Click to listen to the audio version of this Daily Paradox.

The labourer may be worthy of his hire but that doesn’t tell us how worthy. Capitalism says that he is worth what he can get. That is true in an open market but how many markets are truly open? Businesses, governments, civil services, official bodies, oligopolies – none of these are ‘open’, few have genuine competition.

Do employers value us reasonably? Inevitably it is a matter of trial and error. When an employer makes an error over the worth of an employee, the employee pays, usually with his job. It is not an ideal system and it gives rise to Trades Unions attempting to redress the rather one-sided nature of the transaction.

How do we value another man’s time? The law of supply and demand is the most powerful driver. If there are not enough plumbers to service everyone’s needs their price goes up. If there are too many retailers, their takings go down.

The basis on which we employ people is more complicated than simple supply and demand. To employ sensibly we must forecast the potential value of an employee to an organisation. We do this rather crudely by looking at his qualifications and experience.

Degrees are useful as evidence of an ability to discipline ourselves well enough to reach certain standards of analysis and reasoning. They work when the basis on which exams are marked is relevant to the subsequent needs of employers. The people to answer whether this is happening are the employers, not the universities. Currently employers seem to have too little to say about this.

Experience is greatly overrated for all managerial jobs. It is certainly valuable if you are dealing with mechanical work. Management is a disaster when it is regarded as mechanical.

I have often found experience to be a limiting factor in a man’s management ability. Unless he can extrapolate from the industry he knows he will be doomed to stay in it forever. But good managers should move around, applying what they have learnt to new situations. One of the most effective things I used to do when building a business was to teach salesmen accountancy and the accountants, selling. Unconventional but very effective.

We live in the real world. Employers are the people who decide what you will be paid and if they sometimes lack vision we have to cope with it. However, the answer to the question ‘What are you worth?’ is ‘Probably quite a lot more than you are paid’. Can you get your true value? That depends on how you present and negotiate it.

Seeing the submissions of hundreds of employees I am not surprised that they are going to be poorly paid. The presentation of them is often destructive and self- denigrating. If the jeweler wants a high price he shines a powerful light on the diamond.

Our worth is partly determined by the light we shine on ourselves.

Click to listen to the audio version of this Daily Paradox.

It is not always comfortable to hear that example is the most efficient teacher we have. That is because it is true and we know that we do not always set a good one. Our behaviour with the young in school and other institutions is now, at last and rightly, strictly governed and penalties for abusing the trust positions that we hold are heavy.

Appalling, then, to see the models apparently being set by FIFA officials. Sport is universally appealing but its greatest attraction is to children who learn from it standards of teamwork, strategy, competition and survival. Now they are, allegedly, being taught bribery as well.

Corruption is the biggest problem the commercial world has. Now, it seems, it spills over into sports, too. The media are littered with warnings of the ages at which young people may or may not see what is on offer. The internet is full of corrupt stories and depictions. Churches stand convicted of soul-wrenching behaviour with children. Where else is it to go? Has shame gone out of the window forever?

Are our creative talents so poor that we must resort to ever increasing noise and disgust to attract attention? Can we only enjoy a terrible storm that decapitates people but never a gentle breeze that touches our cheek and make us think beyond self?

Is nothing beautiful ever to be created again?

Man’s technological brilliance has outstripped his moral ability to handle it. If we are not wary our move into the Innovation Age will be bereft of ways to enhance our spirit by creating urban experiences to match the enchantment and wisdom of the countryside.

We cannot change the course of progress, nor would we want to. Longevity, immortality, virtual life, worlds beyond what we can even imagine, beckon. They are to be explored and enjoyed.

But if the human spirit is not nourished by creative acts that enhance our dignity, the race will turn into something that makes the dinosaurs seem wise. If we cannot engage in sports without corrupting them and their participants we shall lose all sense of mankind’s purpose and style and revert to monsters.

A simple but good start would be for adult role models to be better examples for those who look to them for guidance on how to handle the future.

Each one of us is a Mentor, whether we like it or not.

Click to listen to the audio version of this Daily Paradox.

The best way to find out if you can trust someone is to trust them. Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway was right. There are many ways to fool people into thinking you are trustworthy and, in fact, most people are – over some things and when they are getting what they want. That trustworthiness evaporates very quickly when people lose confidence or respect – or simply become greedy and selfish.

How does a leader create trust?

By hearing what the led are saying, by asking them sensible questions that show concern and interest, by being demonstrably fair and by doing what s/he says they will do. These four elements are hearing, asking, evaluating and performing. The easiest of them is the last, the most difficult, the first.

We do not now talk of listening any more than we call education, teaching. It is easy to teach, but more difficult to educate; easy to listen but hard to hear because hearing another person is not merely getting the gist of what they are saying. It involves reaching to understand why they are saying it, what is making them say it the way they are saying it and what has caused them to choose this time to say it. Active listening involves questions and skilful observation.

The art of asking questions is knowing when to encourage by using signals that you would like the speaker to go further into what they are already pursuing and when to guide them onto another, more productive, line. Good questioning can be taught and when practiced consistently changes relationships significantly for the better.

Evaluating correctly is the basis of fairness. When other people think something is fair you will regard it as generous. That may be because they are greedy or because their expectations and yours differ. This dilemma is solved by consistency. As we all know, in raising children, being consistent is the key to avoid spoiling; same with adults.

Using the trust you have won with others requires congruent behaviour. Words and actions must be the same. True for handling children, it is equally important in dealing with adults. People think that children like surprises and, of course, they enjoy an unexpected day off or a visit they had not anticipated. In practice, however, nobody likes surprises, not even the good ones. By definition they are behaviour that is out of character and unpredictable and all such behaviour is somewhat threatening.

Maintaining the trust you have won requires congruent behaviour, consistency, and strength. The strength is of the confident sort, not the bullying kind. It is judged as the difference between assertiveness, essential for all management, and aggressiveness, which is just a demonstration of weakness.

When a boss combines the confidence of decisiveness and the humility of recognizing the credit that is due to others s/he has achieved the pinnacle of leadership.

Click to listen to the audio version of this Daily Paradox.

Every transaction between people is based on trust. However tightly the contract is drawn, whatever legal redress is available if it’s broken, the successful outcome of every transaction depends on trust. Con-artists depend on the trust expectations of those they dupe. Children grow up learning to trust – and when to be wary. Lovers trust but often do not realise the other’s expectations. Trust is the foundation of society.

We believe others when they say what we want to hear; we believe them when they use convincing words, when their attitude towards us is conciliatory, when the stature they exude gives us confidence that they know what they are talking about. We want to be able to trust our leaders because to some extent they can make or break our future. They want us to believe them because that is how they derive the power to make their promises possibly come true.

Did the speech by the President of the United States to the British Parliament yesterday engender trust? What did you take away from listening to it that gave you greater confidence in the decisions of the US for your future and the safety of the world? Each of us will have our own views ranging from belief to cynicism, from hope to despair. There were two points about which my trust in US policy strengthened.

NATO has played an effective part in Western defence since WWII. There have been signs that some people think it might have outlived its purpose – there is, after all, no longer any cold war, at least not officially. I believe the President’s intention to maintain NATO notwithstanding its partiality and potentially divisive nature is correct. The first duty of Government is to secure the lives of the governed.

The rise of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) has led many to predict that the West is in terminal decline. Relatively, the power of the West must decline as the emerging nations flourish – that is inevitable. But absolute decline is not the same as relative decline. The world’s economy is not a zero-sum game as the new sources of wealth are ably demonstrating.

When the President says that the rise of the BRICS does not mean inevitable decline of the OAKS (Old American & Kingdom Societies) I believe him. A good house needs both clay and timber. A good world needs both BRICS and OAKS. I trust this President when he says that he wants America to lead the new collaboration to make the world sturdy and durable.

Leadership is not just about great speeches. It is about helping people to understand what is best for them and then letting them behave accordingly. “Trust me, I’m a leader,” no longer works. Today’s leader has to encourage people to trust themselves because self-trust is the foundation all trust and trust, as I said at the outset, is the foundation of society.

Tomorrow I will consider how you get, use and keep trust. And I trust you will be joining me.

Good morning.

Click to listen to the audio version of this Daily Paradox.

Robots in a test in Reading, England have achieved 25% in being able to deceive humans into believing that they are themselves human. Professor Kevin Warwick at Reading University sums it up like this:

Alan Turing in 1950 set out the requirement that you would need at least 30% of interrogators to think that the machine was human for the machine to have passed the Turing Test. So what we’ve got today, the best machine, has got 25% of interrogators thinking it was a human – so we haven’t quite got to a machine passing the Turing Test.

Eliza and I spent time with Professor Warwick a while back and were deeply impressed by the huge strides robots had made in the last few years. An article I produced after that meeting is available to anyone who would like it.

Robots are now an increasing part of life in many activities. They are being built to be carers in hospitals and homes. They will perform certain surgical operations in the fairly near future. The line between the highly sophisticated computer programme and the robot is becoming blurred. Aircraft are increasingly controlled by their computers with potential over-rides from controllers on the ground. Car design is moving swiftly towards machine doing some of the thinking formerly left to the driver.

Developing thinking robots is not unlike bringing up children but with fewer tantrums. The mechanicals are relatively easy to define and implant. The moral choices are more difficult. This will increasingly become apparent as robot development strides ahead. The problem can be summed up as rules versus reason.

One of today’s difficulties with raising children is that we have tried to implant freedom into the human mind. For freedom to work in a socially acceptable way the possessor of it must have clear moral guidelines which fall short of, well, robotic behaviour.

The champions of acceptable moral behaviour and the people who used to at least try to be role models have both largely failed us, the former because they have not kept up with the issues over which moral choices have to be made, the latter because a celebrity culture has left us thinking that display is more important than dignity.

Codes of ethics abound but they all miss the point that a creative, developing world needs some chaos as well as some order. In programming our robots with their moral standards let us hope that we can teach them the difference between constructive and destructive chaos.

It’s the only way we will harness the massive creative powers we now have becoming available for mankind’s benefit.

Click to listen to the audio version of this Daily Paradox.

Increasing evidence of climate change in the form of a devastating tornado in Missouri demonstrates vividly the still uncalculated cost of protection we must now consider if we are to save lives and property as the weather worsens. No amount of successful forecasting can avoid the destruction that new storm patterns are creating, even if such predictions can potentially save lives.

Steps to calm the planet are so overdue that already the cost of doing so is mounting beyond what we ever thought would be necessary. We need to calculate the likely cost of not spending enough, both now and some years ahead.

It is already recognised that lack of drinking water is fast becoming a major issue but the soaring prices of commodities, even if they turn out to be the bubble many think, on top of climate damage repair bills, must make a review of how to deal with the somewhat alarming scenario more urgent than our current efforts will satisfy.

New forms of temporary shelter for those who lose their houses; easily transportable means to make un-potable water fit for drinking; stable food supplies for emergencies; medicines without delay, all need more systematic planning and funding if the weight of demand for relief is not to overwhelm existing resources.

Systems do not of themselves provide solutions, sometimes even merely adding to the bureaucracy and delaying access, but they can make resources more easily available. Great logistical advances are possible with new computer programmes and power. Similar computing wizardry should enable faster response when disaster looms.

The difficulty is that politically changing the world’s preparedness for rough weather is not attractive. The costs are short term, the benefits longer term. Most politicians are predisposed to short term returns on their legislation and spending because their KPI is up so quickly. This can only be countered when their constituents exert the pressure of opinion on parliaments and this is now best done by the internet social media.

We may not like the idea of lobbying. Indeed, many will abdicate their responsibility and say it is not their duty. But unless each individual makes his or her voice heard the swift decline in the planet’s viability will continue. Events like those in Missouri should spur us to greater efforts.

The looming scenario is one we do not want.

Click to listen to the audio version of this Daily Paradox.

President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are both highly intelligent and distinguished politicians. Both have considerable experience of the Israeli question; both know that the solution to the problem involves avoiding statements that raise expectations and tensions to a point where peace becomes impossible without a change of cast. Neither wants to lose his job.

In spite of this we had the ungainly sight a few days ago of the President insisting on boundaries for Israel that he knows are indefensible and therefore unacceptable and of the Israeli Prime Minister lecturing the President in front of the cameras and the world. The President’s constituency does not allow him to make statements of entrenchment without a subsequent politically weakening withdrawal; Israel does not have so many friends that it can afford to alienate its major supporter, the United States.

So what went wrong that led to a humiliating re-defining of what he said from the President and a considerable weakening of Netanyahu’s support elsewhere in the world? Were both men playing to the wrong gallery? Did the agendas get confused? Was the sheer pressure of the situation too much for them?

I suspect none of these things. The two know each other well. It seems that they don’t have a natural ability to communicate easily. My guess is that each misjudged the situation of the other and both failed to do the preparatory ground-clearing before their confrontation became public and apparently intransigent.

If my suspicion is right it is a classic case of them not understanding that their IQs and EQs, which must be considerable for both men, depend on successful application of the HQ (Handling Quotient). Any decisions about Israel are necessarily short – or, at best, medium – term while the so-called Arab Spring is flexing. Final solutions are still inevitably some way off, much as the President would like to add something permanent to his score board.

In this situation the only way to handle each other is to first privately agree the achievable immediate objectives and take their public stances around those, not around dogmatic and unsustainable positions. Successful negotiation is about the terms on which the negotiation is carried out as much as the eventual outcome of the barter.

Where Presidents and Prime Ministers are concerned the preliminaries to a public meeting are conducted by an army of aides, some of whom must have very red faces today. For the rest of us, not backed by such expertise, it should be a lesson in the importance of the groundwork of what is, and what is not possible before the battle starts. A clear understanding of the area of essential compromise is basic to any solution. Politics is the art of the possible.

In the end we are all politicians of one sort or another.

Click to listen to the audio version of this Daily Paradox.

Our dependence on the internet grows daily. Today we learn that Mac computers, popular partly because they have been targeted by malicious software lessthan PCs, have become victim to a fake security scam. This on the same day that SONY, attempting to recover from their recent internet debacle, has had to withdraw a newly-launched site to allow users to reset their passwords.

It seems the internet is getting more, not less, vulnerable, and that means that we are, too. The advance of cloud computing as now configured appears to do little to reduce the potential incidence of hacking.

So much business, government, information and communication now depends on the net that it seems we need a new approach to its security. Proliferating malicious software, repeated invasion of privacy and high risk to our personal security are good reasons to ask what defenses are being developed to make us safe. It is, after all, a Government’s first duty to protect its citizens. This area of protection seems to be woefully lagging behind the enemy.

Recently I have experimented by alerting companies, including banks, whose logos, styles and systems have been copied extremely effectively to create scams, to attempts to elicit sensitive information. The response has, on the whole, been disappointing. A statement along the lines of “Follow the rules and you’ll probably be OK” is scant comfort when you are already assiduously doing exactly that.

It cannot be beyond the wit of man to protect the internet from attack. I am nottechnical enough to know how it can be done. I do know that if a medical alert as seriousas the internet alert was published resources would quickly be marshaled to maximize protection from the looming threat. Who is marshalling those resources as far as the internet is concerned? Where is the equivalent of the World Health Organisation for internet users?

We need a World Internet Negotiator if we are to WIN the battle against hackers. What is the United Nations doing about that?

It is time we all asked for better protection.

Click to listen to the audio version of this Daily Paradox.

Smoking and promiscuity have much in common. Both deliver instant gratification of certain senses. Both are highly addictive. Both have been judged by society to be a matter of personal choice until others are involved. Both can have dangerous results for those engaging in them. Both are legal with others only when they are statutorily ‘grown up’ and fully consent. Those indulging in either outside the law can have their lives devastated.

There is increasing evidence to support the theory that people of high intelligence and whose jobs and lives are under continuous and significant stress – for whatever reasons – may be subject to greater pressure to indulge in either of these pleasurable but undesirable activities. Others with less pressure may find control easier. As people we can only judge behaviour not motive; as members of society we must judge people both for the protection of our way of life and in order to make decisions about the future roles of those whose behaviour we deplore.

So we have a circular situation. Someone highly intelligent is put into a position of immense pressure affecting the world’s currencies and therefore its whole future. The pressure itself may lead to what to the rest of us is bizarre behaviour. The behaviour implies a lack of control and judgement that potentially disqualifies the person from holding the office – but maybe it was holding the office that precipitated the behaviour in the first place.

It is reasonable to conclude that offices of high pressure are not suitable for those who crack under the strain. Forecasting who is likely to and who is not is a tricky business as anyone who has been on suicide watch can attest. The noisy and demonstrative seldom commit the act; the quiet sadly sometimes do.

We could make a better job of choosing our leaders if we paid attention to their eligibility as role models. A position with authority of any kind over others demands behaviour that is not only legal but that will stand up to public scrutiny. Several world leaders have recently demonstrated – in one case is alleged to have demonstrated -a failure to understand this requirement.

When people come to us for help with their ability to handle others we start by helping them to handle themselves. It is only when they have conquered this that they can hope to be the model who can teach by example, the most effective way of imparting knowledge and wisdom.

Those who cannot master reasonable self-control should avoid high office and we should not be a party to making them bear stress they cannot cope with.

Click to listen to the audio version of this Daily Paradox.

China does not need exploding water melons. The diagnosis that chemicals used to precipitate their growth are the likely cause of the latest ‘poorly made in China’ episode will do nothing to improve the image of the world’s fastest developing economy.

Post WWII Japan, then Hong Kong, then Korea went through the stages of low quality products. All survived, learnt the lesson and their products today are of a generally high standard. However, China is increasingly responsible for producing everything from computers to vegetables so much more cheaply than the rest of the world that they have the price edge. As long as people think something is “cheap” they will buy it. Until they learn that it may kill or harm them.

China has 1.3 billion people, some of whom are desperately poor and some unbelievably rich; it represents a microcosm of the whole world. The rural poor are faced with starvation and loss of drinkable water, causing a migration to the cities at a pace that the government must find almost impossible to handle.

So, on the one hand you have people whose next meal is uncertain. They cannot be blamed for producing to any quality if doing so provides for their families for another week. On the other hand you have a group totally unused to money finding itself with more than it had ever dreamt possible. The problems of the nouveau riche (newly rich) are well documented. Handling money is a better problem than handling starvation, but it is still extremely difficult. Add a culture of corruption so deep that to modify it may take decades and you have the potential for a major disaster.

What is there to see on the bright side?

Thanks to the internet it is now impossible to deny exploding water melons, or any other life or health threatening event. We are warned early. Even the poor in China get to see the internet and while their vision is clouded by imminent necessity they are not stupid. The can learn the lessons of Japan, Hong Kong and Korea very quickly.

Can the rest of us help?

Open analysis of China-made products and published results of it plus a willingness to pay for demonstrably better quality would make the transition from cheap and dangerous to cheap and reliable faster.

Insistence on better quality by promoting longer and more executable warranties made the responsibility of the retailer would be a good start. Good companies like TESCO and many other food retailers already understand their part in quality assurance. Unfortunately hardware and computer software retailers do not. They should be made to. They are our conduit to the manufacturer and their responsibility does not stop at sourcing product. They must be responsible for what they sell us.

We must tell them that. Caveat seller, not caveat emptor.