Andrew Hill

Andrew Hill selects his must-read titles

As companies from Amazon to Citi overhaul management, experts warn of consequences beyond job cuts

Judges of the £30,000 annual prize select the year’s most compelling and enjoyable title

Tales of Trump’s finances, AI advances and Amazon’s dominance join the chosen titles

The Problem with Change: And the Essential Nature of Human Performance by Ashley Goodall (Ebury Edge/Little, Brown Spark) Goodall rails wittily against consultants, disrupters, merger advisers, micro-managers and other perpetrators of change for change’s sake. He urges bosses and human resources executives to refocus their attention on how humans flourish at work — and then to leave us alone to get on with it. The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Po…

The annals of mishandled restructurings are full of classic episodes, made worse by technology. Workers have suffered mass redundancy by Tannoy, voicemail, text and Zoom. Now, PwC’s UK arm has charted new territory with an attempt to orchestrate a round of “silent lay-offs” by email. The Big Four firm’s bid to mute the farewells of colleagues participating in a “targeted voluntary severance” has turned out to be far from silent. It may not even be that new. More successful attempts to stop outg…

Some 85 per cent of Americans now live within five miles of a CVS pharmacy. The customer focus and attention to detail of CVS co-founder Stanley Goldstein, who has died aged 89, are among the reasons why. What began with a pair of Consumer Value Stores in Massachusetts in 1963 is now the largest drugstore chain in the US, with more than 9,000 outlets. Parent CVS Health brought in annual revenue of $358bn from pharmacy, healthcare and insurance services in 2023 — more than ExxonMobil or Microsof…

The search is on for 2024’s most compelling and enjoyable business book, with the launch of this round of the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award. This year marks the 20th edition of the award: to celebrate, we asked past winners to name their favourite business book of all time, and to tell us which business books we should have picked for the £30,000 prize since it was launched in 2005. We also asked what the authors would add to their own winning title if given the…

“In today’s post-truth world, it’s more important than ever to separate myth from reality.” So begins this guide to critical thinking by academic and economist Alex Edmans. The book, Edman’s third, provides a road map for how to separate those myths from the real thing and come to a better understanding of the world, drawing on the approaches of academic research. A finance professor at London Business School, Edmans is well placed to share what professional thinkers can teach us about examinin…

“It’s more than, ‘Go for it’. [It’s more like], ‘Don’t be afraid of failure. Be persistent and go for the big challenges. Don’t give up’.” Makiko Ono is trying to describe the concept of yatte minahare, a fundamental part of the corporate philosophy of Japan drinks company Suntory Holdings. There is no precise translation in English, she explains. If she were not too modest to make the connection, her own four-decade-long career within Suntory might be a good illustration. Last year, Ono becam…

Hybrid working is an entrenched part of most office workers’ lives – but at some companies, that could be changing. Major firms including Bank of America and UPS are taking tougher stances on working from home. Will workers drag their feet in returning to the office? And if so, how can companies convince them to come back? Kevin Ellis, the UK head of PwC, tells guest host Andrew Hill why he encourages younger workers to come to work. Later, the FT’s global business columnist, Rana Foroohar, spea…

This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘The return-to-office debate is heating up’ [MUSIC PLAYING] Jeremy MyersonBehind the scenes, you know, companies and company bosses may be making kind of loud noises about getting everyone back in the office and there’s a kind of macho CEO culture. But their HR departments are preparing for the future, and that is hybrid. Andrew HillHello, and welcome to Working It from the Financial Times. I’m Andrew Hill, standing in this week f…

We have all been there: a company-wide brainstorm, a high-level “ideation” session, a — lord help us — “strategy jam”. Tables of 10, a flock of flip-charts and a pile of Post-it notes on which an over-caffeinated moderator invites us to scribble our priorities for the coming year. A week later, a fat attachment circulates by email, only to sink rapidly into an inbox brimful of the day’s more urgent demands. Mercer chief executive Martine Ferland organised just such a gathering for 150 leaders o…

Professors Huggy Rao and Bob Sutton realised they were on to something when executives in their management and innovation classes at Stanford University began to offer vivid descriptions of the obstacles standing in the way of their work. “I work in a frustration factory,” said one who had enrolled in their latest course. Another, from a California technology company, was more blunt. “Professor, I’m swimming in a sea of shit. I’ve barely got my head above the water. And you want me to show init…

In 2011, pitching for approval for Apple’s new headquarters in what was his last public appearance, Steve Jobs told city councillors in Cupertino, California, that the company had “a shot at building the best office building in the world”. Opened in 2017, Apple Park is a circular temple of high technology. It nods to the perfectionism of the company’s founder, from its integrated door handles to the distressed-stone cladding of its yoga room and its tree-filled inner-ring park. It is a long way…

Olympic bronze medallists appear “happier and less likely to feel the sting of failure” than athletes who come second and win silver, according to a classic study Amy Edmondson cites in her book Right Kind of Wrong. Armed with that knowledge about how to “reframe” failure, the Harvard Business School professor was braced to be a runner-up at the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year ceremony on Monday. “Even as the winner was being announced . . . I was just telling myself, ’I…

Amy Edmondson has won the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award for Right Kind of Wrong, about how to learn from failure and take better risks. Her book won over the judges with its systematic, richly illustrated exploration of how to build on “intelligent failure” and its critique of the craze for failure that often hypnotises entrepreneurs and innovators. Harvard Business School professor Edmondson is best known for her research into “psychological safety”. Right Kind…

After losing another Starship rocket this week, 10 minutes after lift-off, Elon Musk’s SpaceX published a 400-word statement. It contains eight direct references to the success of the mission, during which the most powerful rocket ever launched reached space for the first time, albeit briefly. “With a test like this, success comes from what we learn,” concluded the statement. Musk is the foremost proponent of an experimental culture of “Take risks. Learn by blowing things up. Revise. Repeat”, t…

By naming 53-year-old Janet Truncale as its next global chief executive, EY will hope it can put behind it a nasty bushfire ignited by one rival candidate over the final leadership taboo: old age. During his campaign for the top job, Andy Baldwin, 57, warned executives discussing his candidacy that they risked breaching age discrimination laws if they made too much of the fact that a four-year term heading the professional services firm would push him beyond 60. That is when EY usually requires…

How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner (Macmillan/Currency) From the Sydney Opera House to the UK’s HS2 rail line, “megaprojects” often run over time and budget. Flyvbjerg and Gardner lay out the reasons why that happens (lack of forward planning, for one) but, more importantly, draw some important lessons from high-profile failures that readers can apply to mini-projects. Shortlisted for the FT and Schroders Business Bo…