Top management was distracted from the basic business of carmaking.
The basic business of importing is buying for a dollar and selling for two.
This sustains a vast superstructure of senior managers, most of them terrifyingly distant from the basic business of programme-making".
A "new Deutsche Bank," they said, would largely retreat from the basic business of serving retail customers at local branches.
A bit later Finn and Alastair Cook spent a few minutes running though the basic business of turning the bowling arm over in a straight-arm arc.
Cromwell, unlike "il principe, or whatever little worshipfulness is in charge today," is extremely good at "the basic business of thinking".
Dawkins merely meant that the basic business of a gene is to get as many copies of itself as possible into the next generation, by whatever means.
The basic business of the organization, which also includes talks about electronic commerce and the arbitration of global trade disputes, "is bubbling away," he said, although he acknowledged that "all this sounds like modest stuff".
If it's the former, Bond will be remembered as a chairman who spent too much time obsessing about Davis' mega-retention package and too little on the basic business of securing fair value for his shareholders.
He has mastered the basic business of his company, he has faced down high-handed government authorities, he has recruited and trained managers to set up new offices, and time and again he has plunged the company into new businesses when these seemed the best solution to some stubborn problem.
