Big companies watch out - a developing agenda against market domination?

There seems to be a developing agenda in the UK about addressing the fact that we have allowed large swathes of the economy to be dominated by one or two key players - finance, food retailing, energy, media  just for starters.  Might this become a developing agenda in the next Tory government which seems more focused on the issue than Labour?

The Governor of the Bank of England is concerned about banks which have become "too big to fail" and has raised this on a number of occasions.  Today's Financial Times has a commentary piece from Maurice Saatchi, someone who is close and influential in the free-market end of the Conservative Party on the way cartels have found their way around the work of regulators.   While today  sees the launch of  ResPublica an interesting new  think tank launched by Philip Blond and someone who is supposedly close to David Cameron.  He argues that the degree of monopolisation in many key markets in the UK damages society and urges further development of the John Lewis model - where it is owned by a charitable trust with the workforce sharing in ownership of the company. David Cameron is attending the launch.

Of course large organisations are notoriously hard to dislodge and will no doubt be highlighting their role in society but it will be an interesting agenda to watch over the coming years.  It does highlight how weak the role of the Competition Commission has been in this country.  Why does it not set a target that no company can own more than 15% of a key market?   Tesco has a 30.7% share of the UK food grocery market.

Goldman Sachs grapples with society's changing demands

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in simple terms is in response and has in turn seeded the wider agenda in society that there is more to business than just making money.  A business has a wider responsibility to its varied stakeholders not just returning money to its shareholders or paying large bonuses to its employees.  Now what happens when a company's culture is built entirely on making money - end of story.   That appears to be the case with Goldman Sachs according to many of the comments in a recent Financial Times article.

(Photo from FT.com)

The strength of the money making culture at Goldman Sachs would appear to have made it harder for them to understand the developing anger around the large profits made by the bank over the last year and the forthcoming bonuses for staff.  Note even the Wall Street Journal's Market Watch can do a piece on "5 reasons we hate Goldman Sachs".  

Goldman Sachs is trying and has announced a major initiative supporting small businesses in the USA and has said sorry in a somewhat ritualistic way.   But the PR team at Goldman Sachs need to read Prof. Jensen's 2001 paper on the public sphere and the role of the public sphere in developing organisational legitimacy and identity for an organisation.  The implications of this paper is that Goldman Sachs to achieve organisational legitimacy going forward will have to change its culture and that unbridled money making is no longer acceptable for such a large and influential organisation.  Did the Goldman Sachs partners think of that when they went public back in the 1990s?

Changing influence in the boardroom

• Media section of Guardian.
  

Is anybody doing international PR for the Tories? They need it and so does UK.

The Pierre Lallouche outburst in the Guardian by the French Europe Minister has been building up for some time.  Reading the French media for a number of years, which I do, both online and print, it is clear they find the Conservative position on Europe totally baffling.  The word "autistic" used by Lallouche which may be politically incorrect but is an interesting choice of words as it is a condition which I think the medical profession find somewhat baffling to understand the causes, hence its controversial use in this context.

For many years, the Tory party had the wonderful brand even if unofficial of the "natural party of government" and a strong feel for international affairs.   After all it was a Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, who helped set a post-Empire agenda with his "winds of change" speech.  All that instinct seems to have disappeared from the Conservatives, hence Lallouche's comments and sense of bafflement. 

 French media tend to highlight the Conservative leadership as coming from a narrow elite and also one which has no experience of working in industry compared with their énarques.  (The famous Bullingdon dining club photo with David Cameron and Boris Johnston.)

Worryingly for the Conservatives and UK plc, other governments are giving the same message to the Conservatives and its position on Europe with both the US and German positions made clear in briefings to senior journalists.

Are the Conservatives concerned?  Probably not as being attacked from France will play well in marginal seats where they are fighting UKIP and perhaps the BNP, which incidentally has become the most actively visited political website of the UK parties.  However almost certainly the Foreign Office is concerned and I would have thought the City and wider business community is starting to worry that this uncertainty over Europe makes the UK an increasingly uncertain base for a stable long term investment climate.