Professional Services

In a very short space of time – less than a decade really – technology has changed the way people live their lives. It has also changed the way they work. It was in 2008 that Kevin Roberts, the worldwide CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, told me how his iPhone freed him from the constraints of geography, enabling him to run the business as effectively from his home in New Zealand as from his office in New York or Lancashire, where he happened to be at the time.

The professional services landscape is changing – and fast. Professional services firms are embracing the opportunity to tackle new markets, finding economies of scale in larger operations that align well with international clients. However, with increased complexity comes greater difficulty in managing the business effectively. Expansion must not come at the cost of efficiency and responsiveness. As a result of this, it’s clear that the human shape of these organizations is also changing significantly.

The country’s central bank has unveiled new rules that will allow foreign banks to expand their presence by opening branches anywhere in India. In order to do so the subsidiaries will be required to hold minimum capital of five billion rupees ($80 million).

The changes are a part of the push by the central bank's new governor, Raghuram Rajan, to liberalise the sector as he looks to boost growth.

The company, run by US investor Warren Buffett, has reported that net profit rose 29 percent to $5.05 billion in the three months to September from the same period last year.

This was mainly down to its investments at the peak of the financial crisis in General Electric and Goldman Sachs, boosting it by $1.2 billion. Meanwhile, Berkshire's revenue also grew 13 percent to $46.5 billion.

More and more organizations are outsourcing software product development but many are hard pressed to know much about managing a team that may be thousands of miles away on another continent. Too often, companies think about offshore product development (OPD) only as a means to cutting costs and accelerating time to market. Such an approach can produce poor results with your projects if you don’t take into account certain issues like cultural barriers, metrics and workflows.

1994 will undoubtedly forever be the year that mankind associates with the modern South Africa. One does not need to be a historian to know that it was here that the days of apartheid slowly came to end, resulting in the multi-racial democratic election that brought Nelson Mandela and his African National Congress (ANC) to power.

On various occasions, virtually all of us have thought about the associations that are linked to our companies and our brands. We’ve observed situations in which positive associations have helped companies grow and prosper, creating equity in the process. We’ve also observed situations in which negative associations proved to be too great a hurdle for some companies to overcome. And we’ve all spent time thinking about the associations to which we aspire. That is something that we do as individuals as well as business leaders.

If confirmed by the US Senate, Ms Yellen would replace Ben Bernanke, who has held the post for eight years and who she has been deputy to for the past two years.

Educated at Harvard University and the London School of Economics, Ms Yellen is seen as a “dove”, meaning she prefers to prioritise boosting employment by keeping rates low rather than worrying about inflation.

10. QIWI PLC (QIWI)

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