It was a sharp winter's day, with the sun shining crisp and clean against the steel and glass towers that mark out London's financial centre. In the offices of Mackel Stell, the American investment bank, the blinds had snapped shut early that morning when the light sensors detected the first rays of the sun. On the sixth floor, the occupants of meeting room seven sat in the gloom, idly doodling while watching the poorly produced PowerPoint presentation on the screen in front them.

The management consultant stood next to the screen and looked smug. The bar charts, 3D pies, spider diagrams and aggressively animated organograms of his presentation showed just how right he had been. Now phase two had launched; things were getting interesting.

Jon Harley's advice, after years of study, was that the bank's research team should adopt the organisational approaches of the anti-globalisation movement. In his MBA, he had written paper after paper arguing that the . . .  read »