Simon Caulkin has a great article about voom-voom capitalism in today’s Observer. As he points out:
“While it is greatly to the taste of the capital markets, the private equity management style runs up hard against what people say they want from work. According to studies such as Roffey Park’s annual ‘management agenda’, most people are still more motivated by making a difference, by recognition and by doing a good job and feeling good about it than anything else. Put bluntly, beyond a certain point most people want meaning from work rather than money.”
And then goes on to says:
“Such concerns might seem to cut little ice in the face of the high returns being claimed by the most successful private equity and hedge funds, quite apart from the extraordinary amounts being pocketed by those in charge of them. Despite what people privately think, money talks louder than anything else, doesn’t it?
Yet even in this ultra-hardnosed world, the human factor has a habit of biting back. Last week the Financial Times noted that staff at top investment banks in London, struggling to cope with record deal volumes, were so overstretched that they were in danger of making costly mistakes. One consultant noted: ‘The temptation is to drive your people harder. But there is a limit. There could be a danger of people slipping up.'”
And concludes:
“It’s a delicious irony: the boiler room of today’s voom-voom capitalism at risk of blowing up under the pressures it is imposing on others in the name of the virtuous disciplines of private equity. Down on the shop floor, whether in the City or a Land Rover plant in Solihull, you take the ‘man’ out of management at your peril.”