A.O.B.

AOB is An Occasional Blog by the partners, associates, clients and friends of The Governance Partnership. Two ideas drive AOB: one is that we at TGP come across business stories and ideas that we feel intriguing enough to merit a bigger audience than that of boardroom or bar-room; the other idea is that AOB should be serious but not solemn. The politicos make everyone glum enough as it is.

  • Online, content is king (and queen)

    Published: 08 November 2008

    A programme in BBC Radio 4’s Iconoclasts series, ‘The internet is killing our culture’ allowed web entrepreneur Andrew Keen and a panel of leading internet professionals to debate Keen’s proposition that Web 2.0 is anarchic and destroying culture of real value.

  • No Way to Treat a Lady

    Published: 23 October 2008

    Kevin Spacey didn’t star in the 1968 thriller No Way to Treat a Lady; the late Rod Steiger did (with Lee Remick and George Segal). Such is the passion for remakes, however, that we may yet see Mr Spacey in the Steiger part.

  • Holed beneath the Hull?

    Published: 22 October 2008

    I retain a deep affection for the fair city of Kingston upon Hull. My career began on the city’s evening newspaper, the Hull Daily Mail; I played rugby for Hull & East Riding RUFC; a teenage memory of watching an Everly Brothers gig at Hull is still fresh.

  • From buzzword to fuzzword

    Published: 08 October 2008

    ‘There would have been a time for such a word’, quoth Macbeth.

    The ‘word’ Macbeth thought untimely was ‘dead’, which was what Lady Macbeth had just become. Evil old bat that she was, her husband loved her and wished she ‘should have died hereafter’.

  • UnCivil, UnEnforced, UnOfficered

    Published: 01 October 2008

    In August in this space I cautioned local-authority chief executives against making themselves look ridiculous by allowing their PR teams ‘to get stuck in a perpetual fog of excitement, routinely hyping U-turns and nebulous aspirations’. Leave the spin to Westminster, I suggested, as we at The Governance Partnership always do. …