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“Its main asset is the number of PhDs it has working for it, ceaselessly trying to figure out how to extend the principle of search into everything, unbounded by time, space and (soon) language barriers.
The company refuses to hire people more than a year or two out of university, for fear that experience in the conventional business world will taint their freshness of mind. Google googles the Internet for its own purposes, ceaselessly.
It tried to recruit a South African schoolboy I know because it was so impressed with his web page. (He turned them down in favour of going to university, probably a mistake).
Google’s business plan seems to be a simple one: its people start things, and then work out how to make money out of them. This is an internet land grab of extraordinary dimensions.”

Robert X. Cringely raises an intriguing thought:
“In the U.S. the Baby Boom generation includes anyone born from 1946-64, which means everyone 41-59 years old. Those ages generally cover the top technical management positions in most companies and universities and they are starting to retire. But as anyone who reads magazines knows, this generation of upcoming retirees acts younger and healthier than the generations that preceded it and they plan to have very active older years. At the urging of reader Joel Franusic, I’ve been thinking of what implications this has for Open Source software.
The implications are huge. Imagine 100,000 engineers and programmers leaving the U.S. work force every year for the next 18 years, because that’s what is going to happen. Some of those people will find other careers, but most of them will be motivated less by money than they were earlier in their lives. Most of them will want to remain active. And once a nerd always a nerd, so I think many of them will gravitate to Open Source.”

A few weeks ago I enjoyed one of those jolts of the pleasure of recognition, when I began reading a piece in The Guardian by Mary Midgley, which began:
“During my long life I have had a lot of luck, one instance of which may be worth mentioning. I missed out on one of the regular phases of academic education. I never had the normal discipline of the PhD. In fact, I have spent much of my life in philosophy without ever getting those magic letters that qualify one to teach in universities. I doubt whether anyone would get away with that today.”

Later in the piece she describes why she sees failing to get that qualifications was lucky:
“I am not saying that the PhD training isn’t useful. It provides the indispensable skills of the lawyer. It shows you how to deal with difficult arguments, which is necessary in dealing with hard subjects. But that close work doesn’t help you to grasp the big questions that provide its context – the background issues out of which the small problems arose…”
On a much smaller scale, I too had a similar piece of luck. Back in the Seventies, when I was employed as Research Assistant at North East London Polytechnic I was enrolled as a MPhil student. At that time all Polytechnic degrees were validated by a national body, the Council National Academic Awards. Because the Integrated Design course I did at Ealing, was classified as a “vocational” art and design course, the CNNA had some reservations about whether I was qualified to do an MPhil. Eventually I did get registered with them, but not until some eighteen months later.
By that time, feeling that I was not bound by the restrictions of an MPhil programme, I embarked on a free ranging romp through all the resources NELP’s libraries made available to me along with the support offered by my supervisor and a number of other staff from a range of disciplines. It was a great education.
And, of course, despite a couple of attempts to narrow down my inquiry to produce a MPhil type dissertation once I had left NELP, I found myself caught up in other missions, which at the time felt more important, so I never got the qualification.
Do I have any regrets? Well these days the credentials of a formal academic qualification might be handy and not having one stands between me and some of the things I might like to do. But in terms of a rehearsal for many of the things I have most enjoyed doing since that time my wide ranging romp through the disciplines was a much better preparation than the narrow path I would have had to followed to get the degree.
So, I guess, on balance, I would agree with Mary Midgley and conclude that some times not getting qualified can count as a bit of luck, particularly for those of us in pursuit of purposive drift.

This week’s quote of the week should be engraved on every manager’s heart:
“There’s no way they can cut my wages faster than I can raise their costs.”
This said by an airline pilot, whose company was engaged in yet another cost slashing exercise, reported by the ever-interesting Simon Caulkin in an article about the impact of unproductive work in companies and the alienating effects of the often mindless organisational responses to it.

Some months ago I suggested that Nick Durrant needed a website or some other kind of public presence. I am pleased to say that you can now get hold of some of Nick’s, and his partner Gill’s, insights on their new, relaunched business site, Plot. Lots of good stuff, including a longish video of Gill carrying out the difficult task of eating and facilitating a debate on Plastic at the Dirt Café London – talk about multi-tasking.

“… Desired substances, things, patterns, or sequences of experience that are in some sense “good” for the organism – items of diet, conditions of life, temperature, entertainment, sex, and so forth – are never such that more of the something is always better than less of the something. Rather, for all objects and experiences, there is a quantity that has optimum value. Above that quantity, the variable becomes toxic. To fall below that value is to be deprived.
This characteristic of biological value does not hold for money. Money is always transitively valued. More money is supposedly always better than less money. Fore example, $1001 is to be preferred to $1000. But this is not so for biological values. More calcium is not always better than less calcium. There is an optimum quantity of calcium that a given organism may need in its diet. Beyond this, calcium becomes toxic. Similarly, for oxygen that we breathe or food or components of diet and probably all components of relationship, enough is better than a feast. We can even have too much psychotherapy. A relationship with no combat in it is dull, and a relationship with too much combat in it is toxic. What is desirable is a relationship with a certain optimum of conflict. It is even possible that when we consider money, not by itself, but as acting on human beings who own it, we may find that money, too, becomes toxic beyond a certain point…”
Wise words from Gregory Bateson‘s “Mind and Nature”

I was talking to my friend Alex McKie yesterday about a book she is writing that has come out of her travels around the UK asking people for their three wishes for the future. The book is distinct from the three wishes project and equally interesting. Alex is a very experienced market researcher and advertising planner, among a whole lot of other things she does equally well. So during her journeys around the UK she couldn’t help noticing things. The picture she is building is far more complex, nuanced and in some ways more hopeful than the pictures we often presented with. One thing that does seem to be emerging is that on the ground people are developing ways of life that promising a more hopeful future than the banalities of New Labour’s modernisation project.
Talking to her I put forward the view that one of the problems we face is that much of the political agenda is driven by what Stuart Hall has identified as the flashocracy and the fellow travelers who service them. Stuart Hall characterises these people in the following way:
“No longer ‘the workshops of the world’, English cities have become the service centres, the financial and speculative investment engines and consumer retail hubs, of the global economy. The suited executives – those well–groomed, toned, and limousined corporate ‘heroes’ whose well–fleshed faces adorn the business pages of the quality newspapers and magazines – are either a new global entrepreneurial class or, alternatively, the remnants of an old stuffy one who have undergone a make–over. They are equally ‘at home’ in New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur or Tokyo as they are in London, or their country homes in Hampshire. Individually, their fortunes rise and fall but, as a class, they are installed as the permanent executive officers of the new global capitalism.
Many wealthier executives now live well outside the city or in its increasingly gated enclaves and pied–à–terres. They are ‘cosmopolitan’ in orientation. They travel constantly for work and pleasure. They remain in touch, through the circuits of instant communication, with mobile transnational elites elsewhere as they glide in comfort and style across the globe. They are ‘at home’ anywhere, and the more so since ‘elsewhere’ is increasingly like ‘here’, only more so. They are focussed on profit margins and share values, on restructuring core–businesses and absorbing other companies.
They are remorselessly attuned – and without a shadow of embarrassment – to salary settlements unrelated to any calculable performance achievements, guaranteeing the steady supply of staggering amounts of money for skiing holidays and private school fees. Their wives or servants are fully occupied ferrying the children in SUVs to select and selective private schools, those launch–pads to success. Fitzjohns Avenue in north–west London, where there must be twelve or fifteen private primary schools and nurseries within a half–mile stretch of traffic–crammed road, is notorious with taxi drivers. The ‘school run’ brings an army of jeeps, with their ranch–like bumpers, some parked in driveways, others perched on the bank–sides, others still blithely reversing into on–coming traffic.
This new global executive class are ‘flash, fast, fun, feckless, and fantastically frivolous’, as the editor of Tatler, Geordie Greig – who should know – describes the ‘flashocracy‘. Rapidly trading tweed for ‘bling’ (a multiculturalism of consumption only), they are experts in visualising for the rest new forms of urban style and status: not ‘status’ as an alternative to ‘class’, as in the old Marx vs. Weber dialogue, but status as the cultural signifier of new riches, as the materialization of social success. They are living their imprint on the global city.”

Those that service them and promote their world view are not just the people from advertising, marketing and design, who are self-described “creatives, but also the journalists, commentators, think-tankies and consultants, who articulate their agenda and also fall under this heading. As Hall describes:
“The ‘creatives’ who service this corporate and celebrity world are very different in background and in attitudes to the older professional and managerial middle–classes. They are more individualistic, consumer–oriented, culturally–savvy, life–style focussed, entrepreneurial, and hedonistic. More often they are on fast–track mobility or aspirational escalators from lower in the social order. Here, rather than higher up the urban pecking–order, the leading edge of the rising Asian and Afro–Caribbean new middle classes are beginning to carve out an elegant niche. The places they aspire to live in, the life–styles they covet, and the kinds of leisure pursuits and entertainment they invest in are very different to older, more puritan tastes.
They are the advance party of the new urban living – the agents of the ‘gentrification’ of older working–class residential areas and of industrial small–manufacturing dockland or storage areas of the city, whose abandoned warehouses, refashioned into loft–spaces and city–centre ‘pads’, they are rapidly colonising. Good food, art galleries, smart cafes, and health–clubs are the necessary accompaniments to this life–style. These are the pioneers of an intense, designer–shaped, global consumerism, the cultural happy few exquisitely attuned to every minor shift in global postmodern taste and design.”

What I hope is that as the agendas these groups promote are increasingly revealed to be threadbare, self-serving and, in essence, belonging to an age that is passing, other voices, like the ones Alex will be articulating, will be heard more clearly and we can begin the challenging task of building civilised lives in a period of ever increasingly costly carbon-based energy.

I’ve just spent a slightly frustrating couple of hours meandering around the web looking for stuff on “Contextual Intelligence”. I was alerted to the term by a posting on Creative Generalist linking to a piece in the current Fast Company. This was using the term in relation to business leaders.
But, the hints I found elsewhere that got me really intrigued related to the theories of Robert J. Sternberg. From what I could pick up from the snippets around the web his notion of Contextual Intelligence is very close to some of my ideas about Purposive Drift.
The three components of Contextual Intelligence, which would seem to apply as much to organisations as they do to individuals are:
I The ability to adapt to a context you are in by changing something in yourself.
2 The abilty to change the context you are in to create a better fit between you and your context
3 The ability to recognise when it is time to move out of one context into another more rewarding one.
All this sounds very purposive drifty to me, so if anyone can point me to where I can somewhere where this idea has been more fully developed I would be very grateful.

I know I keep on going on going on about Simon Caulkin, but he does write some good stuff. Last Sunday’s piece, “Adrift in a parallel universe” was filled with gems. I think my favourite was this one:
“Is management a hoax? In a recent survey of 3.5 million employees worldwide, research firm Sirota Survey Intelligence found that most workers did their best work when managers were out of the way. Management bureaucracy, blame-placing, inconsistent decision-making, delaying and time-wasting all interfered with their ability to do their work properly. In other words, the less management the better.”

It reminded me of one of the findings from research Shoshana Zuboff did in the 80s and wrote up in “In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power” published in 1988. She found a similar phenomenon in the recently computerised Pulp Mills, where the night shift, less interfered with by managers, was more productive than the day shift.
Caulkin’s main point was the disjunction between management speak and what is actually happening. I would take it a little further him. I have a great admiration for managers, who are some of the most creative people around. The problem is our confusion of language. Most of the people who are labeled “managers” aren’t. They are administrators and apparatchiks, whose language reflects their bureaucratic nature.
Now there is nothing wrong with administrators and administration, indeed they play an important part in maintaining the stability of organisations. The problem comes when what they do is confused with management, which it frequently is and where we can see that their role becomes one of subtracting value from an organisation rather than adding it.
Maybe the answer is to start a campaign for real managers?

Some months ago I wrote a longish entry, filled with good links, “Creativity and conversation”. One of them was to Douglas Rushkoff’s blog where he describes giving five talks in the UK about his Demos book, Open Source Democracy. What struck him was that, “instead of engaging in conversation, most of these folks played high school debate. This sort of banter looks fun when it’s people playing ‘Parliament’ on TV, but it’s not so very productive.” He went on to describe his frustration about the way “The majority of government ministers with whom I spoke seemed bent on finding ways to prevent themselves from considering new ideas – as if even wrapping their minds around a new concept for a even a moment would wreck the sanctity of their current established methodology.”

I was reminded of this by an article by Martin Kettle in the Guardian, who was talking about Robin Cook’s gifts as a conversationalist. Drawing heavily on an essay by Robert Louis Stevenson, Kettle contrasts Stevenson’s enthusiasm for the virtues of conversation with what passes for public talk today:
“… it seems to me that our public talk in this country is now being relentlessly drained of the elements that make such talk rewarding. Politicians, indeed, are now trained specifically not to answer interviewers’ questions. Instead they are told to remain focused on making the predetermined points in the party ‘line to take’. Their interrogators are no better, seeking little more than to hector, embarrass and oversimplify. The consensual creativity and freedom of true talkers, trusting and trusted, is wholly absent, almost wholly subordinated to egotism, adversarialism and melodrama.”

I will leave the last word to Stevenson, which despite to modern ears carrying the implication that good conversation is something that just takes place among men, which is certainly contradicted by my experience, is something of a delight :
“THERE can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be affable, gay, ready, clear and welcome; to have a fact, a thought, or an illustration, pat to every subject; and not only to cheer the flight of time among our intimates, but bear our part in that great international congress, always sitting, where public wrongs are first declared, public errors first corrected, and the course of public opinion shaped, day by day, a little nearer to the right. No measure comes before Parliament but it has been long ago prepared by the grand jury of the talkers; no book is written that has not been largely composed by their assistance. Literature in many of its branches is no other than the shadow of good talk; but the imitation falls far short of the original in life, freedom and effect. There are always two to a talk, giving and taking, comparing experience and according conclusions. Talk is fluid, tentative, continually “in further search and progress”; while written words remain fixed, become idols even to the writer, found wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber of the truth. Last and chief, while literature, gagged with linsey-woolsey, can only deal with a fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free and may call a spade a spade. Talk has none of the freezing immunities of the pulpit. It cannot, even if it would, become merely aesthetic or merely classical like literature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dissolved in laughter, and speech runs forth out of the contemporary groove into the open fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like schoolboys out of school. And it is in talk alone that we can learn our period and ourselves. In short, the first duty of a man is to speak; that is his chief business in this world; and talk, which is the harmonious speech of two or more, is by far the most accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in money; it is all profit; it completes our education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health.”