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.

Britain’s new global shipping port welcomed its first scheduled vessel, the ‘MOL Caledon’ from South Africa on Thursday, November 7.  After more than a decade of planning and construction across three square miles of development, DP World London Gateway deep-sea port is now open, providing British exporters and importers with a more efficient way to ship globally, at less cost. The £1.5billion facility at Thurrock, Essex, is 20 miles downriver from London.

Having started the day priced at $26 each, Twitter’s share closed at $44.90, giving the microblogging site a value of just over $31 billion.

With more than 13 million shares traded in the first hour after the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) opened alone, it was far and away the biggest technology listing since that of Facebook in 2012. Twitter’s choice of exchange ahead of the technology-rich Nasdaq exchange proved somewhat surprising, however as a way of avoiding the technical glitches and delays that Facebook’s IPO launch experienced it clearly worked.

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.

Following a lacklustre second quarter for the European oil and gas sector, there were distinct signs of improvement in the three months to September, with eleven disclosed value deals taking place, between them worth $2.96 billion. While it is true that the lion’s share of this is accounted for by just one deal, the $2.65 billion purchase of North Sea assets from Statoil by Austrian company OMV, analysts feel that this could be a sign that the second quarter was an exception and stimulate a greater volume of deals going forward.

Mr Teke, who is non-executive director at Optimum Coal, replaces out-going president Mark Cutifani. Other appointments announced at the Chamber’s 123rd Annual General Meeting included Khanyisile Kweyama, executive director of Anglo American South Africa, being made first vice president and Graham Briggs, CEO of Harmony Gold, being made second vice president.

The Ancient Mariner complained abut the lack of drinking water on his ship in 1798 but fails to mention (perhaps Coleridge didn’t know) that Samuel Pepys had requested one of his naval captains to carry out “… an Experiment of producing fresh water (at Sea) out of Salt” as early as 1684. The outcome of that is not known, but it can’t have been that successful as onboard desalination doesn’t seem to have progressed much until the invention of the multi-stage flash (MSV) distillation process in 1955.

“If you ask me what factors have contributed most to our success,” says SOS Safety International’s Managing Director, Carmen Nieves, “I would have to say it is a healthy combination of hard work and effort, a lot of negotiating, a lot of sales and ultimately a lot of satisfied customers.”

With its stable, multi-party parliamentary democracy and an economy buoyed by strong agricultural, tourism and mining sectors, Namibia has a lot going for it as a nation. This fact was reaffirmed this year when Bloomberg named Namibia the top emerging market economy in Africa and the 13th best in the world.