As a young and naive business student, I remember being shocked by one tutor who introduced me to the harsh realities of market research. An experienced practitioner, he was blunt in pointing out that researchers often start with a desirable conclusion and design a research project based on achieving that result. This thinking has influenced my response to research projects ever since.

The Director in-box is regularly filled with press releases promoting new research. Most of these are well intentioned and genuinely seek to discover something new. But many more are asinine and transparent attempts to push an agenda. Yesterday I was sent a message from the Guild of Travel Management Companies—a body that does plenty of good work—which contained a travellers' manifesto obtained from a survey of 1,200 business travellers. The list of demands is painfully obvious. "Convenience, reasonable cost, speed and the ability to be able to work through the journey." To use a polite variation on one of my nephew's favourite phrases, "No sugar, Sherlock."

Also from my inbox: the Institute of Business Ethics's (IBE) annual survey of the Perception of Business Transparency run by Ipsos-Mori, and Roffey Park's Management Agenda. The first asks the public to give its views on business, while the second asks managers to answer questions about their employer. Both surveys are well-established and generally offer useful insights. Yet both felt it necessary to report that this year the state of the economy had shot to the top of the list of people's concerns. All this suggests that even if no one else has been busy in this recession, research into the bleeding obvious has thrived.

Both the IBE's and Roffey Park's latest reports do offer useful insights into how the recession has changed UK organisations. The IBE report found trust in business at a shockingly low level. Only 20 per cent of UK respondents think CEOs tell the truth when they talk about their company or industry. This implies that 80 per cent feel most CEOs are lying most of the time. It's not hard to find explanations: executive pay remains the biggest concern, while half of respondents say the conduct of the banks during the financial crisis has damaged their trust in all types of businesses. And 76 per cent feel large businesses will only be open and transparent if they are forced to be.

If there's good news for CEOs from the IBE, it's that while caring for employees was cited as the chief responsibility of business, respondents were pragmatic enough for 55 per cent to agree firms should put competitiveness first, even if that means redundancies.  Even if they aren't trusted, there seems to be support for CEOs keeping their heads down, doing as little as possible, cutting costs (including staff) and riding out the storm. Or so you would think. But this is where it gets interesting. According to the Management Agenda, successful companies "engaged in more diversification activities over the past year than less successful companies, including acquiring more businesses, looking for new markets and developing new products and services".

The same upbeat message goes for the future, too. "Successful companies were focusing more on innovation, while less successful companies focus on sticking to their core business." In other words, they did the opposite of riding out the storm. Successful companies were also "less likely to engage in negative activities such as downsizing, redundancies and suspending recruitment". They were also more likely to invest in sustainability, staff and leadership development.

It is always possible to read too much into research. The Management Agenda reports what organisations are doing and, as the report's conclusion makes clear, doesn't separate cause and effect. But the research cynic in me can't pass over the fact that it's at best a happy coincidence for Roffey Park to be able to report that successful organisations invest in the leadership development it offers and for the IBE to find that the public doesn't trust business and that more firms could therefore benefit from its services.

Richard Cree

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