Category: Retired

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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Management Consulting

Managers often have a bad reputation. What should we make of the people who tell managers how to manage? That question has often been raised over the years, with a sceptical tone. The management consultancy industry battles a stereotype of charging exhorbitant fees for advice that, on close inspection, turns out to be either meaningless or common sense. Managers who bring in consultants are often accused of being blinded by jargon, implicitly admitting their own incompetence, or seeking someone else to blame for unpopular decisions. Still, it’s lucrative. Globally, consulting firms charge their clients a total of about $125bn. Voting for the 51st Thing has now closed. The winning “thing” will be revealed on Saturday 28 October 2017. Producer: Ben Crighton Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon (Image: Business team present, Credit: Shutterstock)
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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Double-entry Bookkeeping

Luca Pacioli was a renaissance man – he was a conjuror, a master of chess, a lover of puzzles, a Franciscan Friar, and a professor of mathematics. But today he’s celebrated as the most famous accountant who ever lived, the father of double-entry bookkeeping. Before the Venetian style of bookkeeping caught on, accounts were rather basic. An early medieval merchant was little more than a travelling salesman. He had no need to keep accounts – he could simply check whether his purse was full or empty. But as the commercial enterprises of the Italian city states grew larger, more complex and more dependent on financial instruments such as loans and currency trades, the need for a more careful reckoning became painfully clear. In 1494 Pacioli wrote the definitive book on double-entry bookkeeping. It’s regarded by many as the most influential work in the history of capitalism. And as the industrial revolution unfolded, the ideas that Pacioli had set out came to be viewed as an essential part of business life; the system used across the world today is essentially the one that Pacioli described. Producer: Ben Crighton Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon (Image: Handwritten accounting ledger, Credit: Suntezza/Shutterstock)
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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - S-Bend

If you live in a city with modern sanitation, it’s hard to imagine daily life being permeated with the suffocating stench of human excrement. For that, we have a number of people to thank – not least a London watchmaker called Alexander Cumming. Cumming’s world-changing invention owed nothing to precision engineering. In 1775, he patented the S-bend. It was a bit of pipe with a curve in it and it became the missing ingredient to create the flushing toilet – and, with it, public sanitation as we know it. Roll-out was slow, but it was a vision of how public sanitation could be – clean, and smell-free – if only government would fund it. More than two centuries later, two and a half billion people still remain without improved sanitation, and improved sanitation itself is a low bar. We still haven’t reliably managed to solve the problem of collective action – of getting those who exercise power or have responsibility to organise themselves. Producer: Ben Crighton Editors: Richard Vadon and Richard Knight (Image: S-bend, Credit: ericlefrancais/Shutterstock)
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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Radar

How the high-tech ‘death ray’ led to the invention of radar. The story begins in the 1930s, when British Air Ministry officials were worried about falling behind Nazi Germany in the technological arms race. They correctly predicted that the next war would be dominated by air power. To address the problem, Britain launched a number of projects in hopes of mitigating the threat — including a prize for developing a high-tech ‘death ray’ that could zap a sheep at a hundred paces. But even though the project failed to develop such a weapon, it did result in something potentially far more useful that was able to detect planes and submarines – radar. And it was an invention that was crucial in the development of the commercial aviation industry. Producer: Ben Crighton Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon (Image: Abstract radar with targets, Credit: Andrey VP/Shutterstock)