Author name: David Parkin

THE word legend is bandied about too much these days. But I was lucky enough to be in the presence of one yesterday. Former Leeds United great Norman Hunter was the guest at our lunch at the Foundry restaurant where we ‘celebrated’ the 40th anniversary of his infamous fight with Francis Lee of Derby County. […]

IT still ranks as one of the biggest challenges of my working life. Give me an arrogant company chairman or cabinet minister to interview, or even the cashflow demands that come from running a business, and I’ll tell you that either are easier than the Lord’s Taverners Balloon Debate. It is more than two years

MASSIMO Cellino has been in charge of Leeds United for barely 18 months but his latest managerial sacking was greeted with a grim inevitability by long-suffering supporters of the Championship team. Are fans of the club today paying the price for something that happened in a previous life? Or is it payback time for all

I THOUGHT I recognised one face among the eager bunch who make up the latest intake on BBC TV show The Apprentice. Ruth Whiteley is the oldest of this year’s candidates at 47 and has a forceful enough personality to either win her tasks and impress Lord Sugar enough for him to invest £250,000 into

THERE are worse ways to wake up than pulling back your curtains and seeing the shimmering blue sea of the Persian Gulf beyond a golden white beach. I’m on a trip to Abu Dhabi and Dubai as a guest of Etihad Airways and Hyatt Hotels as they showcase these twin pillars of success. I’ve visited

FRESH from the opening of the new John Lewis store in Birmingham, the store chain’s chief executive was in Leeds this week to take part in a discussion about leadership in the 21st century. Given that John Lewis is a partnership founded by a man born in the Victorian era, you might have expected Andy

LEEDS has long competed with Manchester. Whether it is which one has the best shopping (Manchester, in my opinion), which has the biggest legal sector (Leeds, I’d say) or who has the best football team (let’s not bother going there) there has always been rivalry between the two cities which are just 40 miles apart.

HANDS up if you don’t receive enough emails? With that question alone, Microsoft’s Dave Coplin, who revels in the title of Chief Envisioning Officer, captured the hearts and minds of a high level business audience at a KPMG Enterprise event in Leeds this week. Alongside Dave on the stage at Aspire were Yorkshire Carnegie coach

I SHOULD have known it was a bad idea from the start. Going head-to-head with one of football’s hardest men, even decades after he retired, was going to leave me exposed. But ever since I came up with the idea of “celebrating” the anniversary of one of football’s most infamous on-the-pitch clashes, it was inevitable

IF there is one standout funding change to emerge from the long recession and the banking crisis, then it has to be the phenomenon known as crowdfunding. A host of platforms have emerged allowing entrepreneurs to attract investment for their businesses from ordinary punters. Since it first started in the late 1990s, crowdfunding has seen