Employers seek people who are head and shoulders above the rest. SMEs need to keep developing and challenging their people. That was the overriding consensus at a recent Yorkshire Business Insider Economic Forum at Headingley to which over 100 CEOs and MDs flocked on a bitterly cold, dark and bleak winter morning. Reading about the [...]

Following up from Nick’s previous post, cabbies aren’t the only ones being geared up to deliver word-of-mouth marketing. The owners of Fabulous Salon and Fantastic Fingers in South Caroline, USA are – according to a story in the Guardian – on the Obama campaign trail. Recognising the salons’ customers offer a captive audience (apparently the [...]

So Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall tried to turn his sleepy town of Axminster into Britain’s first free-range town. He sort of succeeded – 60 per cent of chickens sold that one week were free-range – but the real success will be whether the good intentions continue. I watched each of the programmes intently and thought it presented [...]

When M&S chief executive Stuart Rose was knighted in the New Year’s Honours List, the accolade was awarded for services to retail industry (no surprise there) and to corporate social reponsibility.His CSR credentials were burnished most recently – and most impressively – when he balanced the customer-empowering “Your M&S” campaign with the “Plan A” environmental [...]