Pursuing ones passions

For some time, I’ve been fascinated that my most popular post by far is the one from a year ago entitled "adversarial and consensual systems” which has been viewed almost 600 times without any prompting on my part – 130 of these in the last month.
The post actually gives an account of what I would call the "catholicism" of my approach to life (I don’t understand how this word can also have this meaning of "breadth”) - and the number of times this led me into bipartisan activity which never went down well with my immediate political colleagues.

It’s actually highly ironic that, at age 26, I was elevated by my political colleagues to the post of Secretary of the Labour group on the municipality since my commitment (in both practice and writing) to community development challenged the whole edifice of political parties. Two years later I also took the post of Chairman of the recently established Social Work authority – which allowed me to pursue an agenda of what we now call inclusiveness at both a neighbourhood and town level. I suppose they gave me my head since the energy and openness I showed reflected well on a party which had become somewhat moribund.
I used the experience to found a Local Government Unit in the nearby College where I lectured; wrote papers; and organised workshops about the new promise of corporate management and community development. Quite a recipe! And it positioned me well when a large and powerful Region was created in 1974 covering half of Scotland.
By then, my work had made me an interesting and familiar figure to the councillors who made up the controlling Labour group on the new Region – and I was again selected to act as the Secretary, one of 4 leadership positions. Elections to that position were held every two years – and I managed to hold the post until my resignation 16 or so years later. Again I was given my head on matters of social inclusion (we called it multiple deprivation then) and brought a whole new set of community- and policy-based structures into existence – as well as starting the support for social enterprise (community business as we called it).
Those were the days in which national government largely left us alone in local government – and we were left to blaze trails. Local government since then has become very boring in the UK with municipalities press-ganged to serve the latest central government wheeze.

But the power base of the empires of Education, Roads etc was never threatened by all this activity. And I was too much the loner – working with allies in officialdom, community groups etc, writing papers for national journals rather than spending the necessary time in the smoke-filled rooms with indifferent or hostile colleagues who chaired these sorts of committess and were in cahoots with their Directors. A paper on my website summarises the 16-year experience of developing and managing these policies – and the lessons I found myself drawing in the early 1990s (thanks to a fellowship the Glasgow-based Urban Studies magazing gave me in 1996)

And then, one day in late October 1990, I found myself on the North Sea on a ferry to Copenhagen, beginning a completely new life as a technocratic adviser in central europe – supposed to be helping them build up government systems. It would be nice to say that the commitments and insights of my earlier life have informed my new life of the past 20 years – but this has rarely been the case. Although the early work in central europe was with local government systems, I steadily moved to national government issues – particularly relating to the establishment of a more meritocratic civil service. All the time I was learning as mch as advising – particularly about how other European countries operated (fortunately I had developed good European networks in the 1980s). My great success was in Azerbaijan of all places – in setting up a Civil Service Agency which is still going strong.
But the last 6 years have focussed on training systems and programmes. I don’t pretend to be an expert on this subject – but my background has given me the confidence to challenge some of the sloppy thinking I encounter in this field. Recent blogposts have tried to summarise these thoughts – and I am now trying to integrate these with a paper I wrote in 2008. The results I hope to put on the website soon.

So I have been a very lucky man – free (and paid) to pursue my passions. It’s one of the reasons I feel unable to offer advice to young people. Apart from the fact that these are much more difficult times, I just happened to be in (or manoeuvre myself into) the right place at the right time.

This blog has been a useful focus in the past 2 years for my thoughts and reading. But I have probably reached the point when I need to be more disciplined. One of the blogs I admire posts only every Wednesday – and this is perhaps a format I should be thinking of.

An opportunity to catch up

I will probably be out of access to the internet for the next few days – so please take the opportunity to check back on recent posts – most of which have dealt with the role of training public officials in countries emerging from autocratic rule. Or check the posts from exactly a year ago – for example the one for 10 November 2010 had a section which suggested we allow the wrong sort of people to be honoured and celebrated -

the first twenty years of my life, I focussed on the political – the "what”.

The last 20 years the focus has been on the "how”- on reforming the machinery of government. I’m still interested in the latter but, as the masthead quotation from JR Saul indicates, I think the value of technocrats is overrated and the role of citizens and the maligned politicians has to be asserted. And one of the things wrong with a lot of the reform writing is that it is too abstract. Change is a question of individuals – and we need more of the naming and shaming approach which I used myself for the first time a year ago when I picked out a State Secretary and analysed his (outdated) declaration of interest form which appeared on the Ministry website.

We also need to celebrate more those who are trying to make a positive mark on life – and, as I noted on a recent friend obituary, while they are still alive. One of the reasons I enjoyed Paul Kingsnorth’s book One No; many Yeses on the protests against the iniquities inflicted on the world by multi-national corporations is that it focused on the individuals in different parts of the world who are risking their lives and livelihoods to protest against the destruction being wrought by people running these organisations.

Business has been using the journal “portrait” for a long time to glorify their class – and most management books are little else than hero creation and worship. Only women like Rosabeth Kantor (with her marvellously mocking ten-rules-for-stifling-innovation and Shoshana Zuboff, it seems, are capable of resisting this inclination of business writers! But you don’t find such positive write-up of reformers – presumably because media ownership is so neo-liberal. And the publications of the reform movement tend to concentrate on ideas.
For example, I’ve wanted for some time to say something about one of the people I admire most – a Slovak friend of mine who, as Director of a training centre run on cooperative lines in a village, has utterly transformed an old palace, building up not only the facilities it offers (and the labour force) but commissioning local artists to create glorious murals to remind us of the place’s historical heritage and holding vernissages with painters from central europe, the Balkans, Central Asia etc. Walk into his huge office and he is almost lost amongst the books and paintings which are piled up around his desk. And his house is like a (living) museum – from all the artefacts he has brought back from his vacations throughout the world. He is such a lovely, modest man and I always feel a taste of heaven when I visit him at the Mojmirovce Kastiel.

I was stumped a few months back when I was asked who were the people I admired? Apart from a few inspirational friends such as my Slovak friend, the people I admire are those who have a combination of vision, social justice and communication for example Peter Drucker; Leopold Kohr; George Orwell; JK Galbraith; Ivan Illich; C Wright Mills; Ernst Schumacher. They’re all dead!

And the November 12 post poses four basic questions which are always worth posing and exploring.
So have a good rummage while I'm away......there is some good stuff there....

Leaders of change

New readers should note that this blog is a great resource for those concerned about the apparent collapse of key elements of our core systems – and what we should be doing about it. My blogs rarely comment on the trivia which passes for News these days (although I couldn’t resist the recent grilling of Rupert Murdoch by a UK House of Commons Committee) and try to strike a reasonable tone. They alternate between the professional and political aspects of improving governance (particularly in "transition countries" – a combination which gives these posts a distinctive slant. Most of my posts give direct links to papers which give hard evidence of my points. A bit like Google Scholar, I try to stand on the shoulders of giants. Indeed one of the reasons I keep blogging is that I find it is a great way of organising my reading. Anything which impresses me gets worked in; without the blog I would be wasting time trying to find a paper which I knew said something important. Now all I have to do is punch a keyword into the search engine on the site – and hey presto! The blogs are therefore (I hope) more like perennial flowers which can be enjoyed even if a couple of years old. And I am pleased to see that some of my readers do that without being urged.
Exactly a year ago I had a lament on impotence of democratic politicswhich shows you what I mean.

From October 28, I devoted a series of posts to the issue of the role of training in improving the performance of state bodies in ex-communist countries. I was pretty critical – particularly of the EC funding strategy.
The second post in the series summarised my critique and suggested three paths which those in charge of such training in these countries needed to take to make an impact -

1. to signal that the development of state capacity needs to be taken more seriously – by officials, politicians and academics – and to give practical examples of what this means
2. to try to shine some light on the role of training in individual learning and organisational development – to show both the potential of and limits on training and to have the courage to spell out the preconditions for training which actually helps improve the performance of state bodies
3. to encourage training institutes to cooperate more with change agents in the system - and with academia

Part V tried to put us in the shoes of a Director of the National Institute of training of public servants in these countries – facing incredible constraints - and to expand on these three points. Part VII switched the focus back to the funders and tried to reduce the critique to a few bullet points - "Wrong focus; wrong theory"; "context" and "leadership" and then went on to give an illustration of the sort of cooperation which might pay dividends for a Director of a Training Institute.
A final post backtracked a bit to ask what we actually know about the process of developing the administrative capacity which I had made the core of my argument.
It also noted that I should now explore why on earth anyone facing the sort of political and budgetary constraints which exist in the Balkan countries (widely defined) should ever wish to put her head over the parapet and "think big and reach out” as I had earlier suggested . So here goes……

I did make the point very strongly in the posts that each country has to make its own way – each context is very different and requires something which resonates with its key actors. Locals who bring foreign experience (like most think-tankers) are generally just trying to make a name for themselves as can be seen in this (otherwise interesting) book of case studies from the countries which were in the more direct influence of the Soviet Union.
But I am who I am am; my context (at least for the first 25 years of my working life) was the strong bureaucratic system of Scottish local government – which owned the vast proportion of the housing and transport system. I challenged this system – before Margaret Thatcher appeared on the scene – but from a new left and participative rather than privatising perspective.
And I had a lot of allies – first in men and women (more the latter) who worked in impossible circumstances of low income and insecurity – but who had the guts and energy to try to make a better lives for those around them. And, secondly, in a few officials who realised that if they did not use their position, skills and knowledge to try to make things better, then we would soon hit rock bottom. Mark Moore tried to legitimise the work of such committed officials in his 1995 Public Value book.

It is extraordinary people who make things change – sometimes, of course, for the worse. We have been brainwashed in the past 2 decades to believe that change was always for the better – the default option in the dreadful language. I linked yesterday to a Monbiot article which quoted from an important recent book identifying the psychotic element in so many corporate leaders – which has been a theme since Alaister Mant’s Leaders We Deserve. Malcolm Gladwell shows that even the recently deceased and highly regarded Steve Jobs had many elements of dysfunctionality in his pursuit of perfection.
And psychotic management seems to be in an even healthier state in ex-communist countries – although at least one book has tried to celebrate local heroes willing and able to make a difference.

In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell’s famous book The Tipping Point argued that the attainment of the "tipping point" (that transforms a phenomenon into an influential trend) usually requires the intervention of a number of influential types of people - not just a sinle "leader". On the path toward the tipping point, many trends are ushered into popularity by small groups of individuals that can be classified as Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.
Connectors are individuals who have ties in many different realms and act as conduits between them, helping to engender connections, relationships, and “cross-fertilization” that otherwise might not have ever occurred.
Mavens are people who have a strong compulsion to help other consumers by helping them make informed decisions.
Salesmen are people whose unusual charisma allows them to be extremely persuasive in inducing others to take decisions and change their behaviour.
Hopefully my next post will be able to make proper use of all of these references!!

Public Interest - how innocent we were

One of the really difficult things for people of my generation is to come to terms with is how venal our legislative and legal systems have become (the bankers are simply part of a complex equation). The post-war generation to which I belong was brought up with the tenets of liberal democracy - some of which you will find set out at page 6 of this paper of mine. We believed that government was responsive to public concerns; that our civic input (in whatever form - letters; political membership; political involvement and argument - not least as local councillors) would ensure the system operated in the public interest. The evidence we have seen in the last decade has, however, has forced us to the reluctant conclusion that laws are created generally to protect the rich and powerful; and that the judiciary (despite or perhaps because of its claims of impartiality) is in fact not blindfold but highly susceptible to the interests of the rich and powerful. I leave open the question of whether this is a new phenomenon - or simply one which less deferential a more educated and connected society has become aware of.
The examples I quote are first from a bastion of social democratic values (Canada) and then the better-known practitioner of venality and hypocrisy which happens to be its southern neighbour.The first article identifies the huge inequities in how banks are treated – compared with the rest of us.

They are often protected (from foreign competition); subsidized (for example, in the way capital gains tax worked), and bailed out when needed. But what do banks actually do, in return for all that money? What is their actual economic function?
Let’s cut through the mystification of high finance, and ask that simple question: What do banks do? What do bankers actually produce?
The practical answer, in concrete terms, is simple: nothing. They produce nothing.
In that, the banks are different from the real economy, where hard-working people like you and I produce actual, concrete goods and services that are useful.
Banks, and the financial sector more generally, don’t produce goods and services that are useful in their own right. They produce paper. And then they buy and sell paper, for a profit.
Here’s a little economic lesson. You can’t live off paper. You need food, clothing, and shelter to survive – not paper. And since we are human beings, not animals, we need more: we need education, and culture, and recreation, and entertainment, and security, and meaning. Those are the fundamentals of economic life. Not paper.
What is paper actually good for? You can wallpaper your house with it. You can line your birdcage with it. In a pinch, you can wipe your butt with it.
But other than that, paper is just paper. It is not concretely useful in its own right.
How do banks create that paper? Let me put it bluntly again: They create it out of thin air.
It is not an economic exaggeration to state that the private banking system has the power to create money out of thin air.
Not cash. Not currency. Only the government can produce that.
But most money in our economy – over 95% of money in our economy – is not currency. Most money consists of entries in electronic accounts. Savings accounts. Chequing accounts. Lines of credit. Credit card balances. Investment accounts.
In that electronic system, new money is created, not by printing currency, but through creating credit. Every time a bank issues someone a new loan, they are creating new money.
It’s like a big magic machine, creating money out of thin air. And it’s called the private credit system.
One of my favourite economists, John Kenneth Galbraith, put it this way: “The process by which private banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.”
How do they do it? They start out with some capital. Let’s say a billion dollars. Then they lend it out. Then they lend it out again. And again. And again and again, 10 or 20 or 50 times over.
Each new loan, is new money. The economy needs that money, let’s be clear. Without new money, we wouldn’t be able to pay for the stuff we make. So we’d stop making it, and we’d be in a depression.
So the creation of new money (or credit) is as essential function for the whole economy. It’s like a utility. But we’ve outsourced that crucial task to private banks. We’ve given them a legal license to print money – and the freedom and power to do it on their own terms.
Their goal is not providing the economy with a sensible, sustainable supply of the credit we need. Their goal is using their unique power to create money out of thin air, to maximize the profits of the banks, and the wealth of the shareholders.

The second article I owe to a site - Byliner - which offers simply good writing. Out of curiousity I hit this piece which tracks how the American judicial system treated someone outraged with the secretive and iniquitous way heritage land was being sold to commercial gangsters.

WHEN DECHRISTOPHER’S CASE finally went to court last March, 2,000 protesters showed up. So did the Salt Lake police department, federal marshals, and Homeland Security agents. The trial lasted three days, with Judge Benson making a few things clear up front. First, DeChristopher’s attorneys wouldn’t be allowed to use a necessity defense—the argument that he had to disrupt the auction because of his beliefs about climate change (he had successfully bid for about 12 lots of land with no intention of paying). Second, the defense couldn’t bring up the fact that DeChristopher had actually raised money to buy the land; the court’s view was that, by then, the fraud had been committed. Finally, the defense could not inform the jury that past bidders had not been able to pay for their parcels either. Shea and DeChristopher’s other attorney, Ronald Yengich, were left to argue that their client had acted on impulse and hadn’t intended to disrupt the auction. The prosecution didn’t have much trouble refuting this, given DeChristopher’s public statements, and it came as little surprise when, on March 4, DeChristopher was convicted

You can imagine the behind-the-scene discussions which went on to fix that!

Culture corner
And, after these photos of reality, let's have a fix of something more worthwhile in these latest paintings from Its about Time

In praise of mugwumps

I think I stumbled on an important general insight yesterday when I said that most of my written work is done as a non-specialist, an outsider, trying in my writing to tease out some problems I felt about the particular conventional wisdom I was facing in my work.
Heroes generally have heroic aspects – strength, valour. But my two heroes are innocents – Voltaire’s Candide who is increasingly puzzled by the contradiction between the optimistic philosophy of his tutore Dr Pangloss and the viciousness of life he experiences. And the little boy in the Hans Christian Andersen tale who dared to say that the Emperor had no clothes.
And they are my heroes, I have to recognise, because I have always felt a bit puzzled by the certainties of others. Psychologists would doubtless trace this back to my growing up on the class border – living in a mansion (belonging to the Church) in the West End but going to a state school in the East End. Playing the games (rugby, rowing and cricket) of the richer kids – but becoming a young socialist and, later, Labour councillor. And, as a politician, I chose to spend my time in the curious interstices of community groups and street bureaucrats at one level and, as a strategist, with senior bureaucrats at another level. Not for me the world of Party Conferences and ideologues!
By spending time with such different groups (and even trying to bring them together), I realised how deficient our various perceptions were.
And, for 17 years, I tried to reconcile academic work with politics – impossible at the end – but, while in academia, I was ploughing the unfashionable furrow of inter-disciplinary activity (and also trying to bring academics and practitioners together).
In short I have been a full-blown mug-wump (someone on a fence with his mug on one side and wump on other!). Not generally a comfortable position! But I liked the metaphor of a bridge – particularly the Central European joke that, in peacetime, horses shit on them and, in wartime, they are blown up!

From my personal experiences, I developed a theory about politicians and their behaviour by pointing out that they are pulled in four different directions – by their party (or funders in the US case); by their voters (if the system has geographical constituencies); by the government officials who give them the info and advice; and by their own colleagues with whom they spend so much time. Few politicians can put up with the problems of trying to reconcile the very different messages they receive from these 4 worlds and choose to become servants of one of them – hackmen, populists, bureaucrats and ?? respectively.
But I felt that the effective politician is the one who remains open to all the signals – and tries to craft a synthesis.
And I suppose I’ve continued this perspective in my new role of consultant in the last 20 years – both in how I interpret my role and in how I approach the various papers I have written on such various subjects as decentralisation; civil service reform; implementation of the European acquis; training; or capacity development.

Most people write (however unconsciously) as members of a particular group – be it organisational, political or professional. This affects both the language they use – and their perspectives. I have spent time with most groups but don’t belong to any (I recognised in my 2006 paper that it was not unfair to use the word „mercenary” of us) – and can therefore better appreciate both the strengths and weaknesses of the specialists.

At last the temperature shows some sign of getting above 6/7 – here in Sofia only 200 kilometres above the Aegean! What is this? God’s vengeance on Greek debt??

Today's painting is by Russi Ganchev whose work is rather mixed. Occasionally a bit pedestrian,an exhibition I saw in 2008 showed some like the above. I know nothing about him except that he was a landscape painter who was born in 1895 and died in 1965

autobiographies

A cold mist surrounded the house in the early part of the morning – but, as it slowly lifted, a wondrous sight was beholden. Each tree nearby and far was picked out - as in a touched up photograph - covered with iced snow. It was like a phalanx of phantom warriors. Question – what is the collection noun for a group of government leaders? It was none less than Harold McMillan, a Conservative UK Prime Minister in the early 1960s who gave a great answer to this question – “a lack of principals”! And, as the sun’s rays reached the branches, a rustling around the house as the icicles fell from them.

Paul Theroux is a travel writer who apparently arouses some feeling – his observations apparently offend some people. I find this genre an interesting one but personally prefer Colin Thubron. Theroux has reached the age of 69; started to write his autobiography; got to 500 words; and then realised he couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth about himself and found justification for closing his notebook on the venture by looking at the reliability of autobiographies over the centuries. I suppose blogs make a lot of us diarists if not autobiographers these days. One of the papers on my website attempts what one might call an intellectual autobiography - Search for the Holy Grail - Lessons from 40 years of fighting bureaucracy.

Simon Jenkins had a good piece on the issues behing the uncovering of an undercover policeman who was playing a prominent if not agent-provocateur role in the ecology movement.
And I've recently come across a blog - Musings of an amateur trader - which, like Boggy's blog - gives useful mini-lectures and country vignettes. This week on banking.