Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty has been awarded the 2014 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year prize. The book provoked fierce debate and many questioned its theories, but Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times and chairman of the panel, judged it to be “a challenging but ultimately important book”. Incidentally, the FT had reported what it had felt to be major ‘data problems’ in the book!

CORRUPTION

Managements fail to see risk

Control Risks’s global survey on corporate attitudes to corruption surprisingly found that more than two thirds of the companies surveyed felt it is “somewhat unlikely” or “very unlikely” that they will need to investigate an employee for bribery in the next two years. Control Risks said this was unrealistic and that companies shouldn’t just wait for regulators to ask awkward questions. Compliance teams should probe for potential problems, and then follow up with required investigations.

CSR

Employees want it too A survey by Tata Institute of Social Sciences found that younger employees – the so-called millennials – are acutely sensitive to the social responsibility practices of the firms they work for, or aspire to work for. As much as 88 per cent of respondents said they would like to work for an employer whose social values matched their own, while 86 per cent said they would quit if they found their employer’s social values no longer met their expectations. Clearly, companies have more than legal compulsions as a reason to take CSR seriously!

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