If anything, they found it too convenient. Staff explained that the Warrington store’s main use seemed to be for shoppers to return items that they had bought in Liverpool or Manchester at the weekend.

Zara has made its decision based on objective data – balancing the loss in customer service, and sales the store generated, with the savings from pulling out of Warrington.

It can be easier to see those choices more clearly in businesses other than your own. The cold facts are much easier to separate out from the background noise, emotional baggage and the investment, in time and money, that has gone into an idea.

When Zara opened in a newly-refurbished Golden Square Shopping Centre in 2007, the world looked very different – it’s as hard to imagine the local retail sector without Liverpool One as it is the world economy without the credit crunch. As they approached the break-point in their lease, they appear to have decided that over the next five years it is unlikely that things will improve greatly.

Making the time to assess the usefulness and potential of an aspect of business can be tricky in the day-to-day whirlwind of activity, but it is crucial.

Retailers usually have break clauses which can focus their minds while, as we are seeing at the moment, football clubs use the end of the season for a stark appraisal of their performance.

While football clubs are rarely outstanding models of corporate governance, the huge levels of public scrutiny make it harder for them to ignore problems and hope they improve of their own accord.

The pendulum may have swung too far in terms of their ruthlessness in changing managers – as Liverpool FC has found by changing and Everton FC has found by not, different doesn’t always mean better – but their results-focused approach is unrelenting.

It is generally thought that Manchester City’s manager Roberto Mancini was two minutes away from being sacked, before his team’s remarkable, title-winning recovery on Sunday.

After nine months’ endeavour, he is being judged on those dramatic final two minutes. At least Zara gave it five years.

Andrew Moss has left after a protest by investors at the insurer’s annual meeting last week which saw 59% vote against the executive pay proposals.

The focus is placed on pay and benefits – Mr Moss received a basic salary of £960,000 as part of his £2.69m package – but it is really a question of value.

Shareholders have seen Aviva’s price plunge 30% in the last year, from nearly 450p to below 300p, having already fallen markedly from the early days of Mr Moss’s tenure in 2007, when it was trading above 800p.

Aviva won’t be the last company afflicted by such turmoil, especially with Business Secretary Vince Cable happy to describe shareholder complaints about executive pay as “very healthy”.

His point, that there have been “ludicrous levels of payments unrelated to performance”, is a fair one and it creates rising distrust among shareholders.

One shareholder speaking at Aviva’s AGM – but who could have been addressing the directors of many plcs – said “our board members are more concerned about remuneration than growing the business”.

There is not yet real opposition to high levels of executive pay, although the chill can be felt in boardrooms in the City as that snowball gathers momentum.

But increasingly the question is being asked, what are the executives doing to earn their sky-high salaries? The longer the economy remains in the doldrums, the louder that question will be asked.

It is easier to justify seven-figure packages for entrepreneurs and founders because the link between the individual and the company’s success is much clearer.

The same argument can be made for transformational leaders, even though at times their actions can prove to be unpopular, especially as they often embark on a process of restructuring and cost-cutting.

But the purely transactional leaders have to either prove they are worth their inflated packages or be paid less. It is that simple.

It is refreshing to see activist shareholders take on the issue and hopefully they will maintain the pressure even when companies’ performances improve. That will be the real test of their activism, rather than now when they seem more motivated by wanting to make sure the executive team share their pain.

The article includes quotes from Sean McGuire, chief executive of Ambitious Minds, who argues for a greater investment in education and skills provision for young people.

PDF: TheBusinessDesk.com, 8th May 2012

The article was published in The St Helens Star on Thursday 3rd May 2012.

PDF: St Helens Star, 3rd May 2012

120 years later, the numbers aren’t as severe, but the question that Mr Hardie would ask over and over again – “And what are you going to do for the unemployed?” – remains as relevant as it was then.

My company has today published a report on youth unemployment in Liverpool City Region, which has highlighted a worrying surge in the number of young people who have been claiming jobseeker’s allowance for more than a year.

In Spain, where the levels of youth unemployment are even higher, there have been chicken-and-egg debates about the status of young people in the economy – is unemployment so high because so many young people work in the shadow economy or do so many young people work in the shadow economy because unemployment is so high?

The answer is irrelevant because it distracts attention away from the real problems that sustained unemployment (or life in the shadow economy) causes – disenfranchisement and alienation.

Locally, there has to be real concern that we are creating intractable problems that will have costly consequences in the years ahead.

In the last six months, the number of long-term unemployed young people has trebled in the city region, to nearly 2,000 people. With little economic growth forecast for the rest of this calendar year, significant numbers of the other 16,000 unemployed young people will continue to struggle to find work causing the long-term levels to swell further – and the problems of disenfranchisement and alienation will become further entrenched.

There will be one job vacancy in the city filled today, the Mayor of Liverpool. Of the myriad of challenges facing the election winner, the most important is what can be done to encourage and stimulate job-creating economic growth in the city.

Part of the solution is to ensure that young people who are in education are not only given employability skills but also the knowledge to manage their own independent lifestyles, ensuring they can be active and engaged members of their community and city.

It is not a complete answer to Mr Hardie’s question, but it is a pragmatic and immediate action that can improve the prospects of our young people.

Included in the analysis is a report produced by Ambitious Minds that shows how unemployment amongst the young has been rising since the start of the financial crisis.

The article was published in The Liverpool Post on Thursday 3rd May 2012.

PDF: Liverpool Post, 3rd May 2012

Networks are truly important and improved technologies provide the basis for virtually immediate reception and response. This can become totally hypnotic when my iPhone receives another email, Linkedin update, Facebook message or text. I’m seduced into an instrumental, quick-fire way of connecting with others.

As we move through meetings, conferences and networking events, we add to our list of the 2,000,000 connections that we are only 3 stages away from.

It’s all valuable stuff and can provide the basis for greater opportunity but we need to ensure that our networks also provide a necessary connection for the whole person.

Ensure that you network with people who can provide honest feedback, lift your spirits when things are not working out and those that you can relax with.

Ensure that your connections include those who will remind you of your sense of purpose, meaning and values as a counter to the ‘rough & tumble’ of organisational life.

And finally, ensure that you connect with people who will challenge you to take care of your physical, emotional and spiritual well-being.

These are valuable lessons and practices and we ignore them at our peril.

I’ve designed my best spreadsheets this way: interest rate swap valuations; cumulative preference shares; long term contracts and foreign exchange. I work with mind maps, decision trees and wiring diagrams. It’s best on a plane where the environment convinces me that the lap top should stay where it is. There is no temptation to press a switch. With a blank piece of paper and FAST modelling standards all things are possible. All problems are soluble.

Like the architect with the builder, I hope to turn my clear thinking into a practical design that is simple to interpret. Here you go: that’s all you need. Go away and build.

While things aren’t as bad as 2008-09 when the UK economy had five consecutive quarters of negative growth, there is the sense that the economy is like a boxer who has struggled up from the canvas and is now trying to duck and weave while leaning against the ropes.

Until yesterday, the fighter had only been caught by glancing blows, but re-entering recession has given a standing count to Chancellor George Osborne’s economic plan.

He had hoped that he was boxing clever but there is now the real danger that he has boxed himself into a corner.

As with any data set, there are plenty of caveats, including the fact that this is merely the first estimate and could be revised, and concerns about the robustness of the construction sector data, which showed a 3% drop.

And, as one economic commentator described it last week, recession is subject to “probably the most arbitrary definition in economics”.

Apart from the political capital to be made from it, particularly so near to elections, and the potential impact on consumer confidence, there isn’t any major difference between slight negative growth and slight positive growth.

Strong, sustained growth is the aim, but there is little evidence to point us to an upturn and we have remain a long way from our economic peak at the start of 2008.

GDP, adjusted for inflation, has clawed back about half of its losses since its peak in the first quarter of 2008. After reaching £367.5bn, it dropped to £341.6bn by mid-2009, and yesterday’s first estimate puts GDP at £351.7bn – below the level at the end of 2006.

That’s more than five years of no economic growth, and problems elsewhere could still escalate.

Europe is offering little cause for comfort and the Netherlands this week became the latest country to have a political crisis caused by crumbling support for austerity measures. The French elections could also put a great deal of pressure on the pan-European consensus on the best route out of the economic mess.

The only option for business is to keep its sleeves rolled up and keep fighting.

The forecast by employment research consultancy Income Data Services (IDS) predicts a freeze in graduate starting pay at £25,000 – with high inflation turning this into a fourth-consecutive real-world fall.

If the starting salary still looks high, that’s because it is. Although it is the median average – the middle value in the data set, so avoiding the possibility of being skewed by a few high numbers – the data comes from just 109 employers with graduate trainee schemes.

These are invariably the best-paid positions, with professional services firms and London-based schemes to the fore.

The reality for a lot of graduates will be a job below the expectations they had when they first arrived at university three or four years ago (although, of course, since the explosion in the undergraduate population this has been true for a fairly large number, even in better economic times).

The IDS survey showed that last year there was a rise in the number of applicants for each position from 41 to 46, which is likely to rise further. However the research also found a strengthening of hiring intentions, with available positions up 9%.

With the rising cost of university education, there is greater pressure on students to convert their degree into a graduate-level job, and those coming to the end of their first or second year will be heartened by the apparent strengthening of the graduate recruitment market.

But it will continue to be a buyers’ market for at least the next couple of years, with the ratio of applicants to positions remaining high.

Undergraduates will require a greater degree of patience and planning, and it also highlights the importance of financial literacy education for young adults.

This generation, already burdened by fees rather than boosted by grants, will need a more sophisticated approach than simply relying on swift career progression to pay for youthful exuberance.

They must also show a revised approach to the world of work. Graduates entering the workplace this summer will not only require more realistic expectations, but they will also need to leave their sense of expectation at the door.