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With interests varying from Wimbledon tennis programmes to muckshifting, Hanson Trust is the true conglomerate. Ken Gooding talks to its debonair chairman, James Hanson, who runs what he calls his ‘free form management’ company from the seclusion of a Chelsea mews.

The concept of human resources could be a significant development for the personnel function, with a change of emphasis with implications as far reaching as the evolution of sales into marketing or of works management into operations management. On the other hand, it could be a simple novelty with only minor ramifications. What seems quite clear at the moment is that there is little consensus about what human resources management (HRM) actually is among either practitioners or academics. A shift in emphasis within and around the personnel function of organisations is clear, with personnel management tending to decline and for human resources management to increase, but this is often no more than changes of labels, and few people have a clear view of what they are doing and of the way in which their situation is changing(p. 178). In the academic world, we now see university chairs in human resources management being established, although no British university ever had a chair in personnel management.

Midland Montagu's bread‐and‐butter business, according to financial executive Keith Gutteridge, is investment in small but fast growing companies. In return, it seeks an equity stake and a voice on the board—but never control.

In the space of 18 months Keyser Ullmann has pulled off a series of deals to make it the second biggest of quoted merchant banks. Keyser's joint managing director, Ian Stoutzker, thinks an expansionist policy is vital if merchant banks are to keep up with the development of companies they advise.

The collapse of Barings Brothers has been blamed on the unsupervised activities of a single ‘rogue trader’ in Singapore. This may have been the cause but it is definitely not the reason. While greed and complacency have played a part, the root of the problem lay in the bank's inability to assimilate and adjust to the widely different cultures within the bank, that came with the acquisition of stockbrokers Henderson Crosthwaite, back in 1984, in what then became Barings Securities.

The relationship between strategic positioning and the appropriate mechanism for its implementation is important to most top managers. The determination of an appropriate organisational relationship will largely reflect the complexity of the trading environment. Intrapreneurship within traditional organisational structural formats is one mechanism to combat turbulent trading conditions. A “menu” of organisational relationships is presented which are used within a looser model of organisational relationships. Changes of this nature imply a re‐examination of managerial “grooming”. Educators must design school curricula around criteria of increasing self‐reliance and risk taking. Management developers should encourage the same characteristics. A change in political and social attitudes is also indicated.

In recent years, considerable interest has been expressed in the evolving role of professional management and the extent to which it should take account of the different interest groups in industrial society. A new theory is now emerging which advocates that the primary task of professional management is to balance or try to harmonise the conflicting interests of the major power blocs in society—the employees, the shareholders, the unions, consumers, the community at large and, in some ill‐defined sense, 'the public interest'. More recently, managers have also become deeply pre‐occupied with the inherent conflict of interests in their relations with foreign states as a result of the growth in foreign subsidiaries. The justification for this new approach is that it no longer makes sense to talk about the 'paramountcy' or the 'primacy' of the shareholder interest in the very large organisations which account for a large proportion of the nation's productive assets. Furthermore this viewpoint has some solid backing from surveys carried out in both Britain and the United States which show that the vast majority of professional managers no longer feel that a corporation's duty is only—or even primarily—to its nominal owners, the shareholders.

Rolls Royce Although many people feared that the decision to place the Rolls Royce company in the hands of a Receiver when it ran out of funds in February 1971 meant that its world‐famous name would disappear from the indus‐trial scene, the major rescue operation that was mounted by the Receiver and the Government, with considerable assistance from the American Government and the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, managed to avert some of the worst potential consequences of the collapse.