For five years straight, Fortune magazine named it ‘most innovative company of the year’. By then Enron was a colossus, one of the world’s top seven financial services groups, and the accolade was a stunned acknowledgement of Enron’s peak – $100 billion revenues and soar away $90 share price. Enron’s winning formula baffled the shrewdest …
The dotcom frenzy reached its zenith around the millennium. At every stage of its explosive development and violent decline, its standard-bearer was Boo.com, the European online sports and high-fashion ‘e-tailer’. From its conception in 1998, Boo had value-added glamour in the form of its founders, a Swedish poetry critic and a former Vogue model. They …
From the outset in 1974 (Christopher) Dorling and (Peter) Kindersley were successful hook packagers (they created finished books for other companies to publish). They specialized in large-format, heavily illustrated books on almost any subject. By 1982 they themselves had become publishers, internationally famous for ‘visual guides’ which made complex non-fiction subjects readily accessible. Typical of …
Let’s be clear: this movie is not to be confused with the Oscar-nominated II Postino (released in the US as The Postman) one of the most profound and beautiful films ever to come out of Italy. By complete contrast, Kevin Costner’s The Postman heads several ‘Top Ten Career- Killing Movies’ lists, which is a surprise …
Baring Brothers was Britain’s oldest merchant bank, founded in 1762. It collapsed when a single employee committed the bank to losses of roughly £830 million, which it could not cover. Embarrassingly, Barings had only itself to blame. Its culture had evolved from the collision between its own illustrious history and the contemporary, ruthless avarice typified …
Nick Leeson and the Collapse of Barings Bank – 1995 Read More »
A legendary lemon, Eldorado was BBC TV’s new soap opera for the 1990s. Conceived as Spain became second home to many Britons, it was supposed to replace the gritty realism of no-frills urban drama like EastEnders and Coronation Street with the sun-kissed bounty of sea, golden beach and sizzling paella. The set was purpose-built at …