Optimism, realism and scepticism

First, a welcome to my new readers from the Ukraine – northern neighbours who, my statistics show, have been my most faithful readers over the past week.

I wanted to return to the issue of what has been learned from all the reforms which Britain has attempted in the running of its public services and machinery of government in the past 40 years (raised in a recent blogpost) but have been distracted by the glorious weather which followed the few days of cold and mist. 

First snow of the autumn was on the Bucegi mountains opposite on 22 September (see shot above) but the afternoon sun on the terrace has soon had me stripping off. Today is the third in a row of such superb weather and makes me even less inclined to pop down to Bucharest for its current festival of radio orchestra music. Bucharest inspires very different feelings in me from Sofia – and indeed from some other ex-pats who love the place.

For me Bucharest is only a stopover for better places – but don’t let me discourage those who want to taste its “blowsy charms”. The Sarah in Romania blog is one of the most sympathetic to (if also angry about) the city and marked Bucharest’s birthday with an appropriate post -

This is not a post to list the hundreds of dreadful, illegal demolitions. It is not a post to slag off Mayor Oprescu and the architecture commission, nor the Chief Architect of Bucharest. I have written many of those and it's neither the time nor the place. I say only that after 553 years, while everyone else is trying to improve their cities, renovate rather than rebuild wherever possible, underline the beauty of their architecture and highlight their history whether it be joyous or tragic and syphon traffic away from the centre in order to make things so much more pleasant for citizens, Bucharest is attacked and disfigured by greedy, corrupt, lousy parasites right from the top down to the very bottom.

Those who move a finger are few and far between. I know they exist, that tiny 10%. There are associations, NGOs and individuals who care VERY much. But it seems like a flea up against a tsunami...This was a city where beauty stood on every turn, where every corner was a photo opportunity and where history, patrimony and heritage mattered.  A city (and a country for that matter) which valued education and promoted learning, where the university was renowned and the doctors admired. A city (and country) whose musicians exuded incredible poetry through symphonies and suites and whose concert halls were filled with names that would wow any 'mélomane'. Yes, times were hard, of course they were. But, on the whole there was respect and far more pride than we find today. There was elegance. 

Of course, one can still find beauty in Bucharest - that quiet, shy, almost reticent loveliness that brings a lump to one's throat every time one is confronted with it. You only have to read further back on this blog (and so many others besides) for examples. Perhaps, for the visitors as well as for many Bucharest residents, one must be told where to look - the splendid streets around Dorobanti, the hidden villas behind Unirii, the oldy-worldiness of Tineretului, the charm of what's left around Cismigiu on all sides, the elegance of Cotroceni and Icoanei - and that's just for starters. Bucharest demands to be loved. Few of us actually do. Indeed, there IS beauty.

I have also been rereading some books – eg Smile or Die: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich

Promoting the idea that happiness is within your grasp is in the interests of corporations trying to bamboozle an overworked and underpaid workforce. It's also favoured by churches trying to get rich quick off the American dream. Ehrenreich traces the fad from Calvinist self-control through Christian Science to blatant assumptions of the holiness of cash. Informing the uneducated and unmedicated that their plight is all their own fault is followed up by instructions for making anything you desire – from a new TV screen to a trip to Mexico – "materialise" through mind control. The censorship of negative opinion combines perfectly with the American policy of each man for himself in the best of all possible worlds.This is the philosophy that gave us the smart bomb, the space programme, sub-prime mortgages, plenty of psychopaths and Sarah Palin. Ehrenreich writes that America is unsurpassed in one area: "the reflexive capacity for dismissing disturbing news". .

Even right-wing newspapers reviewed the book positively.   

Ehrenreich savages the instigator of Positive Psychology and finishes on an important note about the importance of realism if not scepticism – an important theme in this blog. I hadn’t until now realised the possible significance of my latest little publication – on Bulgarian realist painting! 

The USA, as a reassessment of a 1960s classic reminds us, has a long tradition of what the book's title calls anti-intellectualism - 

there arose an ethos, a romantic conviction, that a popular democracy should favor "the superiority of inborn, intuitive, folkish wisdom over the cultivated, oversophisticated, and self-interested knowledge of the literati and the well-to-do." Practical experience mattered more than imaginative thinking, and vital emotion trumped anemic rationality. "Just as the evangelicals repudiated a learned religion and formally constituted clergy in favor of the wisdom of the heart and direct access to God, so did advocates of egalitarian politics propose to dispense with trained leadership in favor of the native practical sense of the ordinary man with its direct access to truth. This preference for the wisdom of the common man flowered in the most extreme statements of the democratic creed, into a kind of militant popular anti-intellectualism."

Deep writing

I often bemoan the quality of writing available in journals – dumbed down by marketing pressures or unreadable from the perversions of academic specialisation. A fine exception, I’ve just noticed, is the New Yorker which uses academics who can actually write coherently and gracefully. The current issue has a long and fascinating piece by Prof Jill Lepore on the origins in the 1930s of US political consulting which has removed policy content from politics in that country. The story starts with a marvellous story of the famous writer Upton Sinclair standing for the Californian Governorship under the slogan “End poverty in California" (EPIC) at a time when the Republicans held a total monopoly of power – and how he was defeated by the lies spun by the world’s first political spinners who simply planted in a major newspaper each day a phrase from one of his novels as if it was his policy. The couple behind this went on to run the campaigns against a state health system which President Truman tried to introduce.
For the latest techniques on political campaigning, see here. 

I realise now how ill-informed my comment about the The New Yorker was when I picked up a copy of Julian Barnes' Letters from London 1990-1995 and read the  Preface which explains the rigour of editing carried out by the TNY which he experienced personally when for those 5 years he was its London correspondent!

You can also access in the New Yorker a full analysis done by Louis Menand earlier in the year of the sort of work Mitt Romney actually did for Bain Capital and what this (and his campaign book) implies about his view of the world and leadership style. 

Romney’s program is logical (which doesn’t mean that it’s practical). He believes that if freedom is to be fostered and preserved around the world the United States needs a stronger military. For the United States to have a stronger military, it has to grow economically. For the nation to grow economically, American companies must become more productive. And, for American companies to become more productive, business has to be allowed to do business.

This means that Americans have to tolerate, to appreciate, even to encourage what Romney calls (using a phrase borrowed from Joseph Schumpeter) “creative destruction.”It’s a strange slogan for a politician to adopt at a time of high unemployment and economic uncertainty, but Romney invokes it in his book and he uses it in interviews, because it’s precisely what he means by business. To make the future, we have to be willing to destroy some of the present. “It takes a leap of faith for governments to stand aside and allow the creative destruction inherent in a free economy,” as Romney puts it. We can’t be sentimental. And everything can be thought of in this way, from the production of microchips to the education of children. If we want cheaper chips or better schools, we have to be willing to pay the transaction costs. The unwillingness to do so is what’s holding us back. (A famous saying about omelettes might come to mind here.)

Who or what stands in the way of restoring American productivity and American greatness? Romney lists some of the usual suspects, including multiculturalism (a “fraud”) and “the self-loathing of Western intellectuals” (an odd expression, since all the Western intellectuals I know think rather well of themselves). But readers of “No Apology” are likely to come away with the impression that the chief internal enemy the United States faces today is labor unions. Romney thinks that unions can sometimes work constructively with management but that, fundamentally, they are protectors of the status quo. They make it harder for the destroying part to work.This is why Romney opposed George Bush’s efforts to protect the American steel industry by imposing a tariff on imports, and it’s why he opposed the Detroit bailout (embarrassingly for him. highly successful). Actions like those interfere with the natural business process in the name of saving American jobs. And it’s why Romney’s well-known infelicities—“I like being able to fire people,” “For an economy to thrive . . . a lot of people . . . will suffer,” “Corporations are people,” “I’m not concerned about the very poor”—are not really gaffes, even in the unfair, out-of-context form in which his opponents circulate them. They express something true to the way that Romney sees the world.

Romney’s record at Bain Capital holds obvious interest for his political opponents. Private-equity firms and leveraged buyouts, which is one of the ways Bain pursued its business, are, after all, pretty much capitalism parading around in its most naked state. Romney developed his view of the world during his earlier, nine-year experience, with B.C.G. and Bain & Company, as a management consultant. There are several strains running through the history of management theory, and which paradigms are dominant, and at which consulting firms, depends on the economic times and the nature of the competition. At B.C.G. and Bain & Company between 1975 and 1984, data crunching seems to have been the main engine of analysis. Virtually everyone agrees that Romney was extremely good at this, and he operates his political campaigns in the same way.“He’s not a very notional leader,” Romney’s campaign spokesman told an Iowa newspaper in 2007. “He is more interested in data, and what the data mean.”

But it’s not just that Romney doesn’t have good political instincts. It’s that he was trained to distrust instinct altogether. In management consulting, gut feelings are what you work hard to take out of the equation. That’s the justification for all that painstaking analysis: the consultant who crunches a mountain of numbers to come up with an idea that the C.E.O. already has will not get far. It’s the counter-intuitiveness of the advice that justifies the fee.

It must be difficult being Mitt Romney – with a great progressive father to look up to; a sickening record of bean-counting and employment destruction (at arms’ length it must be said); a reasonably progressive record in his 5 years as Governor (although he hardly spoke to Congressmen) most of which he has had to disavow in the fight for the right-wing votes of the Republican nomination. I don’t doubt that he is a caring neighbour but he must be one sick man in his soul.

Let’s return, however, to the issue of good writing – by which I mean the ability to take a complex issue and make it enjoyable to read about (which I last discussed in mid-June). Until recently, the New York Review of Books has been my favourite journal – although the London Review of Books has been coming up fast on the inside lane. Take, for example, this magnificent bit of writing about (of all things) the British experience of electricity privatisation by the Scottish writer James Meek. Or, in the current issue, a great piece of sceptical reportage on the recent Republican Convention.

America has some great journals – I discovered Harpers when I was there in the late 1980s and also Wilson’s Quarterly. I like the latter's mission statement - 

THE WILSON QUARTERLY is a window on the world of ideas for general readers. Historical perspective and a commitment to consider all sides are the hallmarks of its articles on foreign affairs, politics, culture, science, and other subjects.By making new knowledge accessible to all, it aims to foster more informed public debate.

I don't like the fact that the current issue is the last print issue - from now on it will be available only online. I find this tragic - for all the reasons covered in the numerous articles which attack the notion of the end of books.

America has had some highly original and passionate writers and essayist – not a few of British origin! Sadly two of them died recently – everyone had heard of Chris Hitchens but not so many of Alexander Cockburn of whom Robin Blackburn writes eloquently in the current issue of New Left Review.

And, appropriately, from the superb website, It's about Time - great paintings of women reading
But pride of place - at the top of this post - is a Turner which has "turned up" (forgive the pun) after more than 100 years. I like to think this sort of painting inspired Bulgaria's Alexander Moutafov in the early part of the 20th century

Creative contract management - A question to my readers

Puzzle - why is a boring post of 22 February 2011 far and away my most popular post  - not only today (30 hits); this week (124); but of all time (1338)??? That particular post was a mixed bag -

• referring in its first sentence to Sofia and then giving a link to a great Bulgarian bed and breakfast book; 
• then some comments about another British Government push to marketise if not privatise basic public services such as health (no mention of which took place in their manifesto of the year before); 
• and, finally, the subject which gave the post its title "creative contract management" - an initial assessment of the EC's 2009 Backbone Strategy which I had missed at the time. This was a response to the Court of Auditors' criticisms of how the EC manages its work in the institution-building field I have been working in as an independent consultant for the past 20 years. I would like to think that this is what has attracted - and continues to attract - so many readers to the post. But the post closes by referring to the follow-up posts the next day (and weeks) on the same subject  - and a mere handful showed interest in these.

It would be great to get some feedback from people about their reasons for reading this 18-month old post. Was it just the title (originally "creative contract management" - with its promise of cutting corners); or the reference to Sofia in the first few words???? I've now amended the title of this post - I was just a bit pissed only 5 people have accessed it - and none commented!! Let's seem how many more hits it now gets - particularly now that I've given the original post a more boring title??

The sad truth, however, is that it gets the hits simply because it is the top of the "most popular" list on the right hand side of the blog - and there is no way I can remove it!!

All fall down

Think-tanks enjoy a mixed reputation – originating in the USA where, for the most part, they have become little more than lobbyists for big money and being increasingly seen in the UK as part of an unrepresentative social elite which exercises too much influence over current policy debates and supplies too many of the country’s politicians. Far from bridging the gap between academia and government, they are often seen in the UK as undermining democracy. A good (and more objective) paper on the patterns and traditions in various countries was recently published as part of an exchange with China.

For those, however, like myself in the international consultancy business, British think-tanks and their reports have been a god-send in the past decade or so. Well-written and comprehensive in their analyses and data (increasingly comparative), they have allowed us to pontificate with authority in places such as Baku, Bishkek, Sofia and Tashkent about the latest experiences with improving public management. Academic texts are so boring and out-of-date compared with the endless flow of pamphlets from the Think-Tanks.  

Look for example at this 2007 report on Innovations in Government – an international perspective on civil service reform produced by the Institute for Public Policy Research – a centrist British think tank. Or this 2009 review of the state of the British Civil Service produced by the independent British Institute for Government which also recently published a fascinating case-study of the failure of the UK’s Centre for Management and Policy Studies 1999-2005 which had been (for about 20 years) the Civil Service College and which transmogrified after 2005 into the National School of Government – before itself being abolished this year. The failure of the shortly-lived CMPS is attributable , in the report, to –

• confusion about the main role of the Centre – policy or management focus
• inappropriate (academic) leadership
• loss of Prime Ministerial interest
• the number of other parallel initiatives

British government has, of course, become notorious for its non-stop programmatic,policy and institutional changes. New Labour launched a blitzkrieg on the administrative machine with its Modernising Government programmeof 1999 – an official output of which you can find here. 

Right now I’m not sure where you can find the coolest assessment of the lessons from a decade’s frenetic energy of targets, increased choice, organisational and personnel change. 

But one thing is clear – political discontent with civil service performance is as great as it ever was – and in June the UK government announced its reform plan for the civil service accompanied by a powerpoint presentation. A useful independent website on the British Civil Service has provided a useful summary. The plan was the subject of a fairly positive Institute of Government assessment. 

And this week the Government has also announced a short study into lessons from other civil service systems

But the wider public is not so impressed.

Strategies for living?

“Reading someone like a book” is supposed to denote an easy penetration of someone’s motives and thinking. But in fact reading is an interactive process which depends not only on the reader but on the context and timing. I find that I get different things from rereading a book. Two years ago (almost to the day) I enjoyed the wry humour and scope of Michael Foley’ s The Age of Absurdity - why modern life makes it hard to be happy which mocks contemporary anguishes and values (an early chapter has the great title of “the righteousness of entitlement”). By coincidence I came across this US stand-up comedian who deals with the same issues.
But rereading Foley in the last few days showed me a depth I had missed the first time round. He criticises the generality of the six convergent values identified by Martin Seligman (the founder of the positive psychology movement) in his trawl of religions – justice, humaneness, temperance, wisdom, courage and transcendence. 

“Do the classic texts , he asks, not give us more practical strategies for living ?” 

“The good news (he tells us on page 68) is that there are indeed such strategies. The bad news is that all of them are discouraged by contemporary Western culture”. 

The "strategies" are personal responsibility; autonomy; detachment; acceptance of difficulty; understanding; mindfulness; ceaseless striving; and constant awareness of mortality.

Drawing on philosophy, religion, history, psychology and neuroscience, Foley then explores the things that modern culture is either rejecting or driving us away from:

• Responsibility – we are entitled to succeed and be happy, so someone/thing else must be to blame when we are not
• Difficulty – we believe we deserve an easy life, and worship the effortless and anything that avoids struggle (as Foley points out, this extends even to eating oranges: sales are falling as peeling them is now seen as too demanding and just so, you know, yesterday …)
• Understanding – a related point, as understanding requires effort, but where we once expected decision-making to involve rationality, we moved through emotion to intuition (usually reliable) and – more worryingly – impulse (usually unreliable), a tendency that Foley sees as explaining the appeal of fundamentalism (“which sheds the burden of freedom and eliminates the struggle to establish truth and meaning and all the anxiety of doubt. There is no solution as satisfactory and reassuring as God.”)
• Detachment – we benefit from concentration, autonomy and privacy, but life demands immersion, distraction, collaboration and company; by confusing self-esteem (essentially external and concerned with our image to others) with self-respect (essentially internal and concerned with our self-image), we further fuel our sense of entitlement – and our depression, frustration and rage when we don’t get what we ‘deserve’
• Experience – captivated by the heightened colour, speed, and drama of an edited on-screen life, our attention span is falling and ‘attention’ (at least in the West) is something we pay passively rather than actively and mindfully:

From a recent blog discussion, I noted this interesting perspective -

 I think we need to address the question with our own actions, the things we do that make life worth living. Verbs, not nouns. When I think of how I would answer the question, the following behaviors come to mind:

Creating: Writing, drawing, painting (though I’m not good at it), playing music (though I’m not especially good at that, either). For others, it might be inventing something, building a business, coming up with a clever marketing campaign, forming a non-profit.

Relating: It’s not “family” that makes life worth living, I think, but the relationships we create with members of our family, and the way we maintain and build those relationships. Same goes for friends, lovers, business partners, students, and everyone else.

Helping: Being able to lend a hand to people in need – however drastic or trivial that need may be – strikes me as an important part of life.

Realizing: Making, working towards, and achieving goals, no matter what those goals are.

Playing: Maybe this is a kind of “relating”, but then, play can be a solo affair as well. Letting go of restraints, imagining new possibilities, testing yourself against others or against yourself, finding humour and joy.

Growing: Learning new things, improving my knowledge and ability in the things I’ve already learned.

Those seem like more satisfying answers to me – they strike deeper into what it is I want for myself, what makes it worthwhile to get up in the morning.

The Guardian is currently trying to give its readers some understanding of the nation which is now in the driving seat of the "European project" and indeed of our futures - Germany. I have several times on this blog remarked on how seldom this effort of understanding our neighbours (their culture and history) is made in British books or journals - with most of the accessible literature being humorous accounts of setting up home in rural France or Spain (occasionally Italy). I'm not particularly impressed with the Guardian series - no mention, for example, of the two recent writers who have tried to do the country justice (Simon Winder and Peter Watson).
But this article about one region's attitudes to saving and spending is useful.   

exposing the lies

If you are consumed with greed, enjoy a permanent sense of superiority, are incompetent, suffer from Acute Controlling Syndrome, think ethics are for wimps, or have never created anything worthwhile in your life, the chances are you hold some kind of senior position in one of these professions: politics, the media, investment banking, multinational business, management consultancy, tax accountancy, the Law, or internet service provision.You are the reason all those pursuits serve your interests rather than mine.If you have all of those features in your personal make-up, then you are a seriously big wig, engaged in running the world. You are probably a sociopath, perhaps a psychopath, and definitely delusional…to the extent that your ideal world is one in which the small community and the middle classes have been wiped out, and a few very big bananas have near-monopolies on everything.You are the reason the world is falling apart.In order to retain your position as an influential idiot dedicated to pauperising everyone except the elite, you are going to talk bollocks almost all the time. (Trans: US – horsesh*t, French – conneries, German – Bockmist). You can get away with doing so, because most of the rest of us are too thick, bored, busy or tired to bother analysing the bollocks that pour forth from your mouth in a never-ending testicular stream.

Such is the powerful raison-d'etre for A Diary of Deception and Distortion - a very readable blog dedicated to the deconstruction of bollocks which I am now adding to the list of links here.

Seasonal changes

I’ve been offline for more than a week – initially because my two-year old HP laptop crashed and I had to fit up a new Samsung with all the relevant software, files and websites.

But the silence is also due to the sheer amount of work involved preparing the mountain house to face new rigours and challenges – leaving little time for reading and the stimulation that offers. Not just of winter – but of the rise in rural break-ins. Last week we strengthened our back door and remounted the old shutters on the ground-floor windows. Their absence over the past 5 years caused me no anxiety – but yesterday we talked in Brasov with a home security advisor and are now installing various facilities – including perhaps a “state of the art” sprinkler system to give our extensive wooden beams and floors (if not traditional schiza wood roof) some added protection.

A digger has also gouged out a parking space from the steep front meadow – for our 15 year-old Daewoo which must shortly give way to a new car. Part of me wants to indulge myself and go for a good but economical touring car (eg the 3.5 lires per 100 kms  Skoda Octavia) – but being seen with that sort of car could create the impression of a house worth breaking into. My faithful old Daewoo strikes a usefully modest image in the Balkans! In the meantime I scour the area looking for stones with which to pave the new space.

The weather has been superb in the past week – with the clouds strung out as I remember seeing over the Atlantic Ocean on the coast of the West of Scotland; and quite a strong breeze blowing the trees in front. And the neighbour’s cow was moved this week from the higher pasture to their immediate garden area. The season visibly changes – it’s one of the great features of this part of the world that the season’s changes are still so visible.

Some videos of the area - the villages of Ciocanu and Sirnea; and again Sirnea
a mysterious road trip around the edge of the village; and another strange video by a developer showing the potential of this beautiful village for post-modern nerds