“Brevity is the Soul of Wit”

Yes I know, these last 2 posts have been long and complex - but that seems to have become the hallmark of this blog. 

I’m surprised – if not slightly disappointed - that no one has told me to try to keep things shorter and simpler! Particularly when I’ve had the cheek to complain about the verbosity of others.

Long articles are, of course, easier to write than short ones – most people write not to convey meaning to others but to help them clarify their own confused thinking….And I;m no exception. That’s indeed why I have the EM Foster quote on my masthead –

How can I know what I think unless I see what I write

And it is indeed one of the reasons I continue this blog – I’ll be mid-way through writing a sentence and suddenly realise that I did not properly understood the issue I had been all too confident about in my mind. So even the first draft is the result of several rewrites to get the right words to convey the meaning I want to give to an argument….
At that stage, of course, I should reread not just to see if it makes sense – but to see if the material could be shortened. It was Alexander Pope apparently whose 19^th century poem went –

Words are like leaves, and where they most abound

Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found

But I have been reluctant to cut because I know I will use a lot of the material later for one of the dozen or so E-books you can find in the top-right corner of the blog. The blog gives me the raw material which I then work on and recraft for these books. The blog is simply the means to this wider end

But that’s not really an excuse – since I have a Word file with all of this year’s posts which I often use for subsequent editing. And, indeed, I am rarely happy with the initial post I hoist on the blog - and will generally worry away at it and transpose amended text onto the blog for at least the following 24 hours…The last post got this treatment with not only clarifications but an introductory summary and reading list being added – resulting of course in an even longer post!!

That’s why I inserted at the end of the post a heading – “Bottom Line” – which at least tries to offer the reader a brief “takeaway” message…..  When I managed training programmes, I would remind everyone of the classic 3 step advice for effective presentations –

- Tell them what you are about to say

- Tell them

- Tell them what you’ve told them

Except that there’s too much telling there – effective training is more interactive

Bottom Line

Some 2 years ago I started to use tables to make my thoughts more pithy and accessible – you can find one result in my book How did Admin Reform get to be so sexy?

I will now try to make my posts shorter….indeed I’m even considering opening a Twitter account to link to particular posts as part of a wider attempt to increase the blog’s profile. I realise that the Twitter universe is generally an unpleasant one but it is perhaps worth an experiment?

In Praise of the Butterfly

How can I tell what I think, unless I see what I write?

EM Foster (1927)

Most serious blogs I glance at have a theme – be it British literature; Marxist Economics; paintings; Brexit; French politics; policy analysis; left politics or…Scottish mountains - which the authors stick to fairly religiously with the only relief being the occasional bit of music…(eg Boffy’s Blog; or All That’s Solid)

One of the distinctive things about this blog, however, is its “butterfly approach” to subjects…..That’s usually a derogatory term – used to indicate a shallow person who wanders from subject to subject. It’s true that I have a fixation about strange things such as democracy, government policy-making and institutions, turgid academic writing…. but – like a butterfly – I alight wherever my senses are attracted by a book cover; striking painting; a wine etiquette; a piece of music; or the ambiance of a town or encounter…..        

After all, the blog started as I knew I was phasing myself out of the job market……but conscious of the unusual variety of roles and places I’ve been lucky enough to work in.

I was first elected to political office when I was pretty young; and focused my energies respectively on community action; municipal corporate management and multiple deprivation in the 70 and 80s; and “institutional development” in ex-communist countries in the period after 1990. 

I remember, for example, going to the 2 Universities in Glasgow in the mid 70s and challenging them to produce any research which could help us - in the newly established Strathclyde Region – establish some coherent policies on deprivation…..Result? Zilch

Each of these issues now has a huge literature - but, when I came to them, it was difficult to find reading material. For example Marris and Rein's Dilemmas of Social Reform (1967) and Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals (1970) were the bibles in the early days of community action and deprivation strategies; Donald Schon's Beyond the Stable State (1971) for organisational studies; 
Linz and Stepan's Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (1996) and Elster and Offe's Rebuilding the Ship at Sea - Institutional Design in post-communist Countries (1997) were subsequently the bibles for transitilogy.....  

I had started at an early age this rather odd habit of writing (and publishing) papers and article trying to make sense of the experience – which I have continued for coming up for half a century. 

The blog has been my channel for my thoughts about these issues – talking with other people can often box you into a corner (particularly in Gallic cultures!) but writing forces you to pose questions about what you thought you knew. That’s why I use so often the saying about the “best way to understand an issue is to write a book about it”….and why I love the EM Foster quote which starts this post      

The most interesting question is not whether this blog will continue…..It will (Inshallah!!)!

The most interesting question is whether its focus should change – and if so, in what way?

Its three aims still seem to stand – but perhaps could do with some slight “tweaks” – eg

·         I am perhaps using posts even more deliberately these days as a means of getting inspiration to help me express better my thoughts on reform and social change issues….When I click open text I have been working on for some time, my creativity tends to freeze – but when I move my mind to the blog (or a blank piece of paper) the words come together to form a new perspective……

·         The world seems confronted with new problems which apparently require new thinking…….and make obsolete writings before (say) 1990?…Because I’ve kept a good record of my wide reading since 1960, I would dispute this and have therefore become more conscious of the importance of my role in giving annotated reading lists (and, even more passionately about the need for clarity of expression!!)

·         As I move through my “autumn days” and feel the approach of winter, the “settling of final accounts” (in the spiritual sense) becomes perhaps a more dominant theme 

Last year I wrote about my mother’s little “commonplace book” which we found amongst her possessions. It’s odd that, with the onset of the new technology, the idea of a commonplace book has not become more popular….one person’s record of favourite sayings of sages over the ages…….

Perhaps they were more laconic in those days - not feeling the need we apparently do these days to embellish the core of the wisdom with a lot of explanations? My posts of 2016 were collected and put in the logical order in The Slaves’ Chorus and came to 120 pages (the following year there were double the number of pages). Of course these are “musings”….they don’t try to compress and distill the components into a basic “essence”……which, in a sense, the tables I started to use last year have started to do……Now there’s a thought!

update; an academic offers some lessons from his blogging 

http://danieldrezner.com/research/APSAblogchapter.pdf

About the blog

This blog has been running since I began to contemplate “hanging up my boots” after a career which had started in the late 1960s in “planning” work, moved on to economics and public administration and finished as a “consultant” in ex-communist countries in something called “institutional development”. You might think that after 16 years this blog has said most of what there is to say – but I keep coming across books which throw new light on things. 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 instead the butterfly approach and depends very much on what catches my fancy – generally a book or article, sometimes an incident, painting or piece of music. And I do like to offer excerpts from the books and articles I feel positive about – as distinct from offering opinions. It’s time, however, to do one of my periodic stock-takings of 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 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 the blog has been weak on the third purpose. Indeed one friend has queried the absence of the personal touch – feeling that the tone is 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. 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 who is constantly offering valuable insights from his life experience – he is a few years younger than me. 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 in. 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…

From 1990 I’ve 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 (!!!). In the past decade, in Bulgaria and Romania, I've 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 I’m so deeply grateful) - 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 argument for keeping the posts short. 

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.... 

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

What I am really trying to say is 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 Clease’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 (a) understand 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 came late to an understanding of the interpersonal - 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?

Dave Pollard is one of the few bloggers whose posts I generally read in full – always thoughtful, generally provocative. This post is typical - professing lack of interest in what people had to say about themselves in CVs or expressions of future hopes – but preferring rather to suggest……

six “leading questions” that might evoke some kind of useful sense of who someone is and what they care about - and possibly assess whether the person you’re talking with might be the potential brilliant colleague, life partner, inspiring mentor or new best friend you’ve been looking for. These are the questions:

1. 1. What adjectives or nouns would you use to describe yourself that differentiate you 

• from most other people? When and how did these words come to apply to you?

1. 1. Describe the most fulfilling day you can imagine, some day that might realistically

   • occur in the next year. Why would it be fulfilling? What are you doing now that might 
   • increase its likelihood of happening?

   1. What do you care about, big picture, right now? What would you mourn if it disappeared?

   • What do you ache to have in your life? What would you work really long and hard to 

   • conserve or achieve? How did you come to care about this?

   1. What is your purpose, right now? Not your role or occupation, but the thing you’re 

   • uniquely gifted and inspired to be doing, something the world needs. What would elate you if you achieved it, today, this month, in the next year? What would devastate you if you failed, or didn’t get to try? How did this become your purpose?

   1. What’s your basic belief about why you, and other humans, exist? Not what you believe 

   • is right or important (or what you, or humans ‘should’ do or be), but why 

   • you think we are the way we are now, and why you think we evolved to be where we are. 

   • It’s an existential question, not a moral one. How did you come to this belief?

   1. What’s your basic sense of what the next century holds for our planet and our 

   • civilization? How do you imagine yourself coping with it? How did you come to this belief?

• These are not easy questions, and asking them might prove intimidating or even threatening to some people, which is why in the last post I suggested volunteering your own answer to each question yourself first, in a form such as “Someone asked me the other day… and I told them…”. It’s also why there are supplementary questions to each, to get the person you’re asking started. And the last supplementary question in each group lends itself to telling a story, since that’s what we’re most comfortable with. Even then, some of these questions will stop many people cold, which might tell you something about them right there.

A Musing Decade

The blog will be ten years old in the autumn – making it one of the longest-running (english-speaking) blogs of its kind.  It first saw the light of day as "Carpathian Musings" because the blogging started in my mountain house in that area but, after a few winters spent in Sofia, I realized that the title was no longer a precise description of its source - and the blog has therefore, for the past 5 years or so, been called “Balkan and Carpathian Musings”.

Observant readers will have noticed that this has been replaced by a new title – “The Bookish Explorer”. 
This is an experiment – and I hope you will not be too confused by the variety of titles you will find popping up in the next few weeks..

Why am I doing this? Simply because I want to raise the blog’s profile…

Although I was delighted when the monthly click rate rose a couple of years ago to 10,000, it has reached those dizzy heights on only 3 occasions and is currently running at half that level. I consider the blog an amazing “resource” (I will come back to that word) – on issues ranging from Brexit, administrative reform, Bulgarian and Romanian culture, Germany, the 2014 Scottish Referendum, the state (see the E-books in the top right column of the blog). But neither the word "Balkan" nor "Carpathian" are keywords people use when they are googling on these subjects.....And the name indeed gives a false impression.... So I reckon the blog needs a name which better expresses its content and objectives
I realise, of course, that the way to increase the profile of a blog or website is to manipulate the algorithms – but this costs money I’m not willing to pay…

Let’s be clear, I’m not interested in raising the profile as an end in itself…..I have no illusions about my significance. But I am confident that my blog (and website) is an almost unique “resource” or, if you prefer, “library”..Not of my writing – but of the insights of others whose books and papers I’ve taken the time and trouble to seek out and whose significance I have the capacity to recognize and want to pass on……

But what exactly, I hear you ask, do I mean when I say the blog is one of the longest-running “of its “kind”? Simply that the majority of blogs specialize in a particular topic - whether EC Law, literary reviews (a popular subject), economics (ditto) or Marxist economics – more popular than you think eg Michael Robert’s or Boffy’s Blog (going since 2007) which interrupts its Marxist exegesis with comment on British politics) 
Mine darts like a butterfly to a variety of flowers as I tried to explain in a post last year in the blog’s 2018 Annual – The Search for the Holy Grail. I indeed tried to argue that my claim for the reader’s attention is based on – 

- experience in an unusual variety of sectors (and countries) – each of which is closely manned with “gatekeepers”

- the compulsion (over a 50 year-period) to record the lessons of each experience in short papers

- Long and extensive reading

- A “voice” which has been honed by the necessity of speaking clearly to audiences of different nationalities and class

- intensive trawling of the internet for wide range of writing

- notes kept of the most important of those readings

- shared in hyperlinks with readers

So bear with me as I play around with the blog name – and indeed with its content..

Patterns of the Mind

Some 18 months ago I noticed a strange omission in the blog – no discussion of climate change. Rather lamely, I tried to explain this blog silence by suggesting that  

- the issue was too complex; 

- others were dealing with it; 

- technical change would sort things out; or 

- a few personal changes in life-style could at least salve the conscience…. 

What’s strange is that I do buy, download and read books on the subject. It’s just that I don’t choose to share the content with readers of the blog. Why not? I wonder… 

Last year, I did have two posts on the issue – the first on the Extinction Movement whoseprotests in the UK have brought forward new laws there which are seen in liberal circles as threatening the very essence of English identity.

The other consisted of my initial notes on a book which had just been published Commanding Hope - the power we have to renew a world in peril (2020) by Thomas Homer-Dixon and which I recognised as deserving of a reread. As always, I got distracted and it took a reminder from the author himself a couple of days ago to direct me back to the book 

What had originally intrigued me about Dixon’s book was its focus on our mental processes – on the mix of hope and despair we brought to a subject which can and does arouse trauma. At the time I was aware only of geographer Mike Hulme’s Why We Disagree about Climate Change – understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity” (2009) - although Clive Hamilton had apparently produced Requiem for a species – why we resist the truth about climate change in 2010. 

My reread of Homer-Dixon’s latest alerted me to two other useful titles on this intriguing theme of why most of us seem unable to take the issue of global warming with the seriousness which it warrants –  Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life; Kari Marie Norgaard (2011) and  Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change ; George Marshall (2014) 

Although it’s only a year since I first read “Commanding Hope”, the reread didn’t ring any bells in my head; and that’s despite my having made notes available in the last half of the post - which questioned the lack of an index and bibliography. Many of you may see this as a bit pedantic of me – but, if I’m spending a few hours reading an author’s work I need to have a sense of their biases. I don’t need (or even want) a long reading list - indeed the shorter the better since the author is then required to think very carefully about the average reader. A reading list stretching over 40 pages is simply a virility symbol – “see how clever I am”!!

I do find it disturbing, however, that I have so little recollection of reading the book – just 12 months ago. That’s not a good sign! 

Rightly in my view the book identifies “world views” as a crucial factor in explaining the attitude we adopt to global warming. Coincidentally, I devoted a section of Voices in the Air – the 2021 posts (just uploaded to the blog) to that very subject (from p 105) in which I make the point that the term is only one of five you can find in the literature – others being “world values”, “political culture”, “cultural theory” and “cultural values”. Homer-Dixon makes my life more complicated by offering two more terms – “cognitive affective maps” and something he calls “ideological state space” which he explains in a table containing 15 fundamental “issues” which divide people such as  

Are moral principles universal and objective?

is the world a safe or a dangerous place?

Is the world best understood through reason or emotion?

Can people choose their fate?

Are there large and essential differences between groups of people?

How much should we care about other people?

Should one resist authority or defer to it?

I’m not able to reproduce the table so can’t do justice to it here. Those interested can read this 40 page article which Homer-Dixon wrote in 2015 and which reproduces an earlier version of the table and all the diagrams. He has also outlined his "theory of hope" in this useful briefing note. 

a day's reading

I vowed to do a blog each day – partly to encourage the tiny readership I have but also because it is an important discipline – writing is more challenging than talking – it reveals the gaps in your logic and information. And I’ve found it salutary to put on record some of the discoveries which give life its daily delight. And, when you’re a bookish sort of person, that will include insights gained from books. That indeed is one of the main purpose of the blog – to share useful references in the field in which I’ve chosen to spend so much of my life.
Anyway, I have failed to deliver on my daily quota – mainly because I was going through one of these phases of disgust with reading. I was bloated! Books and work – a life not quite in balance? More of that, perhaps, in another post. In the meantime I simply have to admire those such as Matthew Taylor (see links) who are able to make regular posts – with helpful references to the writings of others. One of features I admire in Matthew’s blogs is the honesty with which he confesses his self-doubts. There are millions of us “symbolic analysts” (as Robert Reich memorably called us) who spend our lives scribbling and meeting in ways which our ancestors would find shocking – and being well paid for it. No wonder that the angst sometime shows through!

OK enough of the guilt. What have I found in recent days which is worth sharing? My focus at the moment is a rather challenging assignment in China. Subject to final medical and visa clearance, I depart in 5 weeks and have now started to think myself into the task. I have first to prepare a “Baseline study” on the state of public administration reform there – imagine!! And, as part of that, to draft various briefing papers on the lessons from the countless initiatives of European states in this area eg performance and quality management.
I want to hit the ground running as far as the second part of the initial work is concerned and am therefore trying to first to track down as many recent assessments on the European experience as I can. I do my best to keep up to date – but it is only in the break between assignments that I have to do the surfing and reading which is needed. Earlier this year, for example, I discovered that I had missed quite a few key documents from the British Cabinet Office and yesterday I came across some interesting reports which the National Audit Office had commissioned from academics on innovation in the public sector. I’ve not been able to get separate internet references for the various documents but punch “innovation government” in the NAO search engine and you’ll get 3-4 interesting papers . The NAO also commissioned PWC to do a review of “Good Government” which focuses on France and USA.
The Cabinet Office has also published a useful study of what they regard as good government initiatives here
“Innovation”, “good government”, “improvement”, quality management”, “performance management” etc The language itself confuses – and, to some post-modernists, is itself the product. I hope to return to this issue which is referred to by the academics who have made this their specialism eg Boivard, Brouckaert, Loeffler, Peters, Pollitt. The European Group of Public Administration has lhad a special committee exploring the issue of productivity in the public sector for some years. Their papers can be accessed here You can see why I had no time yesterday to blog – I was too busy surfing!

I also came across an interesting overview from 2004 by Elaine KamarckShe made some intriguing references to the work of President Vincente Fox of Mexico (2000-2006) and when I googled this item I was referred to an article in an open electronic journal I had forgotten about – The International Public Management Review. A glance at the article on the Mexican experience of reform (by Dusaugge) persuaded me that their experience is very relevant to the Chinese! Read it for yourself at And today, I discovered the Scandinavian Journal of Politics – whose articles I am able to access courtesy of Wiley. Some fascinating accounts of what they’ve been up to which rarely get to the mainstream journals. Sorry I’m not able to share them – I’ll try to summarise at some point in the future.

Six Questions about the new draft

The book has now expanded to 140 pages – each of which seems to have half a dozen hyperlinks. That makes almost 1000 of them. The book still needs a proper conclusion – but can be accessed in its current state here. It's been constructed from the notes I have made over the years  as I tried to make sense of what “experts” were saying in the hundreds (indeed thousands) of books which have deluged us about “the crisis”. Your eyes may glaze over when you come across some of the lists which appear from time to time - so let me anticipate some of your questions….

1.   Why should we read it? After all, you’re the guy who said we needed to ration non-fiction books!

And that’s precisely why I have taken so long to write this damned thing…..at least 10 years. When I wrote that post, I offered the reader some tests to apply to any new non-fiction book. These included explaining what was distinctive about it; annotated reading lists; typologies showing the variety of perspectives the field offers; and visuals and other material to make the text less boring

2.   If you’re so critical of economists, who do you mention so many Economics books?

The majority of well-written books about the global crisis are actually not written by economists! There’s a table in this section (page 46 or thereabouts) which gives examples of the key books about the global crisis in 9 other disciplines apart from economics

3.   OK but why inflict so many titles on us?

Three reasons – First, anyone who wants to be taken seriously in discussions needs to be aware of some of the key names and titles in “the literature” – even if you only flick a few pages to get a sense of their style

People, secondly, differ in their tastes – and I’ve tried to structure the lists by various categories to allow you to find what suits you…For example, p43 gives you access to 8 introductory books which are great reads in themselves….

I would agree, finally, that academics are too good at throwing bibliographies at us. Indeed they overwhelm us with them – whether in footnotes, brackets or end-pages. It’s almost a virility test with them. I get very frustrated with this – since all these lists do is to flaunt their superiority – they don’t actually tell us anything interesting about each book. And that’s why I decided to try not just to list the more interesting of the books – but to add a few notes to give readers a sense of whether it was their sort of book..

4.   Surely neoliberalism has been discredited?

You would think that, as the deregulation which was its hallmark blew up in our faces, this would have led to a rethink but as Colin Crouch first showed in 2011 (and Philip Mirowski in 2013) the doctrine of commercialising anything that moves has actually strengthened. Most people are still scratching their heads to try to understand how this happened and why it seems so difficult to put an alternative agenda together…

5.   Why can’t progressives unite around an agreed agenda for change?

There are a lot of egos at stake! But also so many different perspectives. And it is a notorious fact of history that progressive forces tend to fight one another more than “the enemy”. Understand that, and we will be half way to achieving consensus

6.   Why should I trust anything you say?

If this is the first time you have come across my material, this is precisely the question you need to pose..The only answer I can give is that you will see from the blog I have had for 10 years that I try to keep an open mind on issues – painfully aware of the legitimacy of the different ways of seeing things

"What am I good at/for?" - a SWOT approach

Readers know that one of the few blogs I regularly check is the contrarian one of another Scot who worked in Uzbekistan (as British Ambassador) just after I had left my 3 –year assignment there in 2001 -  the blog of Craig Murray. He has been a thorn in the flesh of not only the British, Uzbek and American Governments - for his early revelations of Uzbek torture condoned by the Brits and continued by the Yanks. These cost him his position but he was subsequently vindicated (by no less a body than the US Senate Intelligence Committee - a misnomer if ever there was one!!!).

But his beloved Scottish Nationalist party then lacked the guts (and intelligence) to accept him as an official candidate for the 2015 General election – despite his sterling (!) work for them………

He poses on today’s post the most critical question any man can ask -

I am confused as to what I might usefully do with my life. I suppose the question I have been pondering is, what good am I?

Anyone who reaches his/her late 50s and has had the sort of rich work experience enjoyed by many born in the immediate post-war period; good health; and reasonable and accessible capital should have been asking Craig’s question for the past decade…..

Fifteen years ago, in a similar mood, I posed not one but five questions in a short paper called A Draft Guide for the Perplexed -

- why I was pessimistic about the future and so unhappy with what the French then  called “La Pensee Unique”, the post 1989 “Washington consensus”

- who were the organisations and people I felt were fighting for a better world

- what they were achieving - and what not

- how these gaps could be reduced

- how with my resources I could help that process

The paper has been updated every few years until its latest version

Craig asks the blunt question of What good he is - which is a slightly disparaging way of putting things. A more useful question is “What am I good FOR?” In other words, to what purpose should someone of my age, experience and resources (time, networks, money etc) turn this latter stage of his life?

We all admire older people who have resisted the temptation to rest on their laurels and have turned their experience and energies to serve a larger purpose – eg Stephane Hessel,

- Initially I thought I might leave some money to a Trust Fund to honour my father’s memory as a West of Scotland public man; or to celebrate the sort of community enterprise I’ve been associated with. But my family has no claim to fame – and such ventures tend to peter out after the initial years of enthusiasm. 
- So, in 2009, I started this blog and also a website with some of my papers with no less a purpose than leaving behind a record of how one 20^th century man thought of the world he had been lucky enough to experience…… 

- Then, with a newfound passion for Bulgarian painting (and one foot now in Romania and another in Bulgaria), I briefly entertained the notion of organising a summer painting retreat to help break down the barrier of indifference which seems to exist between these two nations.   
- At one stage I became so desperate about the rise of corporate greed that I actually contemplated launching the idea of a geriatric kamikaze mission to target the financial class - on the Mintzberg argument that the vanishing "people power" of trade unions and voters needed some strengthening to ensure the "rebalancing of society". But I quickly realised that this would merely further strengthen the repressive power of the "security state" which has replaced our mixed economies and liberal democracies....

- Last year I launched a second, specially designed, website with a larger capacity – Mapping the Common Ground - as a resource for those who share my concerns and want to do some sharing…...On to it I uploaded not only my own books and essays but more than a hundred books which I thought would be helpful to others struggling with my questions…… But, after six years of the blog and one year of the website, I have to confess there’s not been much response.

Craig’s question is a good one since it forces us to do a SWOT analysis – and to try to craft a strategy for this phase of our life on its results. I know that when I first did the Belbin test about team roles about 15 years ago, I had expected to come out as a “leader”. But I was not altogether surprised to discover that I was more of a “resource person”. There’s not much point setting out to build an orphanage if you don’t like children!

I’ve been lucky enough to have been “my own man” for most of my life – an academic of a sort for 17 years but able to devote more time to a role as an (influential) elected official; maintaining a senior position for 22 years through a dozen  elections by colleagues; since 1990 a maverick consultant who has challenged the conventional wisdom.

What good am I? Bluntly expressed - just reading, writing and looking/exploring!

What do I offer the world?
- The results of broad and deep reading over 50 years about social science matters 
- The practice of thinking out aloud since 1970 - in short papers about the work in which I was involved (see “lessons learned” on the new website for those from the past 20 years; “E-books” for almost a dozen of that genre)
- More than 1000 mini-essays with almost 10,000 hyperlinks – on the blog Balkan and Carpathian Musings
- the results of pretty intensive net-surfing for relevant writing over the past decade -available in Mapping the Common Ground’s library

Of course that still doesn’t answer the question which has been nagging me for the past 15 years – of where I should be putting my experience and resources…….!!