Tonight:
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Journalists of a certain age get positively gooey about Sir Martin Sorrell — how wise he is! And how good of him to even talk to us. Everything Sorrell says is taken seriously and reported uncritically as if it were pearls from Solomon himself rather than the musings of an advertising man with a vested interest.
As chief executive of the world's biggest media agency — WPP — Sorrell is privy to an immense amount of economic data and plugged into many big businesses, so his views are certainly relevant. And to his credit, he's not shy — he doesn't hide behind PR people and has always been admirably available, responding quickly to emails, returning calls from, it seems, almost anyone.
He is also shrewd, holding his business together through difficult times and surviving at the helm for 25 years at a time when rival chief executives seldom last five. He may even be, as the Sunday Telegraph gushed this week, “the leading British businessman of the last decade”.
This doesn't necessarily qualify him as a sage and his record as a forecaster is not clear-cut. Sorrell accurately predicted that 2008 would be a tough year, but he didn't get quite how bad.
Other than that, well he's won some and he's lost some.
Like all top business people, Sorrell believes in the system that made him rich — he thinks the free market will win in the end and that consumers should be encouraged to spend money, whether they have it or not. He thinks companies should spend more on advertising whatever the circumstances — during a boom, going into a downturn, or coming out of one.
For reasons passing understanding, this is viewed as sage analysis rather than just what he would say, wouldn't he? He was at it again last week at Davos, offering bland views and posing questions he didn't answer — stuff that was reported as if it were news simply because he said it. The unquestioned assumptions seems to be, Sorrell is good for the rest of us and worth a £100 million fortune simply for his growth-creating entrepreneurship.
Yet the numerous agencies that form WPP — they include Ogilvy & Mather, JWT and Grey Global — don't actually make anything, they sell ideas or media savvy. Sorrell's job is to persuade us that there is a genuine difference between a Vauxhall Astra and a Ford Focus, and that which one we pick says something about our personality.
There's no question Sorrell is talented, but it seems fair to ask whether he has put those talents to best use.What he excels at is to appeal to the worst part of us — the bit that wishes it was taller and lies about its income.
Perhaps we are heading towards an economy that is not based on fluff — in which people make and sell things that other people need and where financial engineering and glib promises are seen as adding nothing. If that's the answer to our woes, Sorrell looks more like part of the problem than the solution.
Now even hired guns get the bullet
Just how many job losses have the high-charging, high-powered lawyers at Linklaters presided over?
As advisers in scores of mergers over the last 20 years, the firm put the finishing touches to deals that put thousands of people out of work, in the name of shareholder value that rarely emerged.
Now there isn't enough debt or equity around to fund takeovers, Linklaters itself is getting rid of 250 staff — 120 of them lawyers.Partners will go too, but their terms will not be discussed because they are so much better than more lowly employees'.
I wonder how many of the Linklaters who are on the way out think back to the deal they once pushed through over a frantic series of late nights and wonder what happened to the lives of those who were just collateral damage for the investment bankers and their lawyers.
Someone has to do the legal dirty work, I suppose. Still, 120 of them will soon have time to re-evaluate whether they'd rather it was someone else in future.
Yes, the world's gone bananas and these jokers look serious
The Yes Men are a pair of pranksters who aren't just kidding around.
Since the early 1990s, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno have been winding up large corporations and presenting parodies of business orthodoxy to conferences as part of a mission to expose capitalism's wilder follies. Naomi Klein has them as Jonathan Swift for the Jackass generation; I prefer to think of them as Ali G with a degree in economics.
The jokes don't always have a particular point. Such as when they swapped the voiceboxes of Barbie dolls and GI Joes and returned them to stores where they were bought for children who were surprised to hear Barbie bark “dead men tell no lies”, while the toy soldier cooed that “math is hard”.
In their eponymous first film, Bichlbaum played the role of fake World Trade Organisation spokesman Dr Andreas Bichlbauer, giving TV interviews and presentations that imitated free-market philosophy. Business managers around the world were advised to abolish the siesta, sell election votes to the highest bidder and apply electric shocks to sweatshop workers.
In a live TV interview, an anti-globalisation campaigner was accused of being “too focused on reality and on facts” — Bichlbauer was daring the audience to expose him as a fraud, but everyone found him to be a perfectly plausible WTO executive.
Now the pair are back with a new film. The Yes Men Fix The World premiered at Sundance and opens the Berlin Film Festival this week. Highlights include their semi-famous impersonation of a Dow Chemical spokesman on the BBC World News in 2004.
Dow, they said, was finally ready to accept responsibility for the Bhopal catastrophe, the largest industrial accident in history. Dow stock lost $2 billion before investors realised they had been spoofed.
The film also launches the Survivor Ball suit which, they tell the super-rich, will allow them to survive terrorist attacks and natural disasters. None of them blink.
