Which Decade Was The Worst Of The Last Five?
- By Professor Prabhu Guptara
- Published 01/8/2010
Professor Prabhu Guptara
Professor Prabhu Guptara is Executive Director, Organisational Development, Wolfsberg (a subsidiary of UBS - one of the largest banks in the world). He is also Freeman of the City of London and of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, and Chartered Fellow of the of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development; he is also Fellow: of the Institute of Directors, of the Royal Commonwealth Society, and of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts Commerce and Manufactures; and he continues to supervise PhD research at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) as well as to be Visiting Professor at various Universities and Business Schools around the world.
Earlier roles include: a Governor of the Polytechnic of Central London, Member of the Council of the British Institute of Management, of the International Federation of Training & Development Organisations (IFTDO), of the Association for Management Education and Development (UK), of the South East Regional Council of the Confederation of British Industry.
Judge, 1988 National Training Awards, 1980 Commonwealth Poetry Prize, 1990 & 1991 Deo Gloria Prize for Fiction; Chair of the Panel of Judges, Deo Gloria Prize 1992 & 1993.
Experience with an enormous range of organisations including: Akzo Nobel (Netherlands), the Associated Banks Institute (Germany), Barclays Bank (UK), British Petroleum (UK), the Council of Europe, Cultor (Finland), Deutsche Bank (Germany), Groupe Bull (France), Federation of Finnish Engineers (Finland), the International Management Association of Japan, Kemira (Finland), Kraft Jakob Suchard (Switzerland), Leadership Academy (Finland), Nokia Telecommunications (Finland), Novo Nordisk (Denmark), Sedgwick International Insurance and Reinsurance Brokers (UK), Singapore Institute of Management, Sonatrach (Algeria), Sun Alliance (UK), UNCTAD, Valeo (France), and so on.
Organiser, chair and lecturer by invitation for numerous international conferences, he has contributed widely to radio and television in the UK and other countries (The Money Program, Any Questions) and has written for Financial Times (London, UK), The Guardian, The Times and other publications; articles, for example, in The Gower Handbook of Management, The Gower Handbook of Quality, and the International Encyclopedia of Business & Management (Routledge).
A CD-ROM has been issued of his lecture at the Professorenforum, University of Zurich, titled "Making the World Better - Why it does NOT happen...and what TO DO about it"
Further information available from rbadertscher@coba.ch
His best-known research publication is "Top Executives in the Global 100 Companies and their IT-Competence" (ADVANCE: Management Training Ltd., UK, and Wolfsberg Executive Development Centre, Switzerland, 1998); and he is included in Debrett's People of Today and in Who's Who in the World. Professor Prabhu Guptara lives in Switzerland.
The Sixties themselves were regarded as "positive" by 34%, while 15% regarded them as "negative"; on the other hand 42% regarded them as "neither", and 8% said they did not know.
The Seventies, Eighties and Nineties improved on those scores more or less uniformly.
The proportions were, respectively:
Positive: 40, 56, and 57 (that is, more and more people regarded them favourably)
Negative: 16, 12 and 19 (a mixed trend, but relatively minor)
Neither: 37, 27 and 22 (fewer and fewer people were sitting on the fence)
Don't knows: 7, 5 and 3 (probably the least important, but reinforcing the trend above)
From these figures, one could conclude that Americans view these decades as increasingly positive.
With the current decade, however, we see an abrupt reversal: Only 27% regard the decade as positive, 50% regard it as negative, the proportion of people who regard the decade as neither postive nor negative, as well as those who don't know drops further (respectively to 21% and 2%).
Probably many factors contribute to this sudden change in view in the USA. In India and China, I am pretty confident that most people would regard the current decade as either "positive" or at least no worse than previous decades. I wonder what the verdict would be in most other countries in the world.
Professor Prabhu Guptara
