Reports from Contemporary Business

Abstract

This chapter briefly considers the portrayal of personality and culture in contemporary business as reported in newspapers and business publications in recent years. An assemblage of extracts from contemporary business news reports are presented within data sets considered to be connected and relevant in an attempt to gain further insights into some of the issues of culture and positioning suggested by the previous chapters. Most of the extracts are repeated verbatim directly from a media source and each report is acknowledged using the title, the name of the publication and the date of the report. These appear in brackets at the end of each extract.

‘To my grandchildren, Maiya, Atticus and Osha, in the knowledge that they’ll end up like their parents and grandparents—ballsy, truth-telling, free-thinking, heart-bleeding, myth-debunking, non-conforming and hell-raising activists.’

(Anita Roddick, Business as Unusual, 2000)