Despite the howls, Tony Hayward’s departure as boss of BP was deftly handled. And other firms are trying harder not to reward bad leadership

WHEN Tony Hayward said “I’d like my life back” on May 30th, losing his job as boss of BP was probably not what he had in mind. But on July 27th he accepted the inevitable. On his watch, zillions of gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. When the microphones were on, gaffes gushed from his lips. He was a walking public-relations disaster and had to go.

His replacement will be another BP veteran, Robert Dudley, an American who grew up in Mississippi. Mr Dudley has had PR problems of his own. While head of BP-TNK, a joint venture in Russia, he fell out with BP’s Russian partners and left the country in some disarray after the Russian security services raided BP’s office in Moscow. None of this will make Americans think worse of him, however. ...

As Microsoft and Intel move apart, computing becomes multipolar

THEY were the Macbeths of information technology (IT): a wicked couple who seized power and abused it in bloody and avaricious ways. Or so critics of Microsoft and Intel used to say, citing the two firms’ supposed love of monopoly profits and dead rivals. But in recent years, the story has changed. Bill Gates, Microsoft’s founder, has retired to give away his billions. The “Wintel” couple (short for “Windows”, Microsoft’s flagship operating system, and “Intel”) are increasingly seen as yesterday’s tyrants. Rumours persist that a coup is brewing to oust Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s current boss.

Yet there is life in the old technopolists. They still control the two most important standards in computing: Windows, the operating system for most personal computers, and “Intel Architecture”, the set of rules governing how software interacts with the processor it runs on. More than 80% of PCs still run on the “Wintel” standard. Demand for Windows and PC chips, which flagged during the global recession, has recovered. So have both firms’ results: to many people’s surprise, Microsoft announced a thumping quarterly profit of $4.5 billion in July; Intel earned an impressive $2.9 billion. ...

Freeing fat-cat felons creates moral hazard, Koreans fear

ON AUGUST 15th Korea celebrates its liberation from brutal Japanese rule. For South Koreans languishing in prison it is an especially joyful day, since many of them are freed. Every year thousands of criminals, big and small, receive a presidential pardon. Some citizens worry, however, that pardons are disproportionately granted to the rich and influential.

Last December, for example, Lee Kun-hee, the chairman of Samsung Electronics and reputedly the country’s richest man, had his conviction for tax evasion expunged. This will make it easier for him to promote South Korea’s bid to host the 2018 Winter Olympics. In August 2008 Kim Seung-youn, head of the Hanwha conglomerate, was pardoned. His crime involved beating some bar workers who had attacked his son. When he grew tired, he admitted in court, he let his bodyguards take over. ...

An industry that could lift millions out of poverty, in theory

IT IS impossible to eradicate child labour, sighs Rajesh Goyal, the owner of a garment factory in Jaipur, northern India. No children sweat in his factory. But he is sure that some of the family enterprises that supply him employ their offspring. He adds, perhaps in jest, that most textile workers are Muslim, so “if a young boy doesn’t work he will end up a terrorist.”

Textiles provide work for more Indians than any other sector, bar agriculture. The industry employs some 35m people directly and 88m indirectly. But thanks to rigid labour laws, it is fragmented and inefficient. It is hard for a firm with more than 100 workers to fire any of them, so most stay tiny. Vast Chinese stitching-shops have no such worries. ...

Another push to sell pay-television to the Germans

THERE are plenty of things to buy in a German supermarket, but little that is truly appealing or expensive. So it is with German television. Dozens of free channels carry a mixture of home-grown stuff and dubbed Hollywood imports. They strike most people as good enough. As many investors have painfully discovered, it is perhaps harder to sell pay-television in Germany than in any other rich country. Yet they keep trying.

In a sense, Germans do pay for television. Public broadcasters levy compulsory fees of €18 ($23) per month on every TV-owning household, a quarter more than Britain’s BBC. Many viewers also receive free television via satellite or cable. Analogue cable connections are cheap—about €10 per month—and often bundled into apartment rents. Only 5.4m households plump for true pay-TV, according to Goldmedia, a consultancy. That works out to less than 15% of all television-owning homes. In America, it is more than 85%. ...

The new dean of Harvard Business School promises “radical innovation”

HENRY KISSINGER, who started his career in the killing fields of Harvard before moving to Washington, DC, is said to have quipped that academic politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small. Schumpeter has no idea whether the contest to succeed Jay Light as dean of the Harvard Business School (HBS) was vicious. But he is sure that the stakes were not small.

HBS is hugely influential. The school is a training ground for America’s business elite: a striking number of the top office holders of Fortune 500 companies, including the heads of General Electric and Boeing, sharpened their skills and elbows there. The school is also the apex of the vast global industry devoted to teaching business. It sits on an endowment of $2.1 billion and employs some terrific thinkers, including Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen. It developed the “case method”—using case studies to teach students about real-world business problems. It claims to be the source of four-fifths of the case-study materials used in the world’s leading business schools. ...

The billable hour is not dead, but many people would like to kill it

LAWYERS hate keeping track of their billable hours. Clients hate them even more; each month they receive bills showing that their legal representatives have worked improbably long hours at incredibly high rates. Billing by the hour often fails to align lawyers’ interests with their clients’. The chap in the wig or the white shoes has an incentive to spin things out for as long as possible. His client would rather win quickly and go home. Since there is clearly a demand for an alternative to the billable hour, you would expect someone to supply it. And indeed, this is starting to happen.

Many legal tasks, although not quite easy, are variations on a theme. The production of a certain document (such as a trademark registration) does not differ vastly from one instance to another. So more firms are using “document assembly” software such as that made by Basha Systems; Seth Roland, the company’s founder, says that his company’s software reduced the time needed to put together a certain type of real-estate lease from 40 hours to one. Automating the automatable stuff allows lawyers to spend more time talking to the client. Everyone wins (including Basha, which Mr Roland says has grown by between 15% and 20% a year for more than a decade). ...

Success in business increasingly depends on chance encounters

EVERY year, hordes of free spirits gather in the Nevada desert to “breathe art”, feel at one with the cosmos and sample the delights of Bianca’s Smut Shack. The Burning Man festival is radically anti-capitalist, with a strict ban on commerce and an emphasis on “self-reliance”. In short, it is not the sort of place you would associate with corporate schmoozing.

But you would be wrong, argue John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison. Their new book, “The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things In Motion”, celebrates unconventional networkers such as Yossi Vardi, the 68-year-old “grandfather” of Israeli venture capital. Mr Vardi attends or hosts some 40 pow-wows a year, including Burning Man. (It’s about art, sex and drugs, he muses, but “I was only involved in art.”) According to “The Power of Pull”, Mr Vardi is a “super-node”, one of the best-connected people in the high-tech industry. More than that, he is a role model: he excels in “managing serendipity”. His avid conference-going, for example, is not just for fun. By mingling with so many strangers, he finds that he often bumps into people who give him valuable information. ...

Why some media outfits still refuse to go online

WHAT do the Beatles, Harry Potter, Bella magazine and the grizzled crew of the Northwestern, an Alaskan crab-fishing boat, have in common? They are scarcely available digitally. Whereas most media firms scramble to create iPad applications or fret about whether to chase online advertisers or build paywalls, a few digital resisters refuse to distribute over the internet at all.

They have some good reasons. Online advertising is worth much less than television or print advertising. It is hard to persuade people to pay much (if anything) for digital content. Technology firms such as Amazon and Apple can often set retail prices. Digital products can be less beautiful than physical ones. ...

Luxury firms are digital laggards, but some are catching up

WHEN Oscar de la Renta, an American fashion house, launched a transactional website some years ago, it expected people to buy mostly smaller items such as belts and perfume. The firm was stunned when it received an online order last spring for an $80,000 sable coat from a new customer in New Hampshire. He couldn’t get to New York, apparently. Online customers have been snapping up the firm’s core product: $4,000 cocktail dresses. “We could not have been more wrong in our expectations of the internet,” says Alex Bolen, the firm’s chief executive. Online purchases are still a small proportion of total sales, but growing rapidly.

Most luxury-goods firms are less open-minded. Many scorn the internet as a plaything for plebs. A product sold online, wrote Jean-Noel Kapferer, a French branding guru, in “The Luxury Strategy”, published last year, ceases to be a luxury item. In early 2008, of 178 luxury firms around the world surveyed by Forrester Research, only a third sold their products on the internet. That figure has risen, but still about half of firms don’t sell online at all, estimates Federico Marchetti, the founder of Yoox Group, owner of Yoox.com, a luxury-goods website. ...