Lingfield College Business

Goldman bets on prefab By:  Sarah Moore 24/04/2019 In Sweden most houses contain pre-made elements And where investment banks go, others tend to follow… Investment bank Goldman Sachs is putting its money into prefabricated houses: dwellings that are put together in a warehouse and then delivered to their destinations fully formed. Goldman has decided the industry is worth a $75m investment. Modular housebuilding is not exactly new to the UK: we tried it in the aftermath of World War II in an attempt to meet the urgent demand for housing. Yet today’s prefabs are, thankfully, more stylish as well as more energy-efficient. The idea is that if production is ramped up, prefab housing could go some way towards meeting the 300,000 houses-per-year target the government thinks we must reach in order to keep up with demand. Unfortunately, the UK is far behind other countries in adopting the trend. In Sweden, around 84% of houses are built using prefabric...

I've highlighted the essentials; try to read and digest the whole thing: Why motivation is the real key to Britain’s productivity puzzle By Jeremy Renwick, CapX The UK’s productivity problem is well-documented. Just this month a report from the Office for National Statistics highlighted a  drop in productivity  at the end of 2018. Since the 2008 financial crisis  our productivity has barely increased  and is lower than in nearly all comparable economies. This matters because it means that we are not getting wealthier as a nation or as individuals, on average, with obvious impacts on public services and living standards. It’s now high time for a new approach to the productivity gap — one that draws lessons from growth sectors and focuses on motivating people. What’s really interesting is that commentators including the Office for Budget Responsibility, McKinsey & Co. and many thinktanks have neither explanations for nor answers to this problem. Th...

Bartleby The fashion for agile management is spreading Executives need to be a cross between Spider-Man and Simone Biles The Economist  Print edition | Business Jul 5th 2018 AGILITY is such a modish word in modern management theory that it can seem as if the ideal corporate executive would be a combination of Spider-Man and Simone Biles, a gymnast. The concept has its roots in the idea of “lean management”, developed by Toyota in car manufacturing, and in the “Agile manifesto” drawn up by a group of software developers back in 2001. Big software-development projects were (and are) notorious for producing costly, late and cumbersome results. The idea of agility was to focus on small, innovative and multi-disciplinary teams. Among the manifesto’s principles were that “individuals and interactions” were more important than “processes and tools”, and that responding to change was better than sticking to the plan. Latest stories The dos an...

Fantastic analysis of reasons why, impact and what might be needed to push it through: An Asda-Sainsbury's merger will have a mountain to climb - but don't bet against it - Daily Telegraph JON YEOMANS 28 APRIL 2018 • 4:56PM On the face of it,   news that Asda and Sainsbury's are looking to combine their businesses should be unthinkable . These are two of the UK's "big four" supermarkets and they have around 27pc market share combined, with about 2,000 stores in total. No one in their right mind would surely believe that such a merger could be possible. Yet the deal makes a lot of sense - especially if we assume it is Walmart, the US giant that owns Asda, effectively waving a white flag on the UK market, and deciding it would prefer to throw in its lot with another operator. Even casual observers of the grocery sector - and, since we all buy food, that means we're all observers to some extent - know that it has been going t...

Fashion giants fail to escape long shadow of Rana Plaza disaster - Daily Telegraph The Rana Plaza collapse was the deadliest garment industry disaster ever    CREDIT:  REUTERS   Jack Torrance   23 APRIL 2018 • 12:01AM I t was on this day five years ago that cracks began to appear in the walls of Rana Plaza, the ill-fated complex of clothes factories and shops in Savar, 15 miles outside the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka.  Though employees were sent home, they returned to work the following day and around 3,100 were inside when the building began to give way. After a power outage, large generators on the roof had been fired up – sending powerful vibrations through the structure and creating more cracks in load-bearing columns.  That caused the building’s floors to collapse in on themselves, trapping thousands of workers in a concrete concertina that ultimately killed 1,138 people and left many others with...