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We each have values implanted in us when young. Some will be positive, thoughtful infusions, mainly from parents and teachers; others will be casual, accidental, based on observation, environment and example, both good and bad. Werner Herzog’s documentary “Into the abyss” is a study of why three lives were gratuitously lost in order to gain possession of a car. The implications of this film reach beyond the appalling amorality of the case; it has lessons for us all.

The obvious importance of handing on good values is widely accepted if not quite so widely practiced. What those good values are now differs from one societal group to another. Based on old religious tenets they are often selfish. ‘Save your soul’ is unequivocally about me, not about others. The orders to avoid doing certain anti-social actions are clearly sensible but the human race evolved more successfully by doing things rather than by avoiding them.

Religious rules do include behaviour towards others, of course. To that extent they are unquestionably beneficial. Their emphasis on rewards in an unproven after-life and from a faith-based Deity places the purpose of and reasons for good behaviour beyond our intellect thus absolving us from rational analysis and flexibility. Religion is based on dogma, behaviour on necessity.

The values most widely implanted in the young are those of achievement, wealth, security. Each is, when handled properly, of importance. Interestingly, the majority of Mentees who come to me for advice claim to have knowledge of and wisdom about money that turns out to be false on examination. I am constantly surprised by the lack of financial understanding even by those in the money industry. Its failure to reassure borders on the unnerving.

The lack of repentance of the characters in ‘Into the abyss’ is more than the result of a failure to implant values of the rights of others. It is a failure to convey the true sacredness of another person. Whether that sacredness lies in something God given we do not know, though some believe. For the purpose of our earthly society it must rest on our intrinsic value not on a value possibly bestowed from elsewhere.

A purpose for life, rather than a value by which to run it, is happiness. Everyone seeks it in his or her own way. The values handed to the young all imply that exercising those values will lead to happiness not just after we are dead but here on earth. Worldly happiness is both desirable and attainable for many people. All the evidence points to its dependence on largely abandoning our own wishes and seeking to help others fulfill their lives.

Paradoxically that reverberates to our benefit as much as to theirs. But then life is, indeed, a Daily Paradox.

A new religion started today should simply be called “Others”.

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A recent report on the British National Health Service claimed that nurses were not being adequately trained in “caring skills”. It makes me wonder if we think we can train everyone in “skills” in order to produce high service standards. Can we, for example, train strategists in “wisdom skills”? Or politicians in “voter understanding skills”? Will happy marriages be assured by training engaged couples in “affection skills” or even maybe “forbearance skills”?

Don’t get me wrong; I am all for training and I am very much in favour of skills. Anyone brought up in post WWII rural England appreciates skills. Crafts are built on skills and, in my youth, formed the foundation of rural commerce. They were the basis for successful apprenticeship schemes.

And that is where I spot the difference between skill and attitude. The apprentice was not only taught a skill, he was introduced to an attitude that is rare today. When my father retired from the Navy after WWII he bought a cottage in Dorset, England. The cottage had a long, thatched roof which had not been re-thatched since it was built almost one hundred years earlier. The average life of a thatched roof is about sixty years.

We employed a local professional thatcher to re-thatch the roof. His name was Alf Tuck – I knew him as Mr Tuck because I was only thirteen at the time. He and I become good friends during the six weeks he took to re-thatch the cottage.  Every summer for the rest of his life Alf Tuck would come, perhaps once every four or five weeks after a sunny day, and sit on the little rise in front of the cottage to admire his handiwork as the sun was setting, casting a beautiful light on it.

We must have had the same conversation many times. I would say “You like your thatch, Mr Tuck?” He would reply “Best job I ever did”. “Does anyone else know that?” I would ask. “”It doesn’t matter whether they do or not,” was his reply, “I know it.” There is no day of my life since then that I have not asked myself about something that I am doing “Does this reach the Alf Tuck standard?”

Mr Tuck didn’t teach me to thatch. He taught me to try to do everything to my own high standard, not the world’s. He showed me an attitude to work that has stayed with me for nearly seventy years. Nursing and looking after people involves many skills, as does mentoring, and these can certainly be trained.

But caring is not a skill, it is an attitude and the behaviour resulting from it is not procedural but thoughtful.

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You probably don’t have much time for Mr Berlusconi, either. His leadership of Italy has been notable more for its female than its fiscal content. Politics can be a dirty business anyway; peeling away the layers of the European Onion is revealing much of what we suspected lay under the outer surface, eye-watering fraud and stinking incompetence. The European end game has begun.

That is no reason for gratuitous personal insults and rudeness. The first rule for a collapsing marriage is that the parties should be polite to each other. It does not guarantee a revival of love but it does permit rational and decent discourse while the shackles of the union are dismantled. The behaviour of the German Chancellor, of whom I have always been a supporter, and the French President at their recent press conference was a disgrace.

People in top jobs invariably find that the power which they confidently expected to enjoy is pretty ephemeral. That is why so many of them redecorate their offices and buy expensive furniture; there are few other real decisions that they can make. For all the impotence of being boss there is still the influence of example, something our leaders have often appeared to forget in recent years.

Public exposure brings with it responsibility for setting a good example, whether you are a politician, a footballer, head of some international monetary organisation or a celebrity chef. All enjoy the limelight as a consequence of their achievements. All should give back a minimum of politeness and good manners as their contribution to educating and motivating the young, their own included.

The world’s finances are in a mess because the world’s leaders have short-changed their constituents for too long. Recovery from this situation – if possible at all – will only be achieved by rational, civilised behaviour. Not sending up a whole nation with a smirk may seem a very small contribution to this effort but it is an essential one.

Leaders who do not understand the importance of genuine stature are not fit to lead. That stature is achieved not from adoration and obedience but from respect for the personal behaviour of the role model. Sloppy personal behavior has long been thought of as irrelevant to good leadership. Well, it isn’t. It is the manifestation of a right to tell others how to behave that a leader’s own behaviour, while never expected to be perfect, is considerate and mannered.

Do not smirk over the names of your partners in public or even in private. Who they are personally is less relevant than whom they represent and Italy is and will continue to be a great nation.

Whether Germany and France will be remains to be seen.

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University education has a great impact on students’ lives. Here is my perspective on some areas where university education might be improved:

Projects: The emphasis on projects in my university is currently immense, especially in the engineering faculty where I study. At its core is a useful ideal: emphasis on hands-on work accelerates the learning process.

In my university, however, group meetings are emphasised unduly more than a group’s actual progress. The current structure of assessment pushes students to ‘prove’ that they are working by organizing arbitrary meetings (for example in certain group-work intensive subjects, where weekly meetings are often mandatory). The meetings sometimes seem pointless, the sharing superficial, done more to impress each other rather than to share solutions. Arriving at solutions is not a periodic process – it takes its own time, and the system needs to recognize this.

The other problematic emphasis is on project outcomes, rather than the process of coming up with solutions. This makes students aim lower, attempting trivial, smaller projects, when they could instead achieve a much steeper learning curve by attempting something harder and more significant. There needs to be a way to control the importance of a project’s result. For example, emphasis on the quality and development of ideas is better than an emphasis on getting everything to work. For college subjects, result-mania ends up making students limit their ambitions; students learn much less.

Guiding Principle: This follows from the previous point – what is the purpose of university education? Why does project-based learning seem ‘ideal’? What does doing a project teach you that is the key?

It is the ability of a project to teach us how to learn. I would suggest that this is what university education is for. We hardly ever use the actual formulae that we learn in college once we join the workforce. This does not mean that knowledge is unimportant. However, each job in our specialized world requires us to acquire the specific skills. This means that success today is based more on our ability to learn than on knowledge alone.

If this guiding principle is accepted, many features of university can be re-assessed. For example, we may question the usefulness of lectures for large classes. The lecturer stands at some distance and delivers his material to us, without us using any muscles apart from the arduous walk to the lecture hall. A smaller set-up, with a more interactive, you-find-the-answer approach to learning may be more effective.

Similarly, what purpose do ‘lecture notes’ serve? Because the immensity of a subject is narrowed by structured lecture notes, we are sending the wrong message to students: instead of saying that the field of study is huge and they should explore it, we are saying ‘here is the formula, learn it’. A more fluid approach, using textbooks and online resources – which are conveniently available, yet painfully underused in my university – would be excellent.

I am sure that if there were to be an exchange with students on this topic, further pointers would arise. This is a great time for universities to tap on students’ thoughts and bring changes – especially when new residential colleges are promising to alter the landscape of many universities, including mine.

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In a recent interview on CNBC television Warren Buffet challenged the American people to take steps to force Congress to deal more realistically with the spiraling national debt. His remarks were specific to Congress. I paraphrase them below because they apply to politicians all over the world, not just in USA.

Warren Buffet suggests that the deficit would be speedily ended if sitting members of parliament became ineligible for election if the deficit exceeded 3% of Gross Domestic Product. He pointed out that the right of 18 year olds to vote took only 11 weeks to be ratified in USA because the people demanded it. Moreover, 7 of 27 amendments to the constitution took less than a year to become law – again, due to popular demand.

His suggestion is that politicians should serve as a matter of honour, not for money. To make this clear all benefits provided only for politicians and not for other citizens should be removed. The people, he points out, did not vote for them, only the politicians themselves did. Politicians should experience the same benefits and privileges as those they represent, and no more.

They should be subject to the same laws as everyone else. Their pay should not be voted by them but should rise by 3% or the amount by which the Consumer Price Index rises – whichever is the lower. Democracy, he concludes, involves citizen legislators, not career politicians.

Warren Buffet asked each of his listeners to write to twenty others encouraging them to help build a tsunami of correspondence to their representatives making these points. The Daily Paradox will never send a chain letter but I do think that Mr Buffet has a point. Unless the ordinary citizens are prepared to make the noise that democracy allows them to make nothing will be done. Despair about the futility of demanding attention from our legislators is not how great nations were born. It may be how they will die.

My commitment that The Daily Paradox will never be involved in a chain letter is absolute. However, let us not allow this rule to tyrannize us to the point of inaction http://www.terrificmentors.com/2011/10/the-tyranny-of-rules/. A gentle nudge would take little effort, cost nothing and just might produce some result? http://www.terrificmentors.com/2011/10/nudge-and-shove/

Cynicism is the response of the weak to a powerful idea – so obviously I fear no cynicism about these ideas from Daily Paradox readers.

May I take that as a ‘yes’?

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Two months short of his 101^st birthday our old friend Edmundo Ros has died. Officially he retired in 1975 but he immediately set about being fully active again. On reaching 100 he declared that it was finally time to take it easy. Those of my age must have frequently danced the rumba to his band. Like “They’ve got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil” his tunes were catchy and easily remembered. In moments of extreme elation I still sing them myself today.

What is it that keeps people going so energetically for so long? Continuing to work, we now know, is one important ingredient; it helps the mind to remember and calculate – two key factors in staying lively. Of course, it does not stop the encroachment of dementia or Alzheimer ’s disease but there is evidence that it slows the progress of these conditions.

Activity alone is not enough. Physical exercise is excellent, of course, and the interaction that a round of golf or a game of tennis involves is stimulating. Meeting up with friends at any time, if you can talk about more than your latest or next operation, is good, too. The secret of a lively old age, however, is joy in the work and play that you undertake.

Of all the benefits that age brings appreciation of the sheer fun of the world and all it offers must be the greatest. Of course, a good grumble about everything going to pot is de rigueur but knowledge that the journey is finite and the end of the line not too far off gives you an opportunity to savor, perhaps even more, the things that bring fulfillment. If, like Edmundo Ros, you share this with someone you love you are doubly blessed.

Edmundo played his music with gusto. Every evening at his club you would see him exuding joy and laughter that came from the belly, not just from the intellect. No matter which new celebs turned up, nor what songs entered the repertoire, Edmundo was there maxing out until the small hours. When members of the Royal Family visited they were treated politely as just another customer. The evening was their own, not the public’s.

One of the funniest of his songs was Bongo, bongo, bongo. It went:

Bongo, bongo, bongo, I don’t want to leave the Congo,

oh no, no, no, no, no

Bingle, bangle, bungle, I’m so happy in the jungle

I refuse to go

Thank you, Edmundo, and bless you. Enjoy your jungle while we do our best to enjoy ours with your vivacity and sparkle.

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In his inaugural address on 4^th March 1933 Franklin D Roosevelt said “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. America was right at the depth of the depression. In his campaign for the Presidency against Hoover, Roosevelt had said little of how he was to restore work to the unemployed, wealth to the bankrupt, food to the starving. His inaugural address is worth reading – it might have been written for the world today instead of the USA eighty years ago.

More people than ever before have come to me fearful of what is happening to the planet and its financial, political, religious, ecological and educational mismanagement. Normally fear precipitates fight or flight; today, in many cases, it is causing paralysis. The current fear is not just of making a wrong decision. Once grown up, we all know the price of living is making mistakes. For many that is the first adult education they get.

Today’s fear seems more about the consequences of rejection and its attendant damage to self-image. It is almost as though we must extrapolate our wounds before we try to mend them, a gruesome version of the excessive naval-gazing that is so popular. The resultant inability to decide and act leaves us with the job of sweeping our problems under the carpet, avoiding reminders of the fact that sooner or later we must deal not only with the difficulty but with ourselves.

The reluctance to face fear extends to being unwilling to seek help. This is a common trait among addicts but in my experience a relatively new aspect of fear. It may be that the world has become too judgmental or inclined to seek reprisals. Perhaps we do not exhibit quite the willingness we once did to devote time to helping. In hospitals it is certainly true that staff members are often too busy to have that comforting – and healing – chat.

All bullies and demons become less when squarely faced. Fear is only a bully in the mind. A logical analysis of the cause, preferably with someone else’s help, will not blow the bully away but will cut him down to a manageable size. Small effort is required to do this but, as with going to the moon, the first step is the hardest. Once taken the rest of the journey is logical and methodical.

Let us hope that those fearing fear will take the first step soon.

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We all want to be masters of our own destiny but we do not live in isolation. Our lives are determined largely by the actions of others. Even so, a measure of control over what we do, where and how we live and our personal behaviour is a clear aim for us all. Society instigates rules to govern some aspects of our lives. These are designed, at least in theory, to maximize societal harmony and minimize personal inconvenience and restriction of freedom.

The concept of this is wholly acceptable. In the beginning we kept to one side of the road to avoid bumping into each other. The rules developed to accommodate fast-moving, potentially lethal cars. Without the rule of the road today the level of carnage would be dramatically worse than it is.

Rules spread. People in positions of power, even quite small amounts of power, find it convenient to shift work and responsibility to others who are unable to refuse it. Necessary and unnecessary rules get mixed up. The syndrome was epitomized for me when I saw this notice in the middle of an empty field. It said only one thing “Do not throw stones at this notice”. So I did.

Today we are overwhelmed by rules many of which are contradictory – by obeying one you break another. That is one reason why we have to be selective about which rules to obey and which to break. There is more to it than that, though. The mathematician George Polya, (1887-1985) said it well:

Pedantry and mastery are opposite attitudes toward rules. To apply a rule to the letter, rigidly, unquestioningly, in cases where it fits and in cases where it does not fit, is pedantry … To apply a rule with natural ease, with judgment, noticing the cases where it fits, and without ever letting the words of the rule obscure the purpose of the action or the opportunities of the situation, is mastery.

Unfortunately it is difficult to practice such commonsense when the law is mostly applied literally and with little reference to justice. It is therefore up to us as individuals to determine which rules apply, when and to what extent.

Bureaucracy is now almost totally out of control. Hundreds of meaningless signatures by people who do not know what they are signing or why, all done on the say so of a professional whose terms and conditions include advance absolution for any possible mishap or mistake on his part are making a mockery of personal responsibility.

While we study the way to reform capitalism, business, democracy, religion and education perhaps we should also take a hard look at the rules that do not seem to make much sense. I for one will pledge my vote to the party that promises to repeal three bits of legislation for every new one it creates.

Perhaps that way we will begin to end the tyranny of rules.

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We all know how to smile – or do we? Think of the smiles you have received today. Most will be smiles of affection or humour, a few may be sarcastic, perhaps the odd one downright cynical. There are smiles of joy and smiles of sorrow, smiles of relief and smiles of anxiety. Every smile tells a story.

Mostly we don’t think about smiling – it comes naturally. So if our mood is suitable for smiling we smile. Some people are natural smilers, some not. If we do not naturally smile a lot can we make ourselves and will it help us or someone else? I was very struck, almost hurt, once when a very great friend said “you laugh a lot but seldom smile”. I had thought I was a smiling kind of chap.

Manipulating our personality may not seem to be a good thing to do. Mentees often say to me “oh, but (behaving like) that is not me”. Obvious phoniness is clearly bad but actually we are all manipulating who we are, all the time. Change some aspect of behaviour and you change who you are. Development is always change, change is manipulation.

Smiling is a habit we always encourage at Terrific Mentors and one of my fellow Mentors, Denise Pang, suggested that I should write about its part in assertiveness. Many of the people we help lack confidence and simply telling them to be more confident is like inviting a non-swimmer to do extra lengths of the pool. You do not conjure confidence from thin air.

So we have pondered the role smiling plays in confidence and concluded that it is part of an assertive aspect of communication, reassuring the listener that what we are saying is both credible and acceptable. Like all communication it is capable of misuse but I assume for the purposes of this discussion that what we have to say is backed by our personal integrity of purpose.

Making a mark today is not easy. So many conversations go over the heads – or, rather, the iPhones – of our audience that we need to learn a new language to impress a point of view, change a decision or simply engage with another. Honeyed words and well-turned phrases are no longer enough. That is why the smile has come into its own; it is assertive, however gently expressed.

If you want proof of this try turning away from someone who is smiling at you. It is difficult to do so. A smile shines into your eyes and heart even if it is not a happy smile. So when you need to emphasise a point, to press home a belief, to convince a sceptic of your views, smile. It will bring you rewards way beyond your immediate purpose.

If you do it often, it will bring you some peace, too. Keep smiling.

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Continuing our contributions from Students and Teachers, Daniela Alina Plewe, Lecturer at the University Scholars Programme at the National University of Singapore offers these thoughts. Daniela teaches  Innovation Management

Evaluating Evaluations

What is the function of an educational system in a society? According to so called institutional economics, schools in the broadest sense guarantee the quality of performance and reduce the risks of failures for those who are certified by them. This is relevant for future employers as well as for society as a whole, structured by division of labor based on reliable and delivering participants. If we subscribe to these goals in this convenient vagueness – then how can we align our education systems towards reaching them?

Universities should be simulations and leave room to counterfactual explorations, apart from the constraints of reality and society in order to explore fruitful alternatives. They should allow curious minds to tackle intellectual and creative risks, both for students and for staff. Do we therefore need strict emphasis on measurements and key performance indicators? Do these guarantee desirable outcomes or suffocate initiatives and explorations? Are we over-obsessed with evaluations instead of devoting energy to progress? Do we have to lecture under the dictate of student feedback, and the imperative of first tier publications for example? (Various scientific communities observe a diminution in the quality of papers, since researchers avoid taking risks of audacious hypotheses in order to safely fulfill their performance indicators.)

Quantitative measures are efficient tools for collating information as in stock prices in order to let market participants bet on them. Are they the most effective tool to communicate pedagogical feedback or predicting someone’s performance – possibly no. Are we overrating their communicative power when we base most of our evaluations on them, gaining a feel-good character but sacrificing core principles of rationality such as the awareness and questioning of theoretical assumptions? Do they really generate the outcomes of comparability (aiming for some sort of “just judgment”) and – even if they do – do we need those actually in this narrow form? Philosophically speaking, no two situations are the same; comparability and predictability are never given. Not all risks can be mitigated. So measuring will not ultimately guarantee quality. Yes, we need codes and shortcuts to evaluate people, and quantitative measures serve well as such. But we should not take them as the “real thing”. Studies have shown that most self made millionaires – if one subscribes to this scale for a moment – were under average performing students.

The obsession with measures bears the danger of motivating people merely extrinsically. Having an answer to the question “what is important?” seems a much more powerful source of motivation than externally defined success criteria. Researchers, if student or staff, should know at anytime, where exactly they are navigating in the overall map of progress. Basics in the meta-discipline of Philosophy of Science reflecting all forms of enquiries may help here. The beauty of this big picture is the key to intrinsic motivation and desirable excellence.