Did you watch Rupert and James Murdoch giving evidence to the Select Committee last week?

I did; I found it riveting, and that was long before the shaving foam appeared. It started me thinking about the line between the “organisation” and the staff, and who’s responsible when things go wrong.

We also looked at some of the legal aspects of the accountability of businesses in our tips for preparing for the UK Bribery Act 2011

Actually, UK law does recognise the concept of holding the “organisation” to account (especially for safety), and directors of companies and trustees of charities are legally accountable individually and jointly. This means they can be sued for something an employee did. They have to make sure there are proper systems and procedures, and that staff know and understand them, and they have to monitor that the systems and procedures work and that staff comply with them.

Getting back to Messrs Murdoch, their main message was “We knew nothing”.

Imagine a similar scene: you’re discussing with one of your staff some major disaster that’s happened in their department, and they say “I had no idea what was going on.”

My guess is you might reach one (or several) of the following unattractive conclusions:

• They’re clearly remote / out of touch and not making an effort to find out what goes on
• Their staff are clearly too scared of them to tell them honestly what was going on.
• Their management is so lax they don’t notice anything and their staff can get away with murder.
• They did know what was going on but they didn’t think there was anything wrong with it.
• They did know what was going on but they’ve been “selectively” ignoring it or they didn’t care as long as staff got results.
• They did know what was going on but bottled out of dealing with it.

Now imagine you have to sit in front of a judge or your most important customer and explain what happened and why. Scary!

Management and Leadership Tips – What Can We Learn?

So what can we learn from all this for our own organisations? I think there are some common-sense do’s and don’ts.

If you don’t already – you might want to make sure that your organisation is doing the following:

Read the rest of "Management Lessons from the News International Crisis"

Posted by Guest Blogger in Business Skills, Management & Leadership, News on July 26th, 2011| No Comments »

Microsoft Attacks Google with News Corp Deal

Written by Andy Trainer – 23.11.09

Since Microsoft launched its new Bing search engine out of the ashes of Windows Live back in May, it hasn’t made many inroads on Google‘s dominance of the search market.

That could be set to change, if a new deal between Microsoft and media giant News Corp announced today comes to fruition. In a bold move, Microsoft has held discussions with Rupert Murdoch’s firm around a deal which could see News Corp “de-index” its news sites from Google, granting exclusivity to Bing.

News Corp owns some of the world biggest newspapers, including the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal in the USA, and The Sun, The Times and the News of the World in the UK.

If information is power (which it certainly is when it comes to seach engines) – this move to effectively censor the information Google can display in its SERPS could be a key move in winning market share for Bing. Market share for Bing is currently around 10-12%, which is embarrasing compared to Google’s share of over 50%.

In terms of service – at present Bing doesn’t really offer anything that Google doesn’t already have. This new line of attack is about taking away from Google, rather than adding anything new or innovative to Bing.

Rupert Murdoch has made his intent to charge for online content clear for some time, using the argument that “quality journalism doesn’t come cheap”. Most  major newspapers currently publish the majority of their content online for free, which has had a major impact on sales of papers from newsagents.

The argument over for whether news should be made availalbe free online or not will continue, but what is clear is that if the way we consume our news online moves to a “paid-for” model, the search engine with the publishing rights to the major players’ content will hold a distinct advantage.

Could this be the beginning of a turn in the tide for Bing’s fortunes?

Let us know your thoughts on this…

Posted by Andy Trainer in News on November 23rd, 2009| No Comments »