Know Thyself

The last post was a bit of a confessional one – which still managed to conceal something. What I was really trying to get off my chest was that I have to recognise that I have always been a bit “distant” in my relations with others. Indeed, as a young politician who was quickly given responsibilities, I was seen as a bit arrogant – when that was the last thing I actually felt. It was rather a defence mechanism. Ernest Schumacher (author of "Small is Beautiful" put our usual approach into superb perspective in 1973 when he wrote - 

"There are four sorts of worthwhile learning

· learning about things
- learning about oneself
· learning how others see us
· learning how we see others"

I was slow to learn about myself – let alone the other dimensions. Despite undergoing some sessions of psychotherapy in the late 1980s, I was too much of a “word merchant” to allow mere words to get inside my brain and challenge my being. 

It’s only recently I’ve been willing to be open about that experience all of 30 plus years ago which, at the time, it wasn’t possible to discuss. Philip Toynbee was one of the rare people who had actually written about it – I learned later that Winston Churchill used the euphemism of “black dog” to refer to his episodes. And about the only popular book about the subject was Dorothy Rowe’s Depression – a way out of your prison (1983)

How times have changed – with credit being due to characters such as Stephen Fry and Alasdair Campbell who were amongst the first to go public and to encourage others to be open about a condition which touches most of us at some time in our lives. 

One of my favourite books is Robin Skynner and John Cleese’s Life – and how to survive it (1993) A therapist and leading British comic have a Socratic dialogue about the initial stages of everyone’s development – as babies weaning ourselves from our mothers, learning about the wider environment and coping with our feelings. The understanding the principles of healthy (family) relationships and then use these to explore the preconditions for healthy organisations and societies: and for leadership viz -
- valuing and respecting others
- ability to communicate
- willingness to wield authority firmly but always for the general welfare and with as much consultation as possible while handing power back when the crisis is over)
- capacity to face reality squarely
- flexibility and willingness to change
- belief in values above and beyond the personal or considerations of party.

It took a massive change of role and circumstances before I came across an early edition of “A Manager’s Guide to Self-Development” by Mike Pedler et al which made me aware of a range of self-evaluation tools such as the Belbin Test of team roles which you can try out on yourself here. When I did it for the first time with my team of the moment, it was quite a revelation. I had assumed that I was a “leader”. What I discovered was that I was a “resource person” ie good at networking and sharing information – which was exactly right. 

Harrison and Bramson’s The Art of Thinking (1982) was also a revelation for me - indicating that people have very different ways of approaching problems and that we will operate better in teams if we understand (a) what our own style is and (b) that others think in different ways. The authors suggest we have 5 styles – “synthetist”, “pragmatist”, “idealist”, “realist” and “analyst” and, of course, combinations thereof. I regret now that I was such a late learner - the question I now have is how people can avoid my fate. Is it enough that there are so many books around for people to stumble on? Or should it now be an integral part of undergraduate work? Perhaps it is?

My fellow blogger Dave Pollard has these questions to ask ourselves

Mea Culpa

OK – message received! Readership figures have this month plummeted – despite posts continuing to come in every second day or so. I admit that too many are on the long side. So I will (try to) take a vow of BREVITY. After all, the blog is 12 years old – surely I’ve said most of what I need to? Except it’s not as simple as that – most blogs have a specialist focus, be it economic, political, sociological or cultural and apply that lens to the latest fashion of the day. This blog celebrates the butterfly approach viz it depends on what what catches my fancy – generally a book or article, sometimes an incident, painting or piece of music. And I like to offer excerpts from the books and articles I feel positive about – as distinct from offering opinions. 

It’s time clearly for another of these stock-takings about the blog. When it started – in 2009 – it set out three aims -    

·       “This blog will try to make sense of the organisational endeavours I've been involved in; to see if there are any lessons which can be passed on; to restore a bit of institutional memory and social history (let alone hope).

·       I read a lot and want to pass on the results of this to those who have neither the time nor inclination to read widely.

·       A final motive for the blog is more complicated - and has to do with life and family. What have we done with our life? What is important to us?” 

The first two objectives are still important. After 12 years, it’s fairly obvious from the unfinished nature of my books on administrative reform (“Change for the Better?”) and on social change (“What is to be Done?”) that there’s still work to be done – although I often feel I’m just going round in circles.

And I’m still finding fascinating books and continue to have this urge to share relevant insights with posterity. But I should probably stop imposing these rather forbidding reading lists.

But I have to recognise that the blog has been weak on the final purpose. Indeed a friend once queried the absence of the personal touch – feeling that the tone was too clinical and aseptic. And it’s certainly fair comment that the blog is a bit “scholastic”. A couple of other friends have indeed called me a “scholar” – which I used to take as a compliment. But perhaps they meant “bloodless!?

As I move through my “autumn days” and feel the approach of winter, the “settling of final accounts” (in the spiritual sense) should, certainly, loom larger. Charles Handy is a real inspiration here – someone constantly challenging himself and making fresh choices every decade or so about where to put the energies and skills he’s been endowed with. One of my favourite fellow-bloggers is Canadian Dave Pollard - a few years younger than me - who is constantly offering valuable insights from his life experience. A lot of this touches on inter-personal relations – one of my weak areas. In that spirit let me apply the Johari Window 

	strong                               Known to me                            weak
Strong     Known to others     Weak	Open   “The Arena”	Blind   The “blind corner”
	Hidden  “The Façade”	Unknown

 Our public self is something we try to control – but rarely succeed at. People notice things about us which we ourselves are not necessarily aware of (our blind corners). Friends should be helpful here – but we often resent critical comment and they soon learn to shut up… 

For 20 years I had a nomadic life – living in some ten different countries – generally leader of teams in which I would make a few new friends. Both the contexts and my particular role were very different from those in which I had spent the previous 20 years. But I was very aware of this – even so, it took me almost a decade before I was fully up to speed and confident that my skills were producing results. Those skills were broadly the same mix of political and scholastic I had used in my previous life - but the context was so very different. And my new skill was being sensitive to that and making the appropriate adjustments to the tools I used. 

As a Team Leader, I had, of course, to be sensitive to the strengths and weaknesses of the members of the team – but it’s almost impossible to shake off one’s cultural assumptions and I carried the baggage then of a Brit still proud of what our democratic tradition had given the world (!!!). It's only perhaps in the past decade in Bulgaria and Romania I've really deepened my understanding of cultural contexts - and am still learning..... 

I write in English – but literally a handful of Brits read the blog. Americans are its biggest fans making up 30% of readers (for which many thanks!!) - with Russians, curiously, coming in next at 15% and no other country having more than 5%. But the scale of non-English readership is an additional argument for making the posts shorter. 

And because I have the time to read widely; live on Europe’s edge; and have been out of my home country for more than 30 years, I have perhaps developed a bit of the outsider’s perspective….But I remain painfully aware of my shortcomings in the inter-personal field - I learned so much when I first did the Belbin test.... 

Comment; This is supposed to be a shorter post???? Will I never learn????   

Charles Handy's Inside Organisations - 21 ideas for managers includes the Johari window as one of the ideas. It's a delightful and easy read which I strongly recommend

The Triumph of the Spectacle

The United States of America prides itself on being the “leader of the free world”. In reality it is a deeply sick society whose only freedom is that of abuse (in all the senses of that word) and the multiplicity of perverse ways it chooses to keep itself entertained.

Of course, it has its decent side – but independent voices are increasingly difficult to find. You can find Chomsky on Youtube and in bookshops – but rarely quoted in the media. 

Chris Hedges is a rare voice of sanity whose articles I have been following this year on the brave Scheerpost site. His background is fascinating – a war correspondent who started out with the intention of being a churchman like his father and whose rebellious spirit saw him sacked from The New York Times for his vocal opposition to the Iraq War. He has become a fairly prolific writer – turning out since 2002 almost a book a year. His Wikipedia entry was clearly written by a corporate lobbyist! 

Somewhat belatedly I have been reading his Empire of illusion – the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle (it was published in 2010!) – which is a savage indictment of the depths to which the country has fallen in my lifetime,  

I used to live in a country called America. It was not a perfect country, especially if you were African American or Native American or of Japanese descent in the Second World War. It could be cruel and unjust if you were poor, gay, a woman, or an immigrant, but there was hope it could be better. It was a country I loved and honored.

It paid its workers wages envied around the world. It made sure these workers, thanks to labor unions and champions of the working class in the Democratic Party and the press, had health benefits and pensions. It offered good, public education. It honored basic democratic values and held in regard the rule of law, including international law, and respect for human rights. It had social programs, from Head Start to welfare to Social Security, to take care of the weakest among us, the mentally ill, the elderly, and the destitute. It had a system of government that, however flawed, worked to protect the interests of most of its citizens. It offered the possibility of democratic change. It had a press that was diverse and independent and gave a voice to all segments of society, including those beyond our borders, to impart to us unpleasant truths, to challenge the powerful, to reveal ourselves to ourselves. 

I am not blind to the imperfections of this old America, or the failures to meet these ideals consistently at home and abroad. I spent more than two years living in Roxbury, the inner city in Boston, across the street from a public housing project where I ran a small church as a seminarian at Harvard Divinity School. I saw institutional racism at work. I saw how banks, courts, dysfunctional schools, probation officers, broken homes, drug abuse, crime, and employers all conspired to make sure the poor remained poor. I spent two decades as a foreign correspondent in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans. I saw there the crimes and injustices committed in our name and often with our support, whether during the contra war in Nicaragua or the brutalization of the Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces. We had much to atone for, but still there was also much that was good, decent, and honorable in our country. 

The country I live in today uses the same civic, patriotic, and historical language to describe itself, the same symbols and iconography, the same national myths, but only the shell remains. The America we celebrate is an illusion. America, the country of my birth, the country that formed and shaped me, the country of my father, my father’s father, and his father’s father, stretching back to the generations of my family that were here for the country’s founding, is so diminished as to be unrecognizable. I do not know if this America will return, even as I pray and work and strive for its return. 

The words "consent of the governed" have become an empty phrase. Our textbooks on political science and economics are obsolete. Our nation has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations, and a narrow, selfish, political, and economic elite, a small and privileged group that governs, and often steals, on behalf of moneyed interests. This elite, in the name of patriotism and democracy, in the name of all the values that were once part of the American system and defined the Protestant work ethic, has systematically destroyed our manufacturing sector, looted the treasury, corrupted our democracy, and trashed the financial system. During this plundering we remained passive, mesmerized by the enticing shadows on the wall, assured our tickets to success, prosperity, and happiness were waiting around the corner. The government, stripped of any real sovereignty, provides little more than technical expertise for elites and corporations that lack moral restraints and a concept of the common good. America has become a façade. It has become the greatest illusion in a culture of illusions.It represents a power and a democratic ethic it does not possess. 

Hardly surprisingly, the book was largely ignored by the corporate media – with one of the few (Canadian) reviewers lamenting that it didn’t really tell him anything he didn’t already know. But what I did appreciate – in the book’s final chapter – was the tribute to “those who saw it all coming! 

There were some who saw it coming. The political philosophers Sheldon S. Wolin, John Ralston Saul, and Andrew Bacevich, writers such as Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, David Korten, and Naomi Klein, and activists such as Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry, and Ralph Nader warned us about our march of folly. In the immediate years after the Second World War, a previous generation of social critics recognized the destructive potential of the rising corporate state. Books such as David Riesman’s “The Lonely Crowd”, C. Wright Mills’ “The Power Elite”, William H. White’s “The Organization Man”, Seymour Mellman’s “The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline”, Daniel Boorstin’s “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America”, and Reinhold Niebuhr’s “The Irony of American History” have proved to be prophetic. This generation of writers remembered what had been lost. They saw the intrinsic values that were being dismantled. The culture they sought to protect has largely been obliterated. During the descent, our media and universities, extensions of corporate and mass culture, proved intellectually and morally useless. They did not thwart the decay. We failed to heed the wisdom of these critics, embracing instead the idea that all change was a form of progress.

Other interesting titles of his which caught my eye were -

Wages of Rebellion – the moral imperative of revolt (2015); and 

Unspeakable (2016) a collection of interviews

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 

A Little Bit of History

I’m always fascinated by the ebb and flow of fashionable ideas as represented in best-seller lists. And have just been rereading Charles Handy’s The Hungry Spirit – beyond capitalism, a quest for purpose in the modern world – which took some courage to publish in 1997.

This, after all, was Britain’s top management thinker (if not guru) daring to suggest that there was something morally questionable about the economic system - which was then in triumphalist mood after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent implosion of the Soviet Empire 2 years later.

It’s true that the World Bank, for example, had started, with its World Development Report of that same year, to row back the strong anti-State stance it had taken just a few years earlier.

And Handy had impeccable credentials – he had worked for almost two decades years for the oil giant BP. And then moved to help set up the UK’s first School of Management – to prepare for which he took a year out to follow the Master’s programme at the prestigious Sloane School of Management at MIT in the US. Even during this time, he was starting to notice some problems in management practice which were brilliantly dissected in a later book by two highly experienced US managers called “The Puritan Gift” 

I thought it would be useful to try to situate “The Hungry Spirit in the wider context of “best-sellers” of the period. Was its dissenting tone noticed? How did it compare with other management writers such as Stephen Covey and Robert Quinn who also had strong ethical concerns?

Interestingly, the very next year Handy was one of the lead contributors in Rethinking the Future  ed Rowan Gibson (1998) which included chapters from such leaders of management thought as Warren Bennis, Stephen Covey, John Naisbitt, Peter Senge and Lester Thurow – the last of whom had indeed just published “The Future of Capitalism”

At the end of the day, I have to wonder, what impact did such writing actually have? Most of us – after the scandalous immorality of the 2001 Enron scandal followed by the global financial meltdown of 2008 – have become deeply sceptical of the possibilities of reform from within   

I was impressed with what I picked up from my reread of “The Hungry Spirit” – particularly with Handy’s ability to put complex notions into simple words; and to integrate important ideas naturally into the flow of the text.

The book has three sections – the first (“Creaking Capitalism”) deals with the limits of markets; when efficiency is ineffective; and what its good at.

The Second section focuses on the individual (“A Life of our Own”), starting with an analysis of “the age of personal sovereignty” and what he calls “proper selfishness”, exploring the search for meaning and ending with the argument that “I needs to be “we” to be “I”!.

The final section (“The Search for a Decent Society”) follows those – like David Korten, Paul Hirst, Will Hutton, John Kay, Paul Collier, Frederic Laloux and Colin Mayer – who have argued for a “stakeholder” (or more German) concept of the firm

One of the few criticisms I’ve come across of Charles Handy is here. 

As it happens, I keep a (running and annotated) bibliography about the global economic crisis in the annex of one of my draft books which starts in the 1970s; is reasonably up to date; and currently identifies almost 200 books. That may sound a lot but that’s only about 4 a year – which means I have been a bit selective! To make it easier, I’ve focused on the period between 1995 and 2003.

It gives a fascinating picture – although I’ve noticed it doesn’t cover the books directly aimed at business leaders! 

I’ll be interested in what my readers make of it. One of the questions I’m certainly left with is that all this critical writing and exhortation doesn’t seem to have had much effect. 

Key Texts for 1995-2003

- When Corporations Rule the World; David Korten (1995) the definitive critique of the modern American company which can be read in full here.

- “Everything for Sale – the virtues and limits of markets” – Robert Kuttner (1996)

- Short Circuit – strengthening local economies in an unstable world” - Ronald Douthwaite (1996). Very practical – but also inspirational….25 years on, it hasn’t really been bettered

- “The Future of Capitalism – how today’s economic forced shape tomorrow’s world” – Lester Thurow (1996). Thurow is another of these rare characters who can sniff changes in the wind

- The Hungry Spirit – beyond capitalism, a quest for purpose in the modern world; Charles Handy (1997) An honest man, famed as a management guru, expresses his moral outrage at the contemporary system

- Political Economy of Modern Capitalism – mapping convergence and diversity ed Colin Crouch and Wolfgang Streeck (1997) an elegant, if academic, treatment of the varieties and commonalities of the beast covering all European countries and the USA – with contributions not only from the editors but Philip Cerny, Ronald Dore, Susan Strange. One of the most serious collections

- Stakeholder Capitalism; ed Kelly and A Gamble (1997). For a brief moment in the mid 90s, the concept of “stakeholding” caught the imagination of UK leftists before Tony Blair slammed the door shut on it.

- From Statism to Pluralism – democracy, civil society and global politics; Paul Hirst (1997) One of the most articulate exponents of the idea of stakeholding 

- From Mondragon to America: Experiments in Community Economic Development; Greg MacLeod (1997). A rare and very useful-looking exposition.

- The Ownership Solution- toward a shared capitalism for the 21st Century; Jeff Gates (1998) This is an important book of almost 400 pages which, sadly, gets forgotten because its analysis and message is a moderate one. It satisfies neither the extremes of the left nor of the right

- The Trouble With Capitalism – An Enquiry into the Causes of Global Economic Failure; Harry Shutt (1998) A wide-ranging book to help the general reader put contemporary events in a proper historical context - and to challenge what Shutt calls the “organised indifference” which ruling interests try to encourage

- Natural Capitalism – the next industrial revolution; Paul Hawken (1999). A persuasive vision of how green technology could revitalize capitalism….

- The cancer stages of capitalism; John Mc Murtry (1999). A much darker vision….. 

- “The Lugano Report: On Preserving Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century” – Susan George (1999). A satirical piece which forces us to think where present forces are taking us….

- The Great Disruption – human nature and the reconstitution of social order; Francis Fukuyama (1999) An important book which passed me by until recently – it is a critique of the loosening of our social fabric since 1965…..

- Economics and Utopia – why the learning economy is not the end of history; Geoff Hodgson (1999) a clear and tough analysis by a top-class economic historian of why socialism lost its way – and exploration of what it will take for it to restore its energies. Not an easy read!    

- CyberMarx – cyles and circuits of struggle in high technology capitalism; Nick Dyer-Witheford (1999). It may be a PhD thesis – but it’s a great read…..

- The New Spirit of Capitalism; L Boltanski and E Chiapello (1999). Surprising that others have not attempted this critical analysis of managerial texts since they tell us so much about the Zeitgeist…..these are mainly French (and a bit turgid)….The only similar analyses I know are a couple of treatments of managerial gurus by Brits….

- Capitalism and its Economics – a critical History; Douglas Dowd (2000) Very readable bit of economic history – from the 18th century

- Anti-capitalism – theory and practice; Chris Harman (2000) A Trotskyist take….

- Debunking Economics; Steve Keen (2001) a fantastic and systematic taking apart of economists’ pretentious waffle – the first really to challenge the basic structure of economics

- Questions of Business Life; Higginson (2002) A fascinating summary of the various critiques of the economic system written for business leaders by the Dean of a seminary which organised  seminars for them….

- Globalisation and its Discontents; Joseph Stiglitz (2002) is one of the best of its time on the subject - exposing the emptiness of economics orthodoxy….

- The Soul of Capitalism – opening paths to a moral economy; William Greider (2003) covers cooperatives and other options…

Charles Handy - part II

When you get to my age, the urge to look back and take stock is fairly irresistible – what, you ask, has life been for?

David Brooks (in The Road to Character) identified two very different ways we answer that question – what he called “CV and eulogy values” respectively. The latter, the more thoughtful, evoked the values we would like to be remembered for - rather than the more partial CV stance we push at prospective employers….Few writers have given such a profound set of answers to this question than Charles Handy whose dozen or so books – many with “confessional” aspects - are constantly touching on the issue. The last post focused on a 2007 memoir of his which I had pulled out a few days ago from the great library I have in my Transylvanian mountain house.

Thanks to the Internet Archive website, I’m reading a Handy book I’ve never before had the chance to explore - Beyond Certainty – the changing world of organisations, a collection of essays he produced in the late 1980s containing the germs of “The Age of Unreason” (1989) and “The Empty Raincoat – making sense of the future” (1994) 

What exactly is it in Handy’s writing which has so captivated me since I first came across his “Understanding Organisations” almost 50 years ago??

·       Is it his blunt honesty?

·       The elegant and unassuming nature of the uncertainties he expresses?

·       The accidental nature of the life he describes?

·       The turning points he so vividly describes?

·       The clarity and almost spiritual quality of the writing? 

Of course, we are all different in the way we respond to writing – and so much therefore depends on what we grew up on. I’m of the generation raised on the likes of Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Reinhold Niebuhr, Arthur Koestler and EH Carr - with authors such as Ernst Schumacher, Robert Fisk, David Korten and even George Orwell appearing somewhat later

Looking now at Handy’s life, it suddenly becomes very clear to me that the reason his writing makes such an impact is that he was somehow motivated to change his career every decade or so - and therefore falls into the category of those who have crossed critical boundaries and who, as a result, have this capacity to see the world differently from the rest of us.

The boundaries I’m referring to may be geographical, intellectual or class – but somehow, when individuals cross them, they find themselves so profoundly challenged that they both make new connections in their thinking and express themselves with such clarity – perhaps because they have become more sensitive to the complexities of language. It’s the spark of originality 

That’s perhaps why he has the rare knack of anticipating the future – somehow he’s able to peer into the tea-leaves and help us make sense of the new worlds are emerging and to do so in the most crystal-clear and elegant of language. He did this first in The Future of Work (1984) when he coined the phrase “portfolio work” to describe how our careers in future would be a mixture of time-limited projects and also invented (in "The Age of Unreason” 1989) the phrase “shamrock organisations” to describe the form the organisations of the future would take – the (small number) of core workers; those on contract; and part-time workers. His books have had an increasingly chatty approach – helped probably by his experience of doing a lot of “Thought for the Day” pieces for the BBC which taught him, he says, to compress his thoughts into 450 words or so. For a very graceful assessment of Handy’s role and significance see this article 

He’s reached the advanced age of 88 – and I was delighted to discover that he produced what may well be his last book 21 Letters on Life and its Challenges which takes the format of short epistles for his grandchildren - summing up what he feels he’s learned about life. It’s such a delightful read that, for my own benefit, I made a note of the main points of each of the chapters – which you’ll find in the hyperlink in the title above. 

Chapter Title	Key Points
Things Will Be Different	List of some key words whose meanings have changed dramatically in a lifetime (“chip used to be piece of wood or fried potato”) and the scale of change in that period – not least work. We are now “Creatives, Carers or Custodians”
The Human Imperative	But the really big issues and questions don’t change. “Trust but verify”
Life’s Biggest Question	Emerson’s advice – “To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, this is to have succeeded” Doing the best you can with what you’re best at
God or What?	In the new diversity, can we tell right from wrong? Aristotle has twelve virtues:  1) Courage – bravery and the willingness to stand up for what you think is right; 2) Temperance – self-control and restraint;  3) Liberality – kindness, charity and generosity;  4) Magnificence – radiance, joie de vivre;  5) Pride – satisfaction in achievement;  6) Honour – respect, reverence, admiration;  7) Good Temper – equanimity, level-headedness;  8) Friendliness – conviviality and sociability;   9) Truthfulness – straightforwardness, frankness and candour;  10) Wit – sense of humour;  11) Friendship – camaraderie and companionship;  12) Justice – impartiality and fairness
Everyone Can Be Wrong	Closed and open answers; Galileo and Copernicus; Handy’s portfolio/clover idea – and the initial reaction against it
Curiosity Does not Kill the Cat	Travel with curiousity in your backpack
How Clever Are You?	Different ideas on the subject (Howard Gardiner). Schools have a strange notion “I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who” (Kipling).
Life Is a Marathon not a Horse Race	Defects of competition; Be your own master
Who You Are Matters more than What You Do	His wife photographs subjects with 5 objects to illustrate their different identities.  Idea of “street wisdom”
Keep It Small	Edmund Burke’s “small platoons” Robin Dunbar’s organisations of no more than 150 and key groups of 5, 15 and 45. Federal systems best
You Are not a Human Resource	Pity Drucker used the management word – “work should be organised; things managed and people led”
You and Society	Complicated letter – suggesting we have excessive regulations; that rep democracy should be upheld
Life’s Changing Curves	We should start afresh before we are forced to
Enough Is as Good as a Feast	The Bushmen had a 15 hour week – then money poisoned everything (Rousseau) Handy separate NEEDS from WANTS (concept of free work)
It’s the Economy, Stupid	His father’s “stipend”; His wife’ separation of “investment” from “consumption” “Money and fulfilment are uneasy bedfellows”
‘We’ Beats ‘I’ all the Time	If there is a common purpose; Never take friendship for granted
When Two Become One	He confesses to selfishness in how he treated his wife
What You Can’t Count Matters More Than What You Can	“McNamara fallacy” means that much of life gets pushed into 3rd or 4th place.. eg love, hope, kindness, courage, honesty and loyalty
The Last Quarter	future generations can look forward to last 25 years of their life being free of financial worried
You Are Unique	We have 3-5 identities
My Last Words	What he recommends for his grandchildren - Learn a foreign language, a musical instrument, a sport (individual better); write a diary and fall in love

 Some Videos

There are all too few videos of the man. But this is one which starts with an appreciation of Peter Drucker and then makes some great points including the importance of listening to what people say – not least oneself!

And then a more recent one whose sub-titles valiantly try but completely fail to catch what his faint Irish brogue is actually saying.