It’s never an easy phone call to make. I had called earlier in the day warning my client that we were expecting bad news, and now I was disturbing his lunch to confirm it. The buyers could not lift their subjects, the business they had in mind for the ship had not materialised at the […]

It had all the hallmarks of a great idea talked about over a long lunch in the City by no doubt very intelligent people nonetheless hampered by ignorance. You can almost imagine it, in some fine dining establishment in the self-styled Maritime Capital of the World, the City of London: “So let’s see. If the […]

Like many very good – and very bad – ideas it started with a lunch. I had gone to see George Mangos, and his brother Christos, of the Interunity Group to brainstorm a little bit before the Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers Annual Forum last November. George and I had not seen each other for a […]

Once upon a time, a long time ago, before Covid and entry into our language of phrases like ‘supply chain bottlenecks’ and ‘friend shoring’, before Ever Given memes were thought of packs of techies roamed the streets of cities like Athens and Piraeus, Hamburg, Copenhagen and Singapore, evangelists for a new world where tech (which meant different […]

Many years ago I was invited to a presentation by the Japanese Embassy here in Athens, where two speakers, one from Toyota and the other from Nintendo, described their company philosophies and strategies. I was less interested in the strategy part – wisely as it turns out, because car manufacturing and making games has little […]