How our mind works

It was only yesterday that I noticed that the annotated bibliography on the global economic meltdown which has been included in my draft book doesn’t mention the management books aimed at business leaders – such as Stephen Covey, Charles Handy and Peter Senge.

At one level that seemed sensible since, with the exclusion of Handy book mentioned in the last post, the titles of these books don’t include words such as “crisis” or “capitalism” – preferring phrases such as “The Fifth Discipline”, “Gods of Management” or “The Seven Habits of Really Effective People”.

But, at another level, the books addressed to business leaders deal with the dynamics of social, economic and technological change – and how those in charge of organisations might best respond to/take advantage of these challenges.

So anyone interested in the ups and downs of our economic system should be following these books…But, apart from a few years in the 1990s – when Annotated Bibliography for change agents was drafted - I haven’t done so. My focus, since 2000, has been a narrower economic one

Having realised the gap in my annotated bibliography, I found my next reaction an interesting one. It was to start scribbling a DIAGRAM to identify how ideas circulate and the role of different groups in that process. I had missed the business leaders  - so who else should be in the picture? The result – in    my very bad scribble – I’ve called “IDEAS, INTERESTS AND ACTORS” although I do appreciate that the distinction between “ideas” and “interests” is a fine,   if not false, one.

The following groups can be distinguished –

- The Corporate Elite (Business and Government). These are the big beasts – with the most obvious and selfish “interests” at stake. But they employ others to articulate these interests through stories which are fed to the public via lobbyists and think-tanks in the first instance and, more subtly, via academics and journalists.

- entrepreneurs – of two sorts, doers and idea merchants. This is a neglected group – some of the “doers” eventually join the corporate elite. And some of the “idea merchants” eventually join the intellectual populisers

- Lobbyists – millions of them who do the bidding of the corporate elite

- So called Think-Tanks – those set up in recent decades funded by the corporate elite (by definition) and dancing to their tune. Generally plugged into academia the more useful of whose ideas they leach onto

- Academics; who have increasingly learned to communicate more clea rly

- Intellectual populisers; who have learned the real tricks of story-telling and are loved by publishers

- journalists; who come in all shapes and sizes and on whom the public used to depend as the intermediary between power and themselves                                

- activists; who supply the basic energy for democratic life

- citizens; an increasingly passive group