More Amazon books and the return of our car – which was getting a last fit-out before the big trip from one of these car mechanic treasures you meet only once in a lifetime. He has a garage in Bran and has such a positive and open attitude.
The latest books are challenging – two radical perspectives on organisations - A very short, fairly interesting and reasonably cheap book about studying organisations by Chris Grey and Against Management by Martin Parker. Then Basic Instincts – human nature and the new economics by Pete Lunn.
For light relief I have The Collected Dorothy Parker; and Perry Anderson’s latest collection of political essays - The new old world - which this time deals with Europe.
Twenty years in foreign fields makes you more aware of the assumptions organisational designers make (generally without realising) about the motives of staff and others whose behaviour they are trying to change. For several years, I’ve been playing around with a table to illustrate the point I generally try to make to my local counterparts that change requires using more tools than just diktat or a new law. The latest version is hidden as table 13 in my 2008 paper Learning from Experience. I’ve now extracted it and uploaded it to the website as a separate short paper – entitled Fitting policy tools to motives.
I was delighted to come across a recent paper from the UK National Audit Office which looks in considerable detail at the use and effectiveness of sanctions and rewards The Guardian has published the Labour and Conservative Election Manifestos – with commentary
