[4] He spent four years as editor-in-chief at The Observer and director of the Guardian National Newspapers, before joining the Industrial Society, now known as The Work Foundation, as chief executive in 2000.

In 2010, he was criticised for his handling of the Industrial Society by a number of publications, including The Sunday Times and Private Eye, for having used the company for campaigning purposes rather than focusing on it as a business enterprise.

[5] As well as a columnist, author, and chief executive, Hutton is a governor of the London School of Economics, a visiting professor at the University of Manchester Business School and the University of Bristol, a visiting fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford, a shareholder of the Scott Trust Limited, which owns the Guardian Media Group, rapporteur of the Kok Group, and a member of the Design Council's Millennium Commission.

[10] In The World We're In, Hutton argues that many viewpoints in this book are neo-Keynesian and that it is critical of short-termism, viewing stakeholder capitalism as an alternative.

The book examines Western concerns and responses to the rise of China and the emerging global division of labour, and argues that the Chinese economy is running up against a set of increasingly unsustainable contradictions that could have a damaging universal fallout.

The analysis in his books is characterised by a support for the European Union and its potential, alongside a disdain for what he calls American conservatism —defined, among other factors, as a certain attitude to markets, property, and the social contract.

His wife, who died in 2016, was a director of a property development company called First Premise, based in Richmond upon Thames, which she founded in 1987.