just as well that Mosley has legally and definitively established that he has no interest whatsoever in the goings-on of the Third Reich, otherwise you could argue the pair were developing an unhealthy obsession.)

I remember meeting Ecclestone a number of years back when, over shepherd’s pie in his local, he likened his role running Formula One to being a ringmaster in a circus filled by recalcitrant performers, or a teacher trying to keep order in the middle of a class of unruly pupils. He was like the sighing godfather in the middle of a huge squabbling family, laying down the law and sorting out the disputes. During our meeting Ayrton Senna came bursting into Ecclestone’s office because he’d thrown his toys out of the pram during some spat or other. Ecclestone loves a bit of divide and rule because it diverts energy that otherwise might be aimed in his direction, wondering whose sweat and risk-taking earned him all those hundreds of millions over the years.

What Bernie likes is good order and getting his way. He likes the trains in his set to run on time. This was reflected in a rather winsome interview he gave with his daughter Tamara to the Sunday Times magazine slot 'Relative values':  'The one thing that would upset me is her and her sister’s untidiness,' noted Ecclestone. 'Order is a big thing with me. If a picture’s crooked, I have to straighten it. It applies to all sorts of things... I feel I have to be in control. It’s the same with work. I’ve tied up a lot of things in the sport by creating order, by controlling the way things are run, by everyone knowing what they should be doing.'

You don’t have to be a professor at Harvard Business School to know that this sort of approach isn’t high on Management 101 in the 21st century. Even the Army says it’s given up on command and control. Neither do you have to spend long around the Formula One game to realise that it is run with a dictatorial edge. It definitely isn’t a democracy, because there’s no free speech within it – traditionally, if you step out of line you pay the consequences. Until you course you can stand it no more and you oust the leader, as the teams have effectively done with Mosley.

Well, part of being a mature leader is understanding and accepting that, as in the playground, things don’t always go your way. Not every picture will always be straight - but you have to control your narcissism and resist the temptation to play god and straighten every picture in the gallery. Even those that aren’t yours. Leadership is about setting an example – encouraging, engaging, taking people with you as they find their own strengths. It’s also now more than ever linked to trust and integrity.

Of course management is about getting things done. But there are very few businesses or organisations that function like Formula One, or Nazi Germany for that matter. This JFDI (Just F**king Do It) school of management doesn’t really make for a sustainable model. It tends to lead to dysfunctional and unhappy organisations, where people feel done-down and miserable. Sending operatives to labour camps when they fail to perform in the desired manner may lead to temporary efficiencies, but it's going to cause you serious problems in the medium term.

There are unlikely to be many more gaffes like this from Ecclestone, now aged 78. When he goes - as he doubtless will before very long - it is unlikely we will see his like again. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

In today's bulletin:
We're not out of the woods yet, says BCC
JJB supports chairman in bid to diffuse Ashley row
Editor's blog: Ecclestone and getting things done
Companies profit from post-Lehman M&A deals?
Graduates feel the squeeze as job market tightens

Rolling Stone magazine is the kind of place where you are more likely to read about the on- and off-stage antics of Crosby Stills Nash and Young than a stirring 12-page attack on the world’s leading investment bank. But this month the magazine’s contributing editor Matt Taibbi has produced a savage indictment of Goldman Sachs, which has tongues wagging from Wall Street to Canary Wharf.

I’d love to be able to provide a link to the whole piece but it isn’t available online yet. Those old rock hacks still want you to buy the paper version for some real money. But you’ll get an idea of the tone from the first line. 'The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.'

And that’s one of the politer bits. Taibbi is effectively claiming that Goldman has got the whole game very nicely sorted in its favour. The article goes through a string of conspiracy theories surrounding Goldman's amazing knack of striking pay-dirt in both good times and bad, highlighting its supposed role in several past bubbles - including last year's run-up in oil prices, the tech-sector boom and bust at the turn of the century, and the current mortgage crisis.

Taibbi has obviously researched his subject long and hard, and he makes some stark claims: 'What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain - an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy… The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth - pure profit for rich individuals.' There's plenty more where this came from, but you get the picture.

Needless to say Goldman Sachs is not at all happy about this wave of bile. They like to be allowed to get on with making their oceans of cash behind closed doors in piece and quiet. You’re lucky if you get your call returned if you ever ring for information. But Rolling Stone has got them seriously riled, and they’re actually saying something in their defence.

The bank's spokesman, Lucas Van Praag, protested in an email: '[Taibbi's] story is an hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories. Notable ones missing are Goldman Sachs as the third shooter [in JFK's assassination] and faking the first lunar landing.' (Being ironic is another first for an organisation not normally big on jokes, because they divert attention from the most important thing in life, i.e. boot-filling.) 'We reject the assertion that we are inflators of bubbles and profiteers in busts, and we are painfully conscious of the importance in being a force for good,' Van Praag added.

Incidentally, today we hear that Goldman is on course to pay bonuses of $20bn (£12.2bn) this year, or a record £430,000 per employee. Plus ca change.

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Judgement Day for Arnie as California suffers 'fiscal emergency'
Editor's blog: Goldman Sachs, the 'great vampire squid'
PM seeks Brownie points with hi-tech fund
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