We come across many sorts of people. Some educated, some uncouth, many ‘lost’, all searching for something. And that’s why we help them, because they are searching. Of course, it’s not always easy to tell whether a person is genuinely searching or merely window-shopping. If the latter they sometimes go on to be window-shoppers for…
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The second half of 2019 will be seen as the time of Definitive Awareness of Realtime Climate Crisis (DARCC). In other words this is when everyone on the planet will become truly aware of, and start to take action about, survival. Of course, the second half of that statement is not assured. We do not…
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Trying to take a calm, rational view of the appointment of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister of the UK is calling for effort and emotional control I find difficult at my great age. Mr Johnson wishes to be the saviour of Britain by enacting Brexit. His Churchillian approach suggests that he likes a battle. His…
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‘Can a focus on governance improve performance?’ question in UK Financial Times. CEOs find themselves increasingly in a muddle over their responsibility for the figures (‘bottom line’) and the wider implications of the need for business to address issues other than dividend and share value. On the one hand the media assess them mostly on…
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Surely a society does not get rid of work without finding other jobs or money-earning occupations to employ the people being thrown out? Well, it is exactly what we are doing worldwide in the interests of efficiency. accuracy and economy. As they say, Robots don’t need weekends off and Artificial Intelligence doesn’t sleep. Successful capitalism…
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Everyone wants power. Control of other people, of resources, of night and day. They now say that Canute wasn’t trying to stop the tide coming in, merely demonstrating to his citizens that he didn’t have the power to do so. Interesting that the story morphed into one of an apparent demonstration of power when, in…
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Work consists of the organisation you work for, your department / unit, your boss(es), things you have to do because the job description says so, things you’d like to do because they interest you, people you work with and people who work for you. If you hate any of these things you risk being unhappy.…
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Politics, it used to be said, is the Art of the Possible. I never quite knew what it meant, something along the lines of ‘politicians have rather limited power’, I think. That would certainly justify it today. The political world is full of eminent people who know – at least vaguely – what is going…
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The two contenders for the role of Prime Minister in the UK have now had most of their self-promoting rallies and the free television time allotted to demonstrate their wares. Martin Wolf, in yet another lucid piece in the Financial Times, has written the saddest article I have read about Britain in my 87 years.…
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Over the last one thousand years – longer, if you like, but reasonably a thousand – a Treaty was cobbled together. Its creation was a complex, onerous task, one that involved disagreements, fights, wars, one that counted bloodshed among its process and tears in its making. Trial and error were its parents, hope and fear…
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