On any given day, you can download multiple financial forecasts of future prices for almost everything from shares in individual companies to the price of wheat, coffee or oil.
I am really interested in the expected future price of oil because my company does most of our work in the oil and gas industry.
If you read the analysts’ views on the oil price and the rationale behind their forecasts, they all sound credible. In fact, they always have, yet they have often been wrong.
Few forecasters predicted the sudden oil price swings up or down over the last few decades, and none of them predicted the collapse in price in the last few months. Today, they can all point to the reasons why it happened and show how obvious it was, so obvious that none of them foresaw it.
Only two weeks after a pilot was killed during a test flight of a prototype vehicle that should one day allow paying passengers to travel briefly into space, it was fascinating to see that scientists had successfully landed a probe on a comet some 300 million miles away from Earth.
The history of space travel is marked with tragedies and illuminated by spectacular achievements.
The first manned flight into space by Yuri Gagarin in 1961, the Apollo 8 crew who first saw the dark side of the moon in 1968, and probably one of the highest points in human history when Neil Armstrong was first to set foot on the moon on 21 July 1969 just to name a few.
Wood Group chief executive Bob Keiller has backed the development of a skills-matching “dating service” for thousands of oil and gas industry workers in the north-east who fear losing their jobs.
Through Wood Group’s recruitment team, Altablue, workers facing redundancy can start searching for jobs in the public sector, including at Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire councils, the NHS, the fire and police services and at Robert Gordon University.
When I was a small child, my granddad and I would sometimes go for walks in the early morning. He said we were picking mushrooms, but I don’t remember us actually picking many. I suspect that it was his cunning way of making time for us to be together.
On those walks, we used to see quite a bit of wildlife such as foxes, badgers, deer and rabbits — hundreds and hundreds of rabbits. I would chase them, and, of course, they would simply scatter ahead of me. I never got close. But, I do remember him telling me some time later that the secret of catching rabbits is to concentrate on one at a time.
Sometimes this applies to business too, especially as you take on a new role. It’s tempting to try and fix every problem, to make every improvement and to overcome every challenge all at once.
Wood Group's boss was inducted into the Entrepreneurial Scotland Hall of Fame at a ceremony in Glasgow last night.
Bob Keiller, the Aberdeen-based energy service company's chief executive, follows in the footstep of illustrious names like Sir Moir Lockhead, Donald Macdonald and Sir Ian Wood who have all received the accolade.
Established in 2002 to recognise exceptional leadership, the Entrepreneurial Scotland Hall of Fame recognises successful entrepreneurs who have made a major contribution to Scottish business life.
