I haven't always hated McDonald's. When my kids were little and I lived in the US, they were as susceptible as anyone to Happy Meals and tatty toys that subsequently littered our sitting room. I believed that if they ate decent food most of the time, a little fast food...

The medical profession is - and knows itself to be - endemically conservative and conformist. The rash of healthcare scandals we've seen - whether in mid-Staffordshire hospitals, Winterbourne View or homes for the elderly - all share the same characteristics: abuse happens out in the open where many people can...

The predominant myth surrounding whistleblowers is that they're cranks, madmen (and women) all with a grudge and mildly unstable. Movies like The Insider and The Informant reinforce the stereotype and it's fantastically comfortable for all of us to pillory these outsiders because as long as they're crazy, we are sane...

A friend of mine recently returned from meeting with the Environment Agency bursting with indignation and frustration. He had gone to investigate why the Agency was doing so little in terms of funding new projects to address environmental problems or to take advantage of environmental business opportunities. The answer he...

Driving through the south of France this summer I was struck by how badly French amour propre had defended what used to be one of the most beautiful and glamourous parts of the world. It is now littered with fast food joints, tacky hotels, supermarkets, billboards, What had, in the...

The leader of any organization in the world must be watching the scandals that rock HSBC, Barclays, the BBC, New Corporation, GlaxiSmithKline, Ameridose, the Metropolitan police, parliament and the Catholic Church and thinking: 'there but for the grace of god go I.'

Because while it would be...

When I published my book on willful blindness, I believed strongly in my thesis - that the worst crimes are committed in public where everyone can see them but tries not to. But I had no idea it would be proved and proved again with such monotonous regularity....

That was the gist of a presentation given by Richard Sermon, Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Lord Mayor's Initiative 'Restoring Trust in the City'. He was speaking at the "Trust and Integrity in the Global Economy" conference put on by Initiatives of Change at Caux.

Why...

The moral chaos of the financial services industry is throwing up some interesting cultural findings. Among these is a recent report by corporate governance experts, Labaton Sucharow, showing that a quarter of the financial services executives they polled believed that unethical or illegal conduct might be required for...

I went to a very interesting dinner this week. Hosted by a senior banker, it included a number of other senior banking folk, several top consumer advocates, business leaders, a few social enterprises, PR advisors and a smattering of academics. The question: how might trust in banks be restored?

We bailed out the banks because we couldn't afford not to. We award absurd salaries and bonuses to bankers because we think we can't function without them. In any other context, being made to do something you know is wrong is a crime called blackmail; in banking it appears to...

When Barclays board tried to force through a massive pay deal for Bob Diamond, they looked weak. Now that he's been forced to step down, they look weak and stupid. The reason that the argument over Bob Diamond's pay mattered was that it put the relationship between CEO and board...

Last July I argued that Rupert Murdoch was guilty of willful blindness in his failure to see how pervasive phone hacking had become in his organisation, in his refusal to investigate it and his refusal to acknowledge what other people found. Now, it appears, the Culture Committee agrees with me.

Every time I go to a conference about creativity and innovation, I'm struck by just how uncreative and dull they are: hideous bland venues that are too big and lack emotion house stale formats and dreary presentation. So setting a digital media conference inside Bath's Assembly Rooms was clearly something...

When I moved to the US in the 1990s, one of my first and best discoveries was Eileen Fisher. I'd never encountered the brand before so I was delighted by beautifully simple clothes, elegant, made from gorgeous fabrics, that all mixed and matched with each other and, apparently, with just...

Many, many years ago, I produced David Starkey's first film for the BBC. A short film about my favourite Tudor, Henry VII, it wasn't Starkey's TV debut - he'd already appeared, clad in leathers riding a motorbike on Channel 4 - but he was still a media neophyte and still,...

In the select committee today, Adrian Sanders asked the Murdochs if they were familiar with the term 'wilful blindness'. The silence was stunning and said everything.

After every institutional debacle, the arguments are the same: it was just a few bad apples. Nobody at the top is to blame. A...

Why isn't the banking crisis as profound an outrage as the phone hacking scandal?

I appreciate that everyone has phones and therefore can understand how obnoxious phone hacking is. Like everyone else I share the revulsion that followed the revelation that Milly Dowler's phone had been hacked. And yes I'm...

Why did it take Rebekah Brooks so long to resign? Did she want to stay or did Murdoch want to keep her? We may never know. But the whole saga looks to me like a bad case of gatecrasher syndrome.

Gatecrasher syndrome afflicts members of minorities who enjoy rapid...

David Cameron has acknowledged the press needs better oversight - but this isn't news. When the public was being abused by hacking journalists, what was the PCC doing? Nothing - because it has never actively looked after the interests of the public. That's not what it was set...