Keith Power

I've stood on both sides of the bed. The one where I redrew someone's role and called it evolution, and watched them hear it along with everyone else. And years before, the one where my own role got redrawn two floors above me, in a meeting at a hotel I found out about from a calendar invite sent at 4.58pm for 9am the next morning. Both times, the bed was already built. The measuring came after. There's an old Greek story about a man called Procrustes who kept an inn on the road to Athens. He...

There's a video doing the rounds at the moment listing eleven "laws of the universe". Most of them I recognised immediately - from boardrooms in Warsaw, factory floors in China, and one memorable budget meeting in Amsterdam where three of them were operating simultaneously. The Greeks had gods for these things. We have eponymous laws named after economists and engineers. Same instinct, which is to give the pattern a name, and suddenly you can see it coming. Here are the ten that have earned...

Everyone agreed, nobody asked... The most expensive silences in business happen in boardrooms. Picture the scene - I've sat in versions of it on three continents. The strategy paper has been circulated. It is thorough, confident, and forty pages long. The executive team presents with polish. Around the table, experienced heads nod. Someone asks about the timeline. Someone else asks about the numbers on page thirty-one. And the one question that actually matters - the simple, almost childish...