Bunhill: Charitable view of a corporate jungle

MANAGEMENT TODAY, that sonorous bible of the managing classes, seems to have caught the shifting business climate in its latest choice of editor.

Out, presumably in the hope of making himself even richer, goes Philip Beresford, who combined the editorship with his long-standing devotion to the Sunday Times Book of the Rich. Some have criticised this weighty tome for its omissions. But Beresford is convinced that cataloguing the ways of the wealthy is the route to his own fortune.

Lindsay Masters of Haymarket Press, Management Today's publisher, has replaced Beresford with an editor of a different hue, arguably more in touch with these less grasping times.

Tom Lloyd's previous claim to fame was presiding over the decline and fall of Financial Weekly, but he has also written books expounding his distinctive theories of the management jungle. Instead of corporate lions and tigers in the undergrowth, he spots dinosaurs, and believes that nice companies - nice to their workers and customers, that is - do best by their shareholders.

Indeed, his next volume, due out in the spring, argues that companies and charities will come together in a new form of organisation called 'comparities'. More bizarrely, Lloyd predicts that the Financial Times will come round to classifying shares according to their companies' charitable policies.

Lloyd is quick to point out that he was roundly derided in the early 1980s for forecasting that large, monolithic corporations would start to break themselves up. After ICI and IBM, that doesn't look so fanciful.