Is the future of British business in and around Old Street roundabout?

Not long ago, I went to see a friend's band play in east London.

It was a pretty typical night out in painfully trendy Shoreditch - hanging out in the basement of a strangely unfinished office block, with plenty of not-very-cheap beer and loud music.

Now, this kind of thing might seem tangential to the economic crisis that is gripping, the UK, Europe, and indeed most of the world.

But I mention it in this context because of an interesting new phenomenon. The trendy clubs and art galleries in a shabby neighbourhood in east London seem to be attracting the kind of businesses that could point towards one way out of the economic doldrums.

And so for the past few weeks I've been hanging out in east London with Radio 4's In Business presenter Peter Day, not to find the next big thing in indie rock or modern art, but instead visiting the offices of high-tech businesses, talking to entrepreneurs and those who are backing them.

The people we met love the place. It has cheap rent, great coffee shops, and lots of parties. It attracts highly educated young people with angular eyewear who are willing to work long hours to get in on the ground floor of a great idea.

Elizabeth Varley is one of the Silicon Roundabout evangelists. She set up Techhub in one of the grim blocks nearby. Much more than an office building, it's a base and meeting space for dozens of tiny companies. For a few hundred pounds a month anyone with an idea can rent a desk and, more importantly, be surrounded by their peers.

Talking to Varley, you get no whiff of the gloom currently drenching the financial pages.

"This area was colonised by artists and designers and independent restaurateurs and shop owners," she says. "There's something very similar between artists, independent bar owners and entrepreneurs. It's about people wanting to do their own thing, and it's about an atmosphere and a vibe in the area."

What's happening around Old Street is small, almost petri-dish sized. The government's Tech City UK initiative estimates that around 1,000 jobs have been created this year because of the east London tech boom. That's nice, but nothing compared to the 38,000 people who became unemployed across the UK in the three months to June.

And we found there are troubling questions about the sustainability of the sector and its ability to really carve out a niche away from Silicon Valley, USA. There is as of yet no UK equivalent of Google, or Facebook, and no obvious candidate to become one.

But there is something happening in this creative cluster, and it might eventually provide a plan to boost job growth. Despite what the Shoreditch hipsters would like to believe, there's nothing unique about east London itself, and nothing stopping similar colonies from springing up in, say, Manchester, Glasgow or Sheffield.

Or indeed anywhere with creative, hungry, educated young people - and some decent bands to listen to once the day's work is done.

Mike Wendling is a BBC Journalist

• In Business is on BBC Radio 4 on on Thursday 8 September at 20:30 BST and Sunday 11 September at 21:30 BST. Or listen via the Radio 4 website or download the programme podcast.
• Mike Wendling 's BBC News Online article: Can 'Silicon Roundabout' challenge Silicon Valley?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006sz6t

Here's a puzzle - and to help you solve it, a clue. The Bottom Line is a conversation show where top chief executives and entrepreneurs have a lively debate about business topics with Evan Davis. Now, can you spot the odd-one-out in the following list?

1. A hypnotist
2. A vegetarian
3. An expert on eco-friendly Christmas decorations
4. The chief executive of the world's largest oil company

The answer is 4 - the only one not to have been proposed (so far) as a contributor by their public relations agency.

Here's some more potential contributors that PRs have suggested: an expert on wine-tasting; a singer-songwriter, who'd also like to perform on the show; a medical expert on 'summer madness'; a documentary film director; a psychologist who can talk about playgrounds; a diet expert; a band who've released their third single; a dentist... There are plenty more examples.

Might one end up thinking that the PR industry is full of people who are out of touch with their counterparts in the media? Well you might, if you saw some of the emails I get. Actually, the best PRs suggest good contributors we might not know about; come up with exciting topics; and help us to remain in touch with important business trends. We're grateful for their help - and their patience with our demands.

Most of the contributors who appear on the show are there because we have made the request. With some high-profile guests, we have to be very persistent to convince them to take part - and good PR people can help us here. The idea of appearing on a programme that's broadcast in the UK and around the world on Radio and TV can be daunting to some contributors, though most are excited by the idea of such a huge audience.

But a few PRs spell trouble. Some will guard access to the chief executive they're looking after a bit too fiercely. On one occasion when we weren't able to brief the contributor properly beforehand, he ended up being a hundred miles away at the time of recording - leaving us half an hour to find a replacement guest from scratch. Another chief executive obviously thought there was safety in numbers, because he had three different PR firms advising him (they all demanded separate briefings).

Then there are the huge number of unsolicited submissions we receive, only a very few of which are suitable enough for us to follow up. Some PRs seem to have no idea that the programme is about business, rather than, say, rock music or holidays. Even when they do have a vague grasp of the show's content, they often pitch almost anyone with a business background however remote, especially if there's some event coming up.

These PRs are often the same ones who send lots and lots of emails...the vast majority of which are irrelevant (a friend has christened these 'spram'). For those PRs who haven't yet grasped the basics of effective electronic communication, this advice from a mid-1990s guide to 'netiquette' might help: "messages... should be brief and to the point... unsolicited advertising which is completely off-topic will most certainly guarantee that you get a lot of hate mail."

Of course I am not alone; many journalists have to grapple with far more calls and emails than I do. Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of Wired magazine, wrote a famous blog post on the subject, where he explained he would ban PR people who sent him inappropriate emails because there were just too many.

The other side of the coin is that it can be tough to reach the right person in a large media organisation like the BBC - and we do try to help 'lost' PRs. But there will always be some who will just grab a media contacts list and email everyone on it, not worrying if the guest or story is appropriate, because it's the easiest thing to do.

So our advice to PRs is, do as Chris Anderson suggests - find out what a journalist is interested in before contacting them. It isn't that difficult - and it might save some money. For example, if a PR listened to or watched an edition of the show before sending in promotional CDs, DVDs and books (and we get a surprising number of these) he or she might discover that we don't play music or movie clips, and we almost never review books.

Managing relations between large organisations and the public is not an easy task. In this week's programme we'll hear how top PR practitioners Julia Hobsbawm and Lord Tim Bell go about it.

Neil Koenig is series producer of The Bottom Line

• The Bottom Line, uniquely, is broadcast on BBC radio and television: on Thursdays and Saturdays on Radio 4, and on World Service Radio and the BBC News and World News TV Channels. The next programme is on Radio 4 tomorrow at 2030 (repeated at 1730 on Saturday).
• The picture, which shows a shelf of Spam in a Korean shop, is by Mark DeMaio. Used under licence.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006sz6t

I can always tell when we've recorded a good edition of The Bottom Line: it is one where I have not had to speak very much.

Don't get me wrong. I love speaking. It's what I'm paid to do. And before we record the programme I always make sure that I have plenty to say on the topics we're discussing.

Fortunately, however, I'm modest enough to know that the Bottom Line is really about the guests rather than the presenter. And for the programme to succeed, it needs to show the guests at their most fluent and expressive.

And that is where the challenge of the programme lies.

To succeed, the conversation has to fizz; the guests have to bounce comments off each other and push their point out, rather than have it pulled from them. In short, the guests have to converse like the professional talkers who fill the airwaves - journalists, politicians, artistic performers and academics.

But the interesting fact is that when you take a significant number of business people out of their comfort zone and put them in a radio studio, they are not relaxed about practising the art of conversation.

Business-people are trained in all sorts of communication: they can bark orders or sell washing powder or talk to Powerpoint presentations. They are just not bred to appear on Midweek.

Put a microphone in front of many of our guests they are a little taciturn; they like to think about what they're saying; they are worried about disagreeing with the other guests or speaking out of turn. Sometimes, they even wait to be asked a question.

Unchecked, none of these habits give the programme the natural flow we are looking for. (After all, you would never feel a dinner party had been very stimulating if it consisted of the host simply asking a sequence of questions to one guest at a time). So my job as presenter is to make all the guests feel comfortable with the task at hand.

Now, over time I've made an interesting observation on what works and what doesn't in making the more reticent guests relax.

I used to give a rather vague pre-show chat to them all, emphasising that they should feel free to speak without being spoken to; that they could make their point when they wanted to, and even interrupt if it sounded natural.

But this turned out to be too imprecise. Business-people are task oriented and hungry for new skills. They want their briefing to be more target-driven.

So I have discovered that if, before the recording, I instead tell them that "on at least three occasions in the programme, you should make a comment without having been asked anything by me", they converse in a far more casual way.

In fact, some of the best conversations occur when I jokingly suggest the show is a competition to see who can initiate the most points and talk most.

Tell them that, and the discussion flows. I have to do very little work. To the listener the result is a programme that has a more variable pace and one that is altogether easier to listen to.

But I expect it's only programmes with business guests that would find the way to foster a natural-sounding round-table chat by giving specific advice upfront of a rather unnatural kind.

Evan Davis presents The Bottom Line, Dragon's Den and Today

• The new series The Bottom Line begins this evening at 2030.
• Some pictures taken at a recording of The Bottom Line in Broadcasting House last July

Pitot tubes. Until recently I had never heard of them. But as we headed from Calgary to Toronto on an Airbus I wondered if they were icing up as the outside temperature hit minus 40 - that low, C or F is the same.

Iced up pitot tubes feeding the wrong information to the onboard computer are the leading explanation for why the Airbus A330 on flight AF447 plunged into the Atlantic between Rio de Janeiro and Paris on 1 June. The false readings confused the computer which mishandled the plane and passed control to the humans. They could not save the aircraft so close to its tolerances in turbulent storms above the Equator. Airbus has now advised upgrading all pitot tubes even though it insists there was nothing wrong with them.

Until then I had taken comfort from the fact that modern jetliners are flown by computer. Even the pilots admit it. Two weeks earlier as we approached Toronto from London the First Officer talked us through the weather and the time at our destination, then added 'we will shortly begin our descent into Toronto in about, ooh, five minutes the computer says.' Relax, First Officer, we'll be down before the Captain has finished his Sudoku.

So I kept a look out for ice on the sharp bits of our Airbus 320-1 as we sped away from Canada's West.

Ah the West! We had said goodbye to the Rockies the day before, driving East on the trans-Canada Highway (two lanes and warnings of elk crossing though we saw none). We over-nighted in Calgary, a city of a million folk and, gosh, a hundred years old or more. It turned out to be a weird place with little to see - and less on Mondays as the Art Gallery is closed. But we stumbled upon a secret none of the guidebooks mentions. Calgary has the best restaurants and bars in Canada. We had struggled to find either so far. But Calgary's 8th Ave SW has a string of them.

Lunch was an Atlantic burger (a wonderful Canadian invention for us semi-veggies which wraps a bap round a North Atlantic salmon fillet) with chips to die for and a light Caesar salad in the Trib Steakhouse. The local house wine, carefully measured in ounces and served in very large glasses, was fruity and rich.

Then to the museum which filled half the afternoon. Not least because the official panels explaining the exhibits, which took us back through a hundred years of the West, were paralleled with alternatives from the point of view of the Aboriginal peoples (as the First Nations or Native Americans now want to be known). Reading them thoroughly was my expiation as a visitor from the nation which had stolen their country.

A short walk to the Bow River, the rapids and canyons we had marvelled at in the West now calmed into a placid highway for timber. Then two beers at the Barley Mill Eatery and Pub, converted from the Calgary Water Power Mill and the wooden office of the Eau Claire and Bow River Lumber Company. More walking and then the search for dinner took us back to 8th Ave SW where we happened on the Mango Shiva. The food was perhaps the best Indian food we had ever eaten and the thin, crisp, buttery Nan bread certainly so.

Why, I asked our server Sharyse, were there so many good bars and restaurants in Calgary? A pause. 'Our demographic is, well, we have a lot of drinkers.' Her voice went up at the end in the rising inflection that nowadays adds emphasis to a statement. And it sits on huge oil and gas reserves. 'It's a very wealthy Province' she added.

The flight from Calgary to Toronto was the day before the flight from Toronto back to London and counted as the journey home. So my thoughts were allowed at last to turn away from waterfalls and glaciers and lakes and mountains and the complete absence of bears to money and the day job. There was plenty of time. What was scheduled to be a three and a half hour flight began with nearly half that rolling round the tarmac at Calgary airport. Problems with the cabin lighting would have left the toilets dark and several soft resets by the crew failed to cure the problem. We went back to the pier and took on a maintenance engineer whose orange jacket brought the lights back to life.

The young man next to me with blond hair, frayed jeans and walking boots, who was already so late he would miss his connecting flight, cheered himself up by reading the death notices in the Calgary Herald. I spent the time absorbing the business sections of the newspapers and magazines. In the press there was a long debate over whether the regulation of financial services should be principles-based (treat customers fairly) or rules-based (do this, don't do that).

Canada is moving to the former just as the UK is moving away from it to the latter. A Ponzi fraud was revealed, smaller than Madoff (of course) but just as devastating for its hundred or so victims. Controversy raged over the disposal of the bankrupt telecoms company Nortel and who bid what for it, when and to whom.

Half way through the flight the near-bankrupt Air Canada, which charged a hefty fare for the flight, now made us pay again for less-edible-than-usual cold snacks. No-frills service at flag carrier prices. It could be a slogan.

I moved on to pages about the Canadian pension crisis. Salary-related schemes closing, some being dumped (with no protection scheme in place) and Canadians being accused of spending too much and saving too little for too long. I could have been home already. That was followed by an analysis of why fund managers in the large public sector schemes had made such big losses on the hundreds of billions of Canadian dollars entrusted to them. The three largest lost 19% or C$72 billion off their C$385 billion assets in the last year because their active managers prefer to put the money at risk in shares rather than keep it in safer bonds.

Defending this approach Jim Leech, the CEO of the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan which lost C$20 billion, said 'The fact of the matter is we have to take on risk to meet our pension promise.' Oh Jim! If taking a risk guaranteed those extra returns you need so badly it wouldn't be a risk would it? The risk is you may lose another C$20 billion. Perhaps Toronto teacher Kelly Alles should be put in charge. 'A high return is great' she told Canadian Business 'but when it comes right down to it I'd rather have a guaranteed lower return'.

And before I knew it we were landing at Toronto. Another journey survived. Only six more hours on the flight to London to watch out for ice on those pitot tubes.

• Part three of Moneybox's Coping with Recession series is on air tomorrow at 1200.
• Subscribe to Paul Lewis's Moneybox newsletter.
• The picture, Calgary Suburban, is by Evan Leeson and is used under licence.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006s609

It is 21 years this summer since I started working on In Business, thanks to a sudden crisis. The programme's previous presenter had been tempted to a more lucrative job in television, and the vital deadline of the Radio Times billing was looming. That was when we decided what ought to be in the programme, and who the presenter would be. And though the presenter has stuck, this is still a familiar deadline, I'm afraid.

In Business had started some time before, in the 1970s, at a time when business got short shrift from BBC News. The powers that be must have thought it too boring, too specialist, too incomprehensible for a general audience.

Economics coverage was mostly restricted to a canter round the monthly economic indicators and a routine daily mention of the ups and downs of share prices as indicated by the Financial Times Index.

Business was a distant world. Radio 4 had woken up to the fascinating intricacies of the financial markets in 1971, when a long postal workers strike badly affected the City of London. The deputy editor of the World Tonight, Vincent Duggleby, was alerted to this, commissioned a piece on it, and very soon after that the Financial World Tonight was born as a separate programme, with Vincent at the helm.

In Business came a bit later; the first series was commissioned by Radio 4 after BBC governors were badgered at a 'Meet the BBC' meeting to recognise that there was a lot more to business than the City. That has turned out to be true.

Nevertheless, despite the explosion of business broadcasting in the past 20 years led by the American networks and then taken up round the world, it is still those perpetual motion machines the financial markets that get the most attention, in minute detail.

Leaving In Business (and its sister programme Global Business on the World Service) ample room to pursue some of the longer term trends. In particular, that means addressing the endless story of change: high technology crashing into the established way of doing things in companies, industries, countries, over and over again.

It's strange but true that the new millennium in 2000 really did seem to usher in a whole new world of business activity, reasserting the significance of the dot-com bubble even after it burst so apparently definitively the same year.

And organisations are still busy learning how to cope with the new wired-up interconnected, interactive world... look at the confusion in the global media industry at the moment if you think the implications of the Internet are now out in the open.

But it may go deeper than mere business models, such as shifting retailing to the web, or not.

Some 10 years ago the great management thinker the late Peter Drucker told me that he did not think that the computer had yet begun to effect the way organisations were managed. At the time, it seemed to be a crazy remark, but thinking about it afterwards it made more and more sense.

Henry Ford transformed industry after industry with his adoption of the production line in Detroit 100 years ago. Theoretically, the interactive information generated by the computer network should be having just as much disruptive impact on business now as Ford had then.

But few pre-existing companies seem to have changed their shape, size or business model to reflect what they now know about the clients and customers.

The mass production corporation tells itself it is making things its customers want to buy, and giving them a choice. But big companies seem to erect walls around themselves to keep the customer at bay. They commission market research rather than themselves go out and ask questions, and they mainly want customers who want to buy the things they make, not the other way round.

Inside the company all is ordered and predicable, punctuated by meetings and lunches and access to the company car parking space. Outside, in the real world, there is fearful chaos.

Big companies seem scared of the individuality of the people in the market place. They long to bring order and branding and simplicity to the disorder of real life.

It is something you see vividly in India at the moment, where the country's 12-million roadside hawkers and tiny corner shops are fighting to prevent the spread of the big corporate supermarkets.

Company Man and Company Woman see chaos on the street and in the bazaars of India, when what I see is huge choice and enormous convenience... backed by a remarkably efficient supply chain getting produce from the wholesale markets to the streets. Choice and convenience now under threat.

Business people get business qualifications that give them the tools to bring what they think is order to the chaos of the real world, in the same way that the whiz kids in the financial markets thought they had packaged up sub prime risk so that it wasn't risky any more.

The 21st century post-Ford lesson that business may have to learn is that the real world is full of millions of individuals with individual needs who want their individuality respected and served. The network computer makes this sort of intimacy possible, if companies were to learn how to use it to craft the mass market products for a clamour of different preferences.

Providing goods and services in this way was not possible when I started doing In Business 21 years ago. Perhaps we ought to make a programme about it. Perhaps that's what we are doing.

Peter Day is presenter of In Business

• This week's In Business, Learning Curve, is about training in the Internet era and is on Radio 4 at 2030 tonight.
• I took some photographs in the offices of Radio Current Affairs in White City - the department that produces Moneybox, Analysis, More or Less and In Business.
• Peter Day remembers Peter Drucker on his death in 2005.
• The In Business archive is one of the most comprehensive at the BBC. You can listen to programmes going back to 2002.
• Peter Day's World of Business podcast combines In Business and his 52 weeks-per-year World Service programme Global Business.