The Importance of Lying

Liar is a dirty word. To be labelled a liar in one's personal life is a mark of distrust. To have the term used in a professional context, in one's relationship with the tax man, the police or the judiciary will, as Jeff Skilling discovered, quickly land you in prison.

To be upright and updtanding, we are told, one needs to be honest, transparent and equitable. This has, for the most part, form the moral underpinning of the government's push towards identification systems: the DNA database, fingerprinting, CCTV, retina scanning on passports et cetera. You have nothing to fear, the argument goes, as long as you have nothing to hide. The implication being, if you are that bastion of moral goodness you will not object to having your laundry exposed to the eye of government.

However, there are two weaknesses to this argument. The first, is that it is based on the premise that that the government itself is truthful, honest and upright. Those who are keen to stress the importance of safeguards, checks and balances and chinese walls in ensuring government probity (probably rightly) assume the the current government can be trusted not to abuse the power such information will undoubtedly give them. However, what they miss is that for 99% of human history governments have not been like the one which we have become accustomed to over the last fifty years. Pretty much any analysis of any government system outside the West from the 1950s onwards can be depicted as a struggle for tyrannical control over its citizens.

Most of our history has been dominated by a succession of communists, fascists, monarchs, dictators, priests and ideologues who have been united in using any means within their power to control the population. Are we so naive to think that increasingly scarce resources, exponential population growth and global warming will not lead to the possibility of our government reverting to its historical pattern, and using this highly personal and powerful information against the populations who submitted to have it taken from them?

This leads me to my second, more controversial, point: that the methods of laws should always enable the possibility of a crime escaping detection. The reason for this, is that, when faced with a tyrannical regime, the normal routes for change lay in people breaking the law. History is again brimming with examples of those who resisted tyrannical government having to act illegally. The ANC, the Indian Independence Movement, the PLO, Solidarity and hundreds of others all acted illegally before improving the systems under which they were ruled. The principle that emerges from this observation is that a system which is capable of omnipresent and omnipotent rule is one which can be impervious to change.

The current neoconservative government push to 'protect' us by achieving an all-seeing eye and an all-knowing mind implicity takes us towards a closed system which cannot be changed from the outside. When history teaches us that the outside is the very place where moral and democratic improvements originate we should not seek to eliminate it with too much haste.

Love work?

I keep wanting to use the word "love" in something I'm writing and I'm not doing so. This may be because the term is inappropriate (i.e. it doesn't fit with what I want t describe) or (more likely) I'm a little scared of using this term when attempting to be a serious academic. Let me explain the scenario:

Mark is a fitter in a car plant. He has generally had bad experiences in work (sacking, demotions, ridicule from a previous boss) and so he tends to leave his "heart" (eek!) at the door when he arrives. This doesn't mean he's bad at his job, just that he doesn't really care about it. He's been taught not to care because, when he does, he gets hurt. One example should suffice:

Mark had noticed that it usually took him about 20 minutes to find spare parts because the Spares Room was always in a mess. He came in 45 minutes early each day for a week and tidied all the small parts into a big organiser that he'd built at home. He could now find the bit he wanted in seconds instead of minutes. When he told his boss about it, his boss:

a. said, "if you're going to come in early you should clear up that mess you leave behind you" - refering to the oil, full bins and waste that was not Mark's job to clear up but that always annoyed his boss.

b. mentioned to one of the directors that he (the boss) had told Mark to do this and that it represented a £xxx saving over 5 years

c. increased Mark's targets to occupy his time during the extra hour that this would save him each day.

d. (and this irritated Mark more than anything).... didn't say thank you.

So, Mark doesn't put himself into the job anymore. He doesn't come up with ideas, he doesn't care, and he doesn't love (there... I said it) his job. Mark now has a new boss but Mark's been hurt to many times to bother trusting this new boss any more than the last. And who can blame him?

Now this is, I believe, the central problem of millions of companies across the world. Demotivated workers who cocoon themselves against being hurt at work. These cocooned workers don't do extra work (unless they're paid for it), they don't come up with new ideas (because there's no point) and they have little enthusiasm for what they do.

The billions of pounds represented by the guru manager textbook market seem, to me, to all be focused on overcoming this fundamental problem: how do you make people love ? The irony is that all the great academics, businesspeople and thinkers miss the answer that any lovestruck 15 year old could give them, which is, "you can't".

Dragons!

I thought I'd write this post as a few people have recently asked me what being on the Dragon's Den was like. For those of you who don't know me, my best friend and I started a company (StayMobile Ltd) a couple of years ago to build and install mobile phone recharging lockers for airports, gyms, festivals, conferences etc....

Anyway, rather than go into all the details about who was nice (Deborah!) and who was horrid (Theo!) which you can read elsewhere, two things caught me off guard. The first how naive I was in preparing for the whole thing as business instead of a showbiz. The contestants are, we found out quickly, treated like circus animals, and prodded, upset and disrupted as much as possible so to produce a show of emotion, be it nerves, anger or upset. I won't go into the details of how this is achieved, but needless to say that the CIA could learn a few tricks on breaking detainees (as they have come to be known).

The second is the speed at which the BBC transform from caring, excited and promising to cold and controlling. After your 2 hour gruelling interview (which many hardened entrepreneurs leave in tears) you quickly informed that any contact with the press must be via the BBC. My posting on Facebook of Something I Saw in the studios was (somehow!) found within hours of me posting it. I was telephoned and threatened with a visit from BBC lawyers if I did not remove it immediately.

The best thing about the whole experience was meeting other entrepreneurs who, with the odds against them and the cynics and told-you-sos at their heels, risk very public failure in pursuit of a chance. If I could do it all again, I certainly would. But this time I'd hit Theo.....

notes

So here's a thought I had the other day. Those of an intelligent and sober nature may wish to skip this post......

The question of why music appears fundamental to human experience has, for the most part, remained unanswered. Philosophers of music focus their attentions on the mathematical relationships and ontological hierarchies that structure music whilst anthropologists pick out cultural resonances between the epiphenomenonal froth of songs and ballads, and the social and political waves upon which they are generated. Psychologists, on the other hand, treat music as an independent variable, to be correlated to human responses with little explanation of the black-box that connects the two, whilst neurologists have successfully identified the parts of the brain which create, respond to and remember music. However, few, if any, disciplines have provided any explanation of why music has the effect it does.

The reason this is important is that music that the relationship between music and the emotional states it creates in our minds reflects the biggest philosophical problem of history. That of the objective and measurable and the subjective and personal. Nowhere else is the impotence of mathematical modelling and scientific methodologies more obviously exposed than in the explanation of why music makes us feel. The difference between Smells Like Teen Spirit and Bach's first cello suite, in structure and form but also in emotional content and subjective impulse, whilst obvious to all humans, is virtually indecipherable to the scientific instrument. This is primarily because the ghost in the machine is unintelligable to objective knowledge and rendered meaningful only through encountering the subjective, personal and emotive self. In short, music is the food of love, not cognition.

Why is this? I believe it is because we are music. Humans, if we can be described in any essentialist manner, are the music of the universe. Now, hold the hippy horses. I am not, I would like to make clear, writing this having donned the hemp sandals and kaftan of the museli-munching chakra-chanter. Music, as its most basic, is a pattern of energy. In most cases, sound waves, but this is irrelevant. Epistemologically, music is knowable as a pattern, whether felt through the skin, cut into vinyl, imaged into magnetic memory or recalled from our very own synapses. It is the pattern, the structure of information, that govern the emotions not the CD, the tape or the record.

Humans also, cannot be defined (surely?) by their physicality. Surely, it is the pattern of life that we make over generations, the algorithm of being which makes us who we are. By this, I do not simply mean DNA or the evolutionary process, but the entire human froth that is generated on the waves of time, space, geographies, economies and the Number 24 bus which generate the phenomena which we call life. Putting it more simply, what makes us human is not our legs, arms, eyes or even brains but the temporal patterns that have generated these forms.

In other words, we respond to music, not due to some cultural resonance or social nicety, but because music is what we are. When we hear it, we feel it, when we feel it we move. When seen as meaningful patterns, music is life and life is music, and science, with all its objective power may describe, but can never understand this.

Worthwhile writing?

So here's the deal. When you're young and idealistic you fantasize about all the ways you will change the world, solving hunger and disease, reading books to blind old ladies and doing all the things which the compromised adults around you don't. But then it would be rude not to do well at your GCSEs, but once those are out the way, THEN you will conquer the world.

Having done surprisingly well at these 'ere exams, you suddenly realise you might, contrary to Miss Simpson's expectations, get into the sixth form after all, and so apply yourself to your A-levels, knowing full well that they can only improve your chances of dong Good Things. And so it goes on, Degree, Masters and Doctorate until you find yourself owing The Man hefty amounts of cash so it would be rude not to get a job.

And so you find yourself in academia, surrounded by bureaucracy and administration, thinking how did this all come about? But, AND HERE'S THE TRICK, you convince yourself that you can actually do good here. That your moral crusade will be satisfied through your writing (after all, look at Karl Marx - or Carl Marks as one of my students called him) and by teaching the young (which is prac-tic-ally the same as helping blind grannies, isn't it?).

This delusion is helped, of course, not simply by all the other lecturers who have built up a moral culture which represents teachers and writers as the enlightened few, but also the philosophical bent of your subject (in this case Critical Management Studies) which claims the moral high-ground through occasional references to exploitation, ideology and work intensification....

What we miss in our moral bunker, of course, are two things. First, EVERYONE in academia, (apart from marketing, who lets face it shouldn't be here) thinks the same way. Economists believe their creating wealth for the poor, sociologist claim they're criticising social exclusion or deprivation and philosophers have the noble pursuit of truth as their own. Second, the writing which is prized in academia is, as one commentator below suggested, stripped of all (real) radical, emotional and purposeful intent through a peer-review process which makes vanilla anything which tastes too sharp. Whilst it is untrue historically to state that writing never changed anything, I think it will certainly be a charge levelled at academics in the 21st century.

Personally, I'm beginning to feel much more like a cog in the machine than even the slightest force for change. Sure, you might tell students about third world sweat-shops, but at the end of the day, they'll leave with their BA (hons) in Management and buy the goods that sustain those sweatshops. You may write a paper with the words exploitation or morality in the abstract, but you must know that the complexity of language preclude any such writing from reaching the eyes of decision-makers. In short, I remain (and hope) to be convinced of the value of what I'm currently trying too hard to be good at.

The pursuit of 'appiness

The joke at school was to pay a visit to 'Curly' and ask "do you want happiness?". When the unfortunately bespectacled one replied "yes", we would yell "Curly hasn't got a penis!" and promptly batter him to within an inch of his life.

Without meaning to stretch (ha ha) the phallic metaphor too much, the acquisition of things large, shiny or new seems to be (as Marx predicted) the primary goal for humanity in their pursuit of happiness or meaning in life. Academics are unclear whether the accumulation phenomenon is, as the existentialists have it, simply a distraction from the gnawing angst of modern meaninglessness, a hangover from the resource-scarce time of old or the primary driver for the creation of wealth and, therefore, the elimination of poverty.

Regardless, it is clear that this object of desire has failed in both achieving the promise of happiness and in providing a sustainable strategy for the survival of the human race. A recent report from Princeton (so it must be true) found that poorer people were, on average, happier than the rich, because they spent more time doing things they enjoyed. It is evident that both the foundations for economic growth (such as flexible labour markets, weak labour laws and open economies) as well as some results of this growth (environmental damage, stress and a class divide) lead to instability, the destruction of communities and the encroachment of business into government. In short, it ain't working.

Many activists suggest that the only cure for this is a reversion to an anarcho-marxism in which local governance and public ownership replace corporatism and liberal economies. This is, of course, nonsense upon stilts. However, if this isn't the answer, then what is?

1968 and all that.....

In May 1968 French students followed the example set in American Universities and protested against the encroaching powers of the universities and authorities. They were shortly joined by over ten million workers who bought France to a standstill.

The Sorbonne, one of Europe's greatest universities, was occupied and declared a "people's university", a state of emergency was declared and a 35% increase in the minimum wage was won by striking unions. As quickly as it arose, the strike dissapated, but anarchism has been born and a residual fear of the left was left in the minds of the authorites.

How tame we are now. The universities are in the grip of business societies, Pepsi-sponsored student unions and over-zealous administrators clambering for League Table success. Students have been rendered apathetic by a culture of individualism, the failure of their own institutions and the burden of debt which forces them to pursue "sensible" options.

Lecturers and researchers, for their part, lost all radical intent through the rise of postmodernism, the redirection of funding to business schools and the horrific effects of political correctness. Where there was once a vocabulary of exploitation, capitalism and alientation, now academics fall over themselves to describe the discourses by which all opinion is constructed as equally valid.

During the same period, our rights have been eroded, the world sits on the brink of environmental catastrophe and industry directs our politicians, universities and media stations. Both students and lecturers would do well to take note of the banner held on one of the 1968 marches which read:

"We want nothing of a world in which the certainty of not dying from hunger comes in exchange for the risk of dying from boredom".

Grrrrrrr.......anxiety

After working 14 hour days for 3 years and being in a tough relationship for 5, I developed depression in 2003 and was put on a crazy antidepresant called Citalopram (recently found to be linked to increased suicide risk, insomnia, and nausea - so that'll make you feel better...).

Anway, whilst I'm much better now, I still get a lot of anxiety when I'm stressed or worried, which seems to happen more easily than before. It's frustrating because the happy, confident me of the past seems to be weighed down by this unpredictable stranger that can affect everything from your memory to your concentration, relationships, energy and moods. In short, when this thing is there, it's pretty rubbish.

When the anxiety is like that, on the outside I seem to appear entirely normal whilst on the inside, this irrational black hole of angst, fear and reflexivity taints every emotion, experience and thought I have. You can't help but feel duplicitous. Which, of course, makes it worse.

My (lovely) fiancé seems fine with it all, though I sometimes want to tell her that I'm not really like this, and if only that stranger would go away, I'd be a better, happier, more carefree me. When I'm like that, I feel like I'm cheating her of a person who's better than the one she's got. But to say this, sounds like an excuse, and an exercise in chest-beating woe-is-me so I try not to.

Anyway, it's here now, though this is mostly my fault from drinking a little too much in previous weeks. It will go. To those of you out there (and there are millions) who deal with this every day, I respect you more than anyone I know.

The 30 month article........

Ok. So as a lecturer, I'm expected to write articles. Blogging doesn't count. There's an enitre, self-sustaining hierarchy of journals which we're supposed to publish in, which only ever get read because other academics want to know what to write. It's like a South Sea Bubble of 'knowledge'. And it hasn't burst.

Anyway, had an idea (almost three years ago now) about the way in which ideas spread like viruses and decided to send the paper to a top management journal. Let's call it the Journal of Management Studies. Because that's it's name.

So amazingly, they don't reject it (98% failure rate apparently) and the four (yes, 4!) professors who reviewed it gave me their comments to improve it for publication. Now, regardless of the fact that most of these comments were contradictory, I made the changes and resubmitted it. Now this pattern of resubmission, comments, resubmission has now been going on for almost three years and I'm starting to wonder what the point of it all is, especially now the reviewers are asking me to reinsert things (!) that two years ago, they asked to be removed.

And you, the taxpayer (gawd bless ya) are paying for this linguistic merry-go-round. Still, it beats stacking shelves at Tescos.......

Who am I?

I drank too much whiskey and wine last night. Far too much. I woke up in my mum's dressing gown in my sister' bed (she wasn't in it). What was interesting was that I was woken by my lovely fiancé I not only was unsure as to where I was but also wasn't sure who I was. I even went to the mirror just to check.

It was a pretty horrible experience. For about five minutes I was a thinking thing, peering at a world that seemed alien and unfamiliar. I felt scared, unsettled and unsure. Why?

I think people carry round an illusion of 'me-ness' that provides a coherence to everyday life. It enables experience to be woven into a consistent story and allows a way of thinking where all you experience can be related to an objective "I". Without this, as Sartre showed, we experience an angst, an undermining, by which our trust in the world is shaken and all meaning is destabilised. For what it's worth, Giddens, Beck and others link this to with the modern condition: globalisation, change and instability.

For me, it's the amber alcohol. Anyway, it reminded me of a thought I had when I had depression a few years ago. That was, the experience of being depressed seemed entirely natural. I couldn't understand, given the world and our lives, why everyone wasn't consumed by a morbid, destabilising anxiety. Then I thought that if everyone did feel like this, most of them would (and do!) kill themselves. So maybe, we evolved "happiness" as a survival instinct. Maybe this concept of self, our love and happiness, is simply nature's way of keeping us alive long enough to reproduce. Maybe the depressed and anxious are just seeing the world with the rose-tinted spectacles removed........

Anyway, mine's a large one. Cheers x

Bath Ales Brewery Tour

Last night our local organised a brewery tour to the Bath Ales Brewery. For £6.50 there was a vast amount of drinking and a talk by one of the Directors, Richard (pictured below). Richard was quiet, interesting man, who did his best to compete with the increasingly loud, and sometimes overbearing, audience.

Talking to people on the tour, it was interesting to see how they each got different things out of it. A few red-nosed glassy-eyed men were clearly focused on getting as much down them as possible, having calculated that the alcohol / price ratio made the tour a more profitable exercise than their local trip down the Dog and Duck. One guy who I approached was conducting his engineering analysis of all the structures and welding in the brewery whilst another seemed to be intent on setting up his own brewery and was fixated on the different recipes for the beers.

For my sins, I caught myself asking about the business. The margins, the market, the operations and distribution. At once I realised that my interest was, sadly, the least interesting of all those present, and decided instead to join the red-nosers in their pursuit of Dionysian bliss.

Conspiracy Theories

I'm sat in The Cross Hands in Bristol (a fantastic place for food ever you're in Fishponds) chatting to the owner about 9/11, Diana's Death and the world at large. He, along with many, believe these, and other events, to be a conspiracy by the powers that be.

What's interesting about Conspiracy Theories is less whether they are right or wrong (who knows?) but the social purpose they serve. The existence of a conspiracy theory (for example, that the moon landings never occured) actually seems to me to actually undermine the resistance which, on the surface, they seem to represent.

By this I mean that the proposition that there is a all-seeing, manipulator of current opinion that is capable of consistently fooling all of the people all of the time, does little to support those who believe that the system can ever be improved. What seems to be the inevitable result of Conspiracy Theory writ large is a self-fulfilling cynicism that no matter what the media says, it is inevitably untrue.

"Could you please stop shouting and just kill us?"

I've just watched the amazing story of the British Commando raid on St. Nazaire in 1941.

The most noticeable thing about the men was not their bravery, which was astounding, but their attitude. After raming their explosive laden boat into the Nazi port, 600 British Commandos tried to take on a defended fortress of over 12,000 Germans.

When 80% of the commandos had been killed and the rest had been captured, the bomb went off, destroying the port. The screaming German officer who told the men they were going to die was met with the response "well then, could you please stop shouting and just kill us?".

The survivors had no need to tell of their bravery, look for counselling or howl about the flag. Their modesty, humour and professionalism seem to set them aside from so many of the reports we now see coming out of Iraq. Is this because they knew they were in the right, or were people just different then?