🎄 Happy Christmas
The business news that matters
This will be the last regular edition of Off to Lunch before Christmas, so on behalf of all the team at Business Leader I wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Thank you for all your support in 2023. Whether you read Off to Lunch, enjoyed our podcast or bought Business Leader magazine, it is your support that makes producing our content so enjoyable. All feedback - and we get criticism and praise! - is not just welcome but encouraged.
2024 is going to be an important year. As well as elections in the UK and US, we have exciting plans to relaunch Business Leader magazine. I can’t wait to share those plans with you early in the new year. We have been working hard behind the scenes expanding our team, developing our strategy and starting to put the new content together.
Our ambition for Business Leader is big - we want to build a new agenda-setting business publication for the UK. To do this it is vital we understand what our audience wants, needs and enjoys. Please get in touch with me at graham.ruddick@businessleader.co.uk with any ideas or feedback. If you run a business, what content would actually help you to grow it?
Off to Lunch will be back in early 2024. However, our Business Leader podcast will continue through the festive period, so look out for that…
Best
Graham
Other stories that matter…
1. Consumer confidence in the UK has recovered to the highest level since September, according to the latest survey from GFK. But it is still deep in negative territory. You can read more here
2. Some predictions for 2024 from experts. Media here, tech here and priorities for business here. A common theme is that the winners in 2024 will be those who focus on their speciality.
3. Only one in four businesses expect their staff to be in the office full-time, according to a survey by the British Chambers of Commerce and Cisco. You can find the survey here
4. The business author and speak Simon Sinek has offered his views on the importance of asking for help and recognising the limits of your expertise…
5. Fortune has published a profile of Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim, which looks at how his net-worth has cleared $100 billion for the first time and the fascinating family dynamics beneath him. You can read that here
6. London could soon get direct train services to Cologne, Frankfurt, Geneva and Zurich, according to the company which controls the Channel tunnel. Guardian story here
7. Good news for the high street: the cosmetics brand Lush is spending £11 million on opening new shops. More from BusinessLive here
8. Axios has put together some genuinely useful tips from readers about how to get up early in the morning and enjoy a productive day. Those tips include making it easy and enjoyable, hydrating properly, and the importance of finding natural or artificial light. More here
9. A great piece from The New Fatherhood newsletter on pushy fathers who drove the success of their sons. The piece is inspired by the Netflix documentary on David Beckham but also looks at Tiger Woods and Andre Agassi. The big question the piece poses is this: “What if Beckham, Agassi, Woods, or any number of sporting superstars with stunted childhoods could roll back the clock? Would they play it any other way? Would they give up what they have today to have a happier time back then? There’s no way to know. But the way Beckham treats his children gives you some insight—he is hands-off in their career.” You can read the piece here
10. I wanted to share one final piece which was initially published last week. Whether you like sport or not, I highly recommend reading Go Long’s three-part series on the Buffalo Bills and coach Sean McDermott. This is actually not about sport but a classic leadership case study - one that highlights the importance of understanding who is really driving the success of an organisation and why a leader’s skills may be appropriate for one stage of a journey, but not the next. These articles have had a lot of media attention because they broke the story that McDermott praised the communication skills of the 9/11 hijackers during a team meeting (McDermott has since apologised). However, there is much more here than that. You can find the pieces here
Podcast…
The latest episode of our Business Leader podcast looks at one of the most promising new businesses being built in the UK. We speak to Alex Kendall, the co-founder of Wayve, about why his London-based company may hold the answer to self-driving cars being on our roads, not the tech giants in Silicon Valley or the automotive industry in Detroit.
You can listen to the episode on Substack here, Spotify here or Apple here
And finally…
A podcast recommendation for you - check out Walter’s War by Tortoise, a fascinating four-part story. You can find that here
However, seeing as Christmas is approaching, I thought I should offer some present suggestions too. So, let me point you to a collection of gift guides that Substack has put together from different newsletters. That is here. I found the list for new parents by the excellent Lenny’s Newsletter particularly useful…
Another list I want to point you to is Bloomberg’s guide to what business leaders have been reading in 2023. Bloomberg does this every year and it is great. This year’s list includes business books like Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building by former Google and Stripe executive Claire Hughes Johnson - a guest on our podcast - as well as The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman (a book about tech), Michael Lewis’s Going Infinite about Sam Bankman-Fried, I Have a Superpower, a children’s book by basketball star Stephen Curry, and a collection of fiction titles like So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men by Claire Keegan. You can find the list here
Thanks for reading. If you enjoy Off to Lunch then please share it with others and spread the word. If this newsletter was shared with you then please sign-up below to get Off to Lunch sent directly to your inbox
Best
Graham