Why Alice?
Executive recruitment is a serious business. So why the Alice theme on our website?
It began with the line from the Red Queen that's quoted on our homepage:
"Now here, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must try to run at least twice as fast as that!"
That struck Lewis Carroll as an amusing absurdity. But now it feels like a pretty accurate description of life at the top of most modern organisations.
Dipping into Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, we found more and more parallels with contemporary business life. These became the theme of Picking winners in a race with no finishing post - a collection of reflections on business leadership issues.
If you'd like to download a pdf of this booklet, please click here. A hard copy can be requested from our office: please call 020 7227 0800.
Alice famously questioned the merit of a book without pictures. A website without pictures would be pretty dull, too. We could have enlivened ours with pictures of thrusting executives carrying briefcases into helicopters or pointing at computer screens. But a few of the delightful illustrations from the Alice books somehow seemed more enjoyable. We hope you agree.
We subsequently realised that Lewis Carroll spent the later part of his life, and is also buried, in Guildford - where we have one of our offices. And that one of our researchers lives in Christ Church, Oxford - where Carroll studied and later became a mathematics lecturer. But these are merely coincidences...
