Sir John Kay, formerly dean of the Saïd Business School in Oxford and a professor at London Business School as well as the author of countless stimulating columns and books, is the doyen of British thinkers on the evolution of business, and it is always a pleasure to hear from him. 

In this latest reappraisal of ‘what business is for and how it works’, Kay invites us to consider whether the capitalism of Marxist theory and 20th-century practice is a thing of the past, the crude interaction of capital and labour having been replaced by a more sophisticated nexus of relationships between top executives, ‘knowledge workers’, outsourced suppliers of services and physical goods, and, of course, capital, still provided by shareholders, though these are nowadays at such a remove as to be almost insignificant to the strategies of the businesses concerned.

In the mid-20th century, the corporate archetype in the Western world was General Motors (GM) – huge, vertically integrated, hierarchically managed, capital-intensive and based on fixed and repetitive manufacturing processes. Perhaps the last survivor of that dinosaur breed today is Boeing, the Seattle-based aircraft manufacturer that appears to be in