Business leaders show two heads are sometimes better than one

The first 100 days of the Cameron-Clegg political partnership set me musing about double acts in business. There have been famous ones in the past: the predatory Lords Hanson and White spring to mind, and the veteran US investor Warren Buffett has been hand-in-glove for decades with his sidekick Charlie Munger. Sir Fred Goodwin and Sir George Mathewson used to be joined at the hip at Royal Bank of Scotland and their highly successful takeover of NatWest was very much a joint enterprise; I've always wondered whether Fred would have gone so far off the rails if Mathewson had still been in the chair. We have Adam Crozier and Archie Norman at ITV but the cult of the star CEO seems to have encouraged a climate of individualism. In the BP oil spill, it was noticeably every man for himself, with chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg seeming to distance himself from the chief executive, Tony Hayward. A bit more togetherness in business might not be a bad thing.