Our old friend Edward de Bono died on 9th June. There are plenty of obituaries that give dates and times of his many achievements so I shall confine my comments to some of the events that involved us. There were plenty, and they were invariably lively and often challenging. As a thinker you can’t please…
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Cornwall, England, is more celebrated for Rick & Jill Stein’s Seafood Restaurant than for lofty international summits. Indeed, I hope they have checked the nearest runway for its capacity to handle Air Force One, President Biden’s vehicule du jour as he heads for this beautiful British holiday centre. It’s near where I began my farming…
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“Compete when you must; cooperate when you can” is a mantra we hear frequently now. Make no mistake, inter-business cooperation is the most profitable form of business. So much so that there are extensive laws to prevent any cooperation that would disadvantage the consumer. Rigging prices in a market is definitely out. And yet, cooperation…
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Like everyone else during these semi-lockdown days, I paused recently to ask myself what is it about Singapore that attracted me when I first came to live here in 1979, and does it still rate high on the list of reasons that I want to stay. ‘Quality of life’ is an obvious catch-all answer. Order…
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In the galaxy of creative solutions to restricted theatre attendance this must rank high among the successes. Set in Raffles Hotel, Singapore it capitalises on the beauty of the building, on its intriguing history and on the mystery that forever surrounds this icon of Singapore. In your search for the culprit within a story from…
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Face some facts. The pandemic, in one form or another, is likely to go on for a long time. Primary schoolers today will probably be wearing masks, at least from time to time, when they are at university. A disease like Covid is versatile; it will change its infectionality, its morbidity and its composition with…
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If Covid has taught us anything it is that Governments are not Magicians, Science still has a long way to Go and Discipline is not a Tyrant but a Saviour. Of course, we knew all these things before. We’ve just learnt them more vividly. Or have we? We need to answer this question if we…
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There is a surge of need – bordering, for a few, on desperation – for something to believe in that allows us to rationalise whatever our ‘normal’ thinking is, something that will give us hope and guidance, something that says there is more to death than you think, more to life than you are getting.…
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The armed forces are inevitably dedicated to obedience, to doing what ranking officers command and to the harsh reality of conflict and battle. Interestingly, most have changed more over the last decades than businesses in the art of handling human beings. Why? Because they have had to. The intake of recruits, whether compulsory or voluntary,…
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Seeing someone achieve his or her latest ambition is a potential cause of tears for me. Why? Because I think they are going to be happy, to reap success? Perhaps. But maybe also because it is such a relief to me that what we have been working towards together they can now claim as their…
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