THERE'S good news and there's bad news. The good news is that the business lobby group, the CBI, expects the economy to grow by 0.9% this year, with strong improvements in the second half. The bad news is that their forecasts are often not especially close. In February last year the CBI predicted 2011's growth to be 1.8%, but it turned …

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EXACTLY 200 years ago this summer, the Duke of Wellington fired off a sarcastic memo to ministers in London complaining of the burden of bureaucracy. As he marched his troops from Portugal towards Madrid in order to meet Napoleon's forces, the Duke had become exasperated with the demands coming from London. He complained that "each item and every farthing has been accounted …

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A MEMO was circulated this week to a group of business owners in one of our region's commercial sites that began "You may have already heard the news on the grapevine...", that went on to announce the memo author's promotion to site manager. Putting questions of writing style to one side, the phrase gave away the author's opinion of his own …

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ALMOST every entrepreneur wants to become rich. Mostly to provide unequivocal validation for their idea, but also because in the end it can work out as being paid little more than the minimum wage for the number of hours spent working. The most straightforward way to do this is to exit the business by selling for an attractively large sum of …

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THE post-Christmas period is always the time of year when people’s interest in their own heritage peaks, as the barrage of adverts for websites offering family tree researching tools that are blanketing our televisions demonstrates. This year, my family is no exception, in part encouraged by a couple of landmark birthdays and the first of the next generation of the family …

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THERE are a myriad of ways to define an SME, most commonly involving employee numbers, turnover or balance sheet total. I'd like to suggest a simple demarcation. It is a large business if its senior management are invited for lunch by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) and an SME if it feels like they are eating your lunch. Everyone has heard plenty …

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THEY say Christmas is a time for sharing, so here are five things I learnt about business and management among the presents, parties and puddings of the 2011 festive season. 1. Capacity isn’t a limiting factor which can be wished away. Slightly distracted by B&Q reducing the price of its Christmas trees by 99.97%, to a single penny (surely they could have …

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ONE of the problems with regional economic data is that by the time it is sufficiently robust it can seem too dated to be relevant. Take the information from the Office of National Statistics on gross value added (GVA) figures, released last week. It measures economic output, but its sub-regional data is only for 2009. In normal economic times, the two-year-old data …

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TOMORROW afternoon MPs will debate the issue of financial education in schools after a petition reached the magic 100,000 signatures, which triggers a Parliamentary debate. The petition called on the Government to “make financial education a compulsory part of the school curriculum”, a measure which has also been recommended this week in a report by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Financial …

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THE National Literacy Trust's assertion that 3.8m children in the UK don't own a book which created headlines this week isn't entirely bad news. In fact, it demonstrated the importance of the storyteller. First, though, some words of warning about the headline figure which makes me think it's probably best that this Trust looks after literacy and not numeracy. Within the data …

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