I don’t think it’s way too complex, I think it’s way too fast. You know, I was talking to a senior partner from an accounting firm now long since retired who was reminiscing about how he used to get instructions by letter. And you know, you’d get round to implementing them, whereas of course now it’s, you know, microseconds basically and it’s Twitter and it’s email and it’s everything, so it’s instant. The trouble is that because people can communicate instantly, they expect instant replies. And I think we’re in danger of doing everything too fast and not doing everything sensibly. You know, I think the hardest thing in business now is to find time to think, find time to stand back and give yourself space and not to react immediately, not to follow the crowd, just to stay calm and so, you know, most of what happens can be ignored. And that’s a very courageous thing to do, but I think that’s probably the most sensible thing that most people can do. Most news is noise, ignore it.

Laurence Bard: "The definition of R&D and some of the costs there are necessarily grey areas in the tax legislation.  What we will do with clients is actually understand their business, understand what they will do and explain how that might interpret into a claim.  And therefore by understanding your business, your activities, what your people do, we can translate that into a claim or what is a reasonable claim based on a number of uncertainties.  So we help people interpret what is otherwise quite difficult to interpret.  A lot of people start off thinking I don’t do R&D at all.  You talk to them, they discover, yes they do, but how much.  You talk to them further and you develop an agreed idea of what it is reasonable to say is R&D.  And that’s our prime function.  A lot of people don’t know too much about it.  They might know about it in principle.  But our prime function is to translate somebody’s business into claims that can help them."

Ian Luck: "We get the most cost effective range of benefits for the corporate entity.  But also for the members themselves so they actually get something that is appropriate for them in a tax efficient way.  I think the flip-side of that is if you get it wrong then you have a benefits package that nobody really appreciates, everybody becomes a bit, you know, fed up with what’s available, they become a bit lethargic in terms of the benefits, they’re just there, we don’t really pay too much attention.  And if they’re not paying attention they don’t really value what you’re spending on them.  So what we can do is deliver or help the company to deliver something that everybody appreciates."

Guy Rigby: "Well you can get by with just building up a business often, but what will happen is that you will find that you made the wrong turning at some point.  What we do is we find that a lot of businesses that come to us two, three years after they’ve been created, they haven’t really taken proper advice at the outset, and we find that they’ve made ... they’ve fallen into bad traps, if you like.  And we have to kind of unwind them and start again.  And that be a very painful exercise, if you’ve, you know, if you’ve set off on the wrong foot.  The reason that we think we are suitable for entrepreneurs is because of this personal bit, so we care about the entrepreneur.  But what we’re also trying to do is to make sure that they don’t hit those bad traps early on.  So what we always say to people is, “we’re a big firm, we have all of these skills and capabilities so that should give you enormous peace of mind.  We’re not going to wheel all of those services in to your first meeting and start charging you for them.  But you know that when you want to put in a share option scheme to incentivise your employees, we can do it.  You know that if you want to take your business international we can advise on it. We know that if you want to raise finance you can rely on us to help.”  So all of those things are really, really useful even though they might not be needed on day one."

Mark Webb: "There are a number of companies that I’ve worked with where they haven’t looked at things that don’t look particularly transformative when they think about them.  So for instance, capital allowances – capital allowances are a relief that unlocks over a long period of time.  And a lot of people will think that’s not that much value in them actually looking at that allowance.  But if I were to say to you that they’ve just raised the annual investment allowance to 250,000 per annum, which means that you can take a write-off of capital expenditure day one for a much larger amount than previously.  So you get tax relief immediately for, up to around about a quarter of a million.  Then that is worth looking at for a lot of small medium sized enterprises.  It can generate a lot of cash flow by saving you a lot of tax."

Business is no longer linear and you have to adapt your thinking to suit. Julie Meyer explains further in this TV show.

Business strategy models - Networks

If you are still, in any way shape or form thinking linear or hierarchical, you need to update your thinking to a network orientation. That's much more important than just the Facebook as a phenomena or LinkedIn as a phenomena. Everything has moved to a world of interdependency and multiple dependencies in that.