About Corporate Red

From the outside, large companies stand for (embody?) values like capitalism, globalisation, hard-headedness and the free market.

Large companies are against state interference, central planning and quangos. Their CEOs will happily lecture hapless civil servants, instructed by their political managers to employ a more business-like approach, in the disciplines of the market. Public sector cock-ups are greeted in the press with cries of "they wouldn't get away with that in business"

They would.

Those of us on the inside of big companies know they aren't really like that: Really they are more Ricky Gervais than Gordon Gecko, more Basil Fawlty than Citizen Kane. I work in one and sometimes you would cry, if you didn't laugh.

But my blog is not just about corporate life, it's also about how big companies are run - for from the inside big companies are from the market they profess to aspire to: internally they embody values like central-planning, socialism, statism and command-and-control.

Which is why they often don't work....