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Jan 6, 2025 | 
thegappartnership.com | Chris Atkins
When you work in professional services, governance is not just important, it is critical - a way of life. And when you provide negotiation services, governance is not just a way of life, it is absolutely vital to the continuation of your business. Our negotiation consultants are often asked, “Have you worked with our counterparties?” We have been providing negotiation solutions for more than 25 years to Fortune 500 companies globally, so the chances are that the answer is, “Yes”.
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Sep 19, 2024 | 
dailymail.co.uk | Chris Atkins
Reading back over the transcript of the disturbing interview I did with Mohamed Al Fayed’s PR man Max Clifford in 2008, I feel physically sick. I was making a documentary revealing how powerful operators like Clifford were able to cover up damaging stories about their clients. But nothing could have prepared me for the extraordinary revelations he made about Al Fayed.
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Sep 14, 2024 | 
independent.co.uk | Chris Atkins
A phrase I often heard inside was “your sentence starts the day you leave prison”. To an outsider, this sounds completely crazy. Surely leaving jail should be the happiest day of your life? But to those entrenched in the criminal justice system (and I include myself in this description, having been given five years for tax fraud in 2016), it’s a painfully accurate take on the difficulties faced when leaving custody. To be fair, I had it a lot easier than most.
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Sep 9, 2024 | 
dailymail.co.uk | Chris Atkins
Labour’s early release scheme, which will see 5,500 prisoners let out to free up space in overcrowded jails – 1,700 of them today – is worse than chaotic. It’s like using your credit card to pay off your overdraft. The lack of capacity in Britain’s prisons is a serious problem. But to do it in a panic, without proper planning or support for those being bundled out of the gates, is a recipe for more crime.
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Aug 14, 2024 | 
thegappartnership.com | Chris Atkins
The rise of European retail buying alliancesEuropean retail buying alliances have been influential for nearly two decades, growing in strength and number. This trend began with the rise of Omni channels, which threatened traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, shifting the balance of power toward suppliers who gained more options for allocating their promotional funds.
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Aug 5, 2024 | 
inews.co.uk | Chris Atkins
I have a Google news alert for prisons, and every week it pings me with a story of a female officer shagging a strapping inmate. Most recently, Linda De Sousa Abreu has pleaded guilty to misconduct in public office after a video of this hapless screw screwing a prisoner exploded all over social media. This encounter took place in my old home, HMP Wandsworth, and made me feel slightly put out that I stayed there for nine months and saw no action whatsoever.
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Jul 8, 2024 | 
recruitingdaily.com | Noel Cocca |Chris Atkins |Brian Fink
Technology has radically transformed talent acquisition strategies, enabling recruiters to source with greater speed, precision and cost-effectiveness. One of the key elements of modern talent sourcing is programmatic job advertising – a term ported over from the marketing realm – which automates the job ad buying process and offers HR teams data-driven decision-making and real-time adjustments.
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May 26, 2024 | 
dailymail.co.uk | Chris Atkins
My mate Simon has a glittering new career ahead of him, if he can only stay out of prison long enough to attend the job interview. In his old role as a thief, druggie and all-round social menace, Simon has been prosecuted for more than 80 criminal offences. He keeps getting arrested for being homeless — though, as he points out, he can't really help it since the council refuses to give him anywhere to live.
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Apr 23, 2024 | 
dailymail.co.uk | Chris Atkins
One of my most memorable encounters as a former jailbird was with 'Ali', a notorious gangster whom I met days after he was released from a high security prison. He'd just completed several long sentences for firearms offences and serious violence. We'd become connected through a mutual friend who was one of Ali's neighbours in HMP Belmarsh — home to the UK's most notorious and dangerous criminals. 'Chris, mate,' the friend wrote. 'I found someone you gotta talk to.
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Dec 5, 2023 | 
perthnow.com.au | Chris Atkins
When anti-vaccine protesters laid siege to New Zealand’s parliament building in Wellington in 2022, police tried desperate measures to force them to disperse. First they activated the water sprinklers on the lawn. Then they turned on loudspeakers, blasting the crowd with Barry Manilow songs and the monotonous dance hit Macarena on a loop. The protesters responded by donning cagoules and dancing under their umbrellas.
