Duncan Greenwood, vice-president for end-user computing and the digital workspace, VMware: HR departments are now concerned about what it looks like to retain and acquire talent. My daughter joined a UK bank – she was taking a modern-day apprenticeship approach to her first role – and I asked her what her first day was like. She said: “Absolutely fantastic.” And then she rang me on the Thursday, and I asked if everything was okay, and she said: “Rubbish. Today was IT day. I sat in a room for eight hours with 40 other graduates and apprentices, and they preached to us what we shouldn’t do, what we can’t do and what they won’t allow us to do.” 

The next day, they got their equipment, and she said: “The laptop I’ve got is threeand-a-half years old and it looks like it’s been dropped from the third storey of the car park, and they gave me a Nokia phone that is about ten years behind my personal phone. How am I supposed to work in a place like this?”