Brian, is there also a niche “northern places in sunshine” art school?
NEW BLOGPOST: Palestine Action: What just happened?
A look at some of the legal principles at play following yesterday's verdicts.
thesecretbarrister.com/2026/02/05/p...
Well-established companies should ask themselves a simple question: “Who in the company is in the business of looking after its future?”’ My FT Big Read on how giants from Boeing to Kodak to GE lost their way
on.ft.com/4jLtLS8
#management #leadership
I used to be one of the people selecting the letters to the editor for FT publication. You live for moments like this.
Thank you. I see that they were planning to charge me extra for a new “service” they hadn’t told me about. This needs a legal challenge.
FT readers will pretty much never have seen Andy Slade's name in print. But he was the kind of person who gets a newspaper out with minimal errors and maximum attention to the needs of the readers. We're all very sad at his death. But this is a beautiful obituary: www.ft.com/content/76e8...
Isn’t there someone else we’re supposed to quote if someone says “in the long run”?
Intelligent, nuanced email from @stephenkb.bsky.social today on dangers in Labour's schools bill. There's plenty wrong with England's schools, especially on special needs, but the bill risks reversing the greatest national achievements of previous decades - the improvement in state education.
And that fine distinction between indescribable and undescribable (although a writer should try).
So many congratulations to you both.
And who also in Nice Work made a rare (in modern times) fictional foray into industrial life.
So we can add BA silver cards to the list of things we boomers had which are now denied to younger generations. www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-...
I try to use subway systems wherever I go. NYC’s is the most bewildering I’ve encountered. When I wrote a column saying New Yorkers were probably sniggering at our confusion I got messages from lifelong New Yorkers saying they’d only ever mastered their journey to work.
Thanks to the @financialtimes.com Claer Barrett for letting us know that the latest model of Monopoly is card-only.
Will tell you when I next see you.
The FT once had a news editor known as the Whichfinder General.
This CD player was my birthday present in 1997 along with the incomparable Fresh Hits 1997. I found it recently and COULD NOT BELIEVE how rich the sound was, after years of streaming Spotify on my phone. My column today is about this phenomenon, which I’m calling “qualitynesia” on.ft.com/3ZlwHf5
Here's @pilitaclark.bsky.social writing about how "around" had replaced "about" as the word used when talking about something. While I'm an ever bigger pedant than Pilita, I hadn't noticed this one. It will now irritate me every time.
www.ft.com/content/b589...
Opine/opined
Don’t forget learnings.
My old friend Peter Grimsdale arguing in the @financialtimes.com that Jaguar's ad is a return to traditional values.
People facing retirement often want whatever they do next to have a wider purpose or worry that their career didn't have one. So thanks to Victoria Tomlinson of Next-Up for alerting me to this study concluding that a sense of purpose reduces dementia risk. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC....
Our overdiagnosis crisis
Amid a sharp rise in mental health conditions, critics say we have started to pathologise “ordinary human unhappiness”.
By Rachel Kelly
www.newstatesman.com/politics/hea...
Took me four days. Watch the bottom step!
Took me four days. Watch the bottom step!
My old deputy, and then editor, Isabel Berwick and I talk about what we wish we'd known when we started out.
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/w...
Delighted to see @pilitaclark.bsky.social advocating "if you cough, you're off". If you're ill, go home and don't infect everyone else. As a manager, I was sending snifflers home long before Covid, as my deputies @martinbrice.bsky.social and Hugo Greenhalgh will recall.
www.ft.com/content/d79c...
How to play the organisational politics game. My @financialtimes.com column. (And, no, opting out of the game entirely doesn't work.)
www.ft.com/content/772f...
Pleased to have caught the last performance of "Skeleton Crew" at the Donmar Warehouse about the closure of a Detroit car plant. Brilliant portrayal of the middle manager's invariable dilemma: having to defend company line against the rage of your team, who you try to protect against all the odds.
“We are not considering an EU-wide youth mobility scheme and there will be no return to freedom of movement.” Meaning that any u-turn will be portrayed as a return to FoM. Difficult to see how they spin this.