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Highlights an address made at the launch of West London TEC′s IT Skills Forum. Discusses ICL′s training policy and structure; advocates an investment in skills for the future to beat the recession.

The impact of IT extends further than simply increasing efficiencies. Five areas of impact are provided with the specific implications for ICL: business structure; productivity; business process; business networks; new business.

How ICL identified the need for a new “mind set” is described and the action taken to create it. A programme of training was instituted, which was unusual in being both mandatory and applied to the board itself. The concepts of career management are introduced which will be developed further in a subsequent article.

Developing people in an international context is a difficult and expensive activity to manage. It is important that organizations analyse carefully the requirements they have, and formulate a strategy accordingly. Examines the factors to be taken into account, and the types of international development that can meet business needs. Describes the case of ICL with respect to its alliance with Nokia Data: the reasons to merge, the integration process in creating a “merged” culture and the implications for management development.

Organizations have never faced a more turbulent, complex or changing environment. Traditional managerial approaches need to be supplemented to enable business to survive. Making sense of complexity requires holistic, lateral, intuitive thinking – right‐brain skills that can be improved and developed. These skills need to become legitimate features to identify, discuss and develop in business settings. Argues that right‐brain skills are vital to the development of the five main qualities of a continuously learning organization: customercentred vision; systemic thinking; alignment; empowerment; and openness. These five characteristics are identified as crucial to organizational success and are explained more fully using practical examples. Concludes that managers will be selected and developed using quite different criteria from those used to build the bureaucracies of the past.

Presents the story of a managing director and his team adopting management development as a positive contributor to a massive and urgent change of strategy within a company. Examines the way that total cultural change within the company was achieved. Focuses particularly on those processes, structures and systems that are relevant to people development.

British Telecom (BT) has achieved a classic turnaround that involved divestment and efficiency drives. This interview with Sir Mike Rake, Chairman of BT, sheds light on BT's past development and future growth.

The paper takes the form of an interview with Sir Mike Rake, Chairman of BT.

The interview outlines a number of important factors in running a resilient and effective global company such as culture and common values, leadership at board and executive levels, remuneration transparency, skills, technology, and corporate governance.

The paper provides insight into the strategic journey of BT.

BT is the largest organization to be recognized as a prize winner in the European Quality awards. While the global telecommunications provider's achievement reflects strong performance across all nine criteria of the business excellence model, the judges of Europe's premier business excellence competition have identified BT's approaches in three key areas of management and business performance as exemplary.

What counts as evidence of good performance, behaviour or character? While quantitative metrics have long been used to measure performance and productivity in schools, factories and workplaces, what is striking today is the extent to which these calculative methods and rationalities are being extended into new areas of life through the global spread of performance indicators (PIs) and performance management systems. What began as part of the neoliberalising projects of the 1980s with a few strategically chosen PIs to give greater state control over the public sector through contract management and mobilising ‘users’ has now proliferated to include almost every aspect of professional work. The use of metrics has also expanded from managing professionals to controlling entire populations. This chapter focuses on the rise of these new forms of audit and their effects in two areas: first, the alliance being formed between state-collected data and that collected by commercial companies on their customers through, for example loyalty cards and credit checks. Second, China’s new social credit system, which allocates individual scores to each citizen and uses rewards of better or privileged service to entice people to volunteer information about themselves, publish their ‘ratings’ and compete with friends for status points. This is a new development in the use of audit simultaneously to discipline whole populations and responsibilise individuals to perform according to new state and commercial norms about the reliable/conforming ‘good’ citizen.