Building cathedrals: exploring new business thinking

Interview with CK Prahalad

I've been involved with The Thinkers 50 project for a few years. Here's a really good interview with CK Prahalad conducted by Des Dearlove.

Irrational pessimism?

Remember Greenspan and his quip about Irrational exuberance? We're in danger of going in the opposite direction. Don''t get me wrong. I know times are tough, but this is no time for anyone to bury their heads ostrich-like in the sand and hide in their little silos. There's a lot of scary stuff being churned around - a recession as bad as the 1930s, maybe even the worst since well Noah.

 But here's just a little statistic - not that accurate. World trade at the beginning of the twenty-first century was probably fifty times greater than it was in the 1930s. Globalization, like it or loathe it is going to get us out. In the meantime we mustn't try looking for solutions in the past, and think that we can fall back into a nice little comfort-zone where things happen as they always did.

Building cathedrals

I remember reading a story told by the late great Peter Ferdinand Drucker about some medieval stonemasons. Their work was hard, but they knew they were making great things - cathedrals no less. The story has been borrowed by other business writers (including Ricardo Semmler), but the message is clear You can make big things out of small objects so Think Big!

This blog will be a place for bringing together little morsels of information and thought which, by themseles, may seem small and insignificant.

I'm fascinated by business thinking. A lot of the stuff that gets spouted is tired old rubbish, but there's a lot of really groovy material out there that's fun and can really make a difference.

• Areas of special interest are

• management strategy

• buusiness communication

• international trade

• development economics

• business ethics

Content will be deliberately unstructured. There''ll be comments, sometimes clever but more often crazy rants from me, (and anyone else who wants to join in), plus links to interesting sites.  There'ill also be reviews of books and articles, though, once again, some of the reviews will be written on the hoof, as I'm reading.